Brave has an interesting approach where they have added core support for four key MV2 extensions to the core of the browser engine, bypassing MV3 entirely.

> Update: As of v1.81, we host the following Manifest V2 (MV2) extensions on Brave’s backend: AdGuard, uBO, uMatrix, NoScript. These extensions operate independently from the equivalent versions that are currently present on the Chrome Web Store, and have to be downloaded separately. Users can download and enable these 4 extensions from the brave://settings/extensions/v2 page.

https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

I see a lot of people saying that Firefox is not as good as Chrome. Do you have any examples of things Chrome does that Firefox doesn't? Genuinely curious, I have been alternating between Chrome and Firefox for the past two decades and last time I switched back to Firefox was 2 years ago, and I haven't had any performance/compability/feature concerns at all. (Full disclosure I use Zen, not vanilla Firefox)

And sadly, Firefox on iOS is the only browser that doesn't have a the possibility to run an Adblocker. Safari can run uBlock Origin. Brave had one built-in. Hell, even Edge has Adblock Plus.

Does Mozilla have a contract with Google to not build one in as part of the search contract?

As you alluded to, many Chromium forks (notable exception is Ungoogled) are backed by tech companies. There's already plenty of intentional changes they maintain in their forks, like Privacy Sandbox,[0] so I don't think preserving support for v2 is a large hurdle for them.

[0]: https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/10742158329613-W...

We can use helium. It works fine.

This should be Firefox, but they've expended a lot of time and energy reimplementing code from Chromium instead of focusing on where they can add unique value.

Vivaldi (not affiliated) kinda aims to do this. At least they build the blocker in. It uses the Blink engine, too. I don't think this move by Google will adversely affect Vivaldi in the same way it does Chrome.

One can hope that Ladybird will become that browser.

I was experimenting a bit with this a few years ago. A way to easily see all the domains and connections and api’s every site you visit attempts. The UI is certainly complex, and most people don’t care.

Helium has been the closest I've found. It comes with uBlock Origin. It is based on Chromium though, so not sure if the manifest v2 removal will break that.

I think the closest right now would be the Tor Browser.

Also, not affiliated with Vivaldi. Just been loyally using them since the alpha bc they posted here about being The Real Opera’s Phoenix, aka its spiritual successor made by a band of Opera employees that Jerry McGuire’d. I watched the movie for the first time because of this browser.

They do built in Adblock that keeps up in the YT arms race. If they’re losing and I get an ad I restart the browser and we’re winning again.

It does lack elemental control of the DOM to manipulate pages on the user chrome, but dev tools is there. Though there are some CSS rendering options in a drop down like inverted colors and sepia and such. You can screenshot any page section with its screenshot tool.

Video controls can be shown on any image/video element with a right click.

Incredibly configurable. It offers email, RSS feeds, profiles. Exposed and granular user privacy controls in the settings window.

Its open image in new tab is pretty consistent, though some sites pull all the tricks and it’s just impossible to get the image (looking at you Reddit)

Their business model is a cookie swap on purchases made through their built in speed dial options. That doesn’t happen if you don’t click on them directly.

They could honestly stand to be fully transparent about that in the browser UI in the wake of Honey. I for one would love a popup that says “using this link sets us as the affiliate for this purchase. Thank you for supporting the development of your Vivaldi browser”

Brave already does this. Built in ad Blocking

> The browser is my agent, not your mole.

Sorry, Google says no, and who are you to disagree?

Sarcasm aside: this what people who wax poetic about the market miss. In the 21st century, where products have "minds" of their own (software), they are developed to serve their manufactures first. The consumer is a distant second. And competition won't align the market with consumers, because all manufacturers have similar incentives (aka "enshittification").

> That was always the plan with Chrome

No. The original plan for Chrome was to save money on "traffic acquisition cost" (The cash they give to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine) by moving users away those company's browsers.

Buuuuut, once Chrome turned out to dominate the browser market, the temptation to abuse that dominance was too much.

> For uBlock Origin users on Chrome, there’s uBlock Origin Lite. However, the Lite version “allows some tracking, its blocklist is a fraction of what the original blocked, and it can't perform the dynamic filtering that made the original effective,”

https://www.pcmag.com/news/googles-next-chrome-update-will-f...

+1, Lite is mostly fine. The main difference seems to be that YouTube videos sometimes start a couple seconds late. Not quite annoying enough yet to switch browsers (tbh though, Firefox is totally fine these days, main downside for me is that the WebGPU implementation lags quite a bit behind Chrome and Safari).

Same. I'm still not seeing ads.

I've realized over time that people on the internet love finding things to be mad about, because raging against evil is fun. They'll make up an injustice if they can't find one today.

it's not nearly as complete: You only get filter list updates when the extension updates, there's no custom element picker, no per-site switches, no strict-site blocking, no dynamic filtering and you can't import block lists. It's better than nothing (which is pretty much unbearable IME) but not as good.

Origin Lite _can_ be beat by advertisers rotating the URLs they serve ads from. That doesn't mean advertisers are actively bypassing Lite, but they could

Hiding elements on the page should be the last goal. A lot of the traffic uBO-proper blocks, has nothing to do with what you see. "Ad blocker" is a lame name, it's not even the important part.

Yup, unless you're really intense about blocking ads, uBlock Origin Lite is at worst a minor loss in quality most people wouldn't notice.

"Closing the door" on ad blockers is quite an exaggeration.

This is HN. The topic has been discussed so many times already. Please read the developer's post about it.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

Correct. They indeed do this in the name of security as announcing they do it for profit would probably be bad PR.

I primarily use Safari, and only switch to Chrome if a site misbehaves; every time I do so, I'm aghast by the ads and popups I suddenly get everywhere - despite having uBlock installed. I refuse to take that as an acceptable state of browsing the internet.

Aaah the beautiful inability to see what is so obvious because your salary depends on it.

Blink 3 times if you're being held against your will, dude. "Trillion dollar advertising company neuters ad blocking because it wants to protect you" is some "I love Big Brother" stuff.

Eh, Google controls the add-ons marketplace though. They control what add-ons are allowed, and they could even audit the add-ons for malicious code/behavior. Google, being a company that collects 75% of its revenue from ads, is being disingenuous by claiming this is a security-centered position. If security were the priority then the add-ons themselves should be inspected thoroughly, that much is obvious.

If you look at the spending of the Mozilla Foundation they most certainly do not need our support they need to spend their resources on their browser instead of frivolities.

Just a shame its a tiny bit slower than chromium based browsers still (the ui, not the web page rendering), and you dont have to take my word for it, a web search for something like 'firefox sluggish compared to chrome' will back this up too as I've tried switching multiple times but always end up back on a chromium variant because the firefox ui just doesn't feel like an upgrade.

Personally I've just given up trying with firefox and I now put up with brave - its certainly not perfect but at least the ad blocker isnt about to break.

Firefox might need my support, but Mozilla does not.

The UX aesthetically could use more polish, but agree it is an excellent browser replacement for Chrome.

There is ublock origin lite[0] on chromium which is the v3 compliant ad blocking strategy, but it is severely limited by the new ruleset and limitations, being a crippled version.

There are more details available on this fan site of ublock[1]:

> What Was Manifest V3?

> Manifest V3 was Google's major update to the Chrome extension platform. The most significant change was replacing the webRequest API with the more limited declarativeNetRequest API. While Google cited security and performance benefits, this change removed capabilities that content blockers like uBlock Origin relied on for effective ad and tracker blocking.

> How This Affected uBlock Origin

> uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. As a result, the full uBlock Origin extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store in late 2024. Chrome permanently disabled all remaining MV2 extensions in July 2025.

[0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

[1]: https://ublockorigin.com/

Most ad blockers do already use MV3, uBlock Origin is the only one still using V2 as far as I know.

There are some drawbacks to V3, however none prevent creating an effective ad blocker, as demonstrated by the fact that many exist. Though saying that doesn't make for nearly as effective clickbait...

Been a happy user of Zen for at least a year now. Big fan of the clean UI and vertical tabs. Super stable, no issues. Not in love with their tab group implementation, but its fine.

I've wanted to love Zen for a while, I really have, but every time I start using it, it just feels... I don't know... foreign? Too new for comfort?

I think it's one of those "once you get used to it, you never go back" technologies, but I also think it takes a bit of time to get used to it. Thoughts?

Maybe you could expand inline in your comment about what makes Zen “even nicer”

I mentioned this above, but Brave both includes its own ad blocking engine and has also added support for the MV2 version of UBo to the core engine.

https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

Pretty sure Brave shields isn't based on an extension API so it shouldn't be affected.

Have people actually noticed worse performance from uBlock Origin lite?

This article isn't nuanced enough. Ad blockers will continue to work.

The ones Brave choose to block, sure. You're going to end up with the same problem eventually.

that thing has been in development for the past 10 years. At this point, I doubt we ever see it.

and after some traction serve you ads via the LLM itself (a la brave browser)?

If Google ever decides to "close the door" on these too, all they need to do is make Chrome always use DoH instead of classic DNS.

Leaving Chrome is 1000x easier than maintaining that.

"Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension" really doesn't tell a general audience what is happening here. No wonder it gained little notice.

How little RAM does your phone have? My Moto G4 Power (less than $200, before the RAM crunch much less) with 2 GB runs Firefox hunky-dory, and I'm one of those triple-digit tab people.

You obviously don't know how Android works. When an app hasn't been open for a while and it has no background tasks, it gets put to sleep. Waking it up takes a second.

You can delay that by selecting the app in the settings and choosing its Battery setting to Unrestricted, however, despite its name, it will still get suspended

The checks are poorly coded. Even on Unrestricted, if you play music from a web player, the browser will get suspended after the song ends but before a new one starts playing because there's a point where it awaits data on the foreground task, Android sees it has no background tasks and suspends it.