The latest Edge Canary version started disabling Manifest V2-based extensions with the following message: “This extension is no longer supported. Microsoft Edge recommends that you remove it.” Although the browser turns off old extensions without asking, you can still make them work by clicking “Manage extension” and toggling it back (you will have to acknowledge another prompt).
At this point, it is not entirely clear what is going on. Google started phasing out Manifest V2 extensions in June 2024, and it has a clear roadmap for the process. Microsoft’s documentation, however, still says “TBD,” so the exact dates are not known yet. This leads to some speculating about the situation being one of “unexpected changes” coming from Chromium. Either way, sooner or later, Microsoft will ditch MV2-based extensions, so get ready as we wait for Microsoft to shine some light on its plans.
Another thing worth noting is that the change does not appear to be affecting Edge’s stable release or Beta/Dev Channels. For now, only Canary versions disable uBlock Origin and other MV2 extensions, leaving users a way to toggle them back on. Also, the uBlock Origin is still available in the Edge Add-ons store
Librewolf on desktop Mull on Android
I don’t suggest Librewolf for the plebians though.
It comes with very aggressive anti-fingerprinting and privacy features.
For people in !technology@lemmy.world that’s less of a problem but I wouldn’t suggest it to my family members.
Regular Android Firefox has Ublock origins as well.
DivestOS has ceased maintaining Mull if I remember correctly. I use Ironfox on Android now.
Mull is not maintained anymore. However there is a fork called IronFox.
What’s the advantage over regular Firefox?
You can think of it as a mobile version of LibreWolf. Strict security settings are default and Mozilla’s telemetry is disabled/removed. Also unlike regular Firefox, you can download it from F-Droid (currently you need their repo but it’ll be added officially soon, probably).
Are they doing their own development or are they still mostly reliant on Mozilla? The thing with all these forks is that I doubt they’d be able to continue development if Mozilla were to disappear, since they still rely heavily on Mozilla.
Firefox is in the process of enshittifying.
Well shit… Thanks for the heads up!
No problem!
I had a feeling this would happen. I have to use Google services for a lot of things at work and Edge works fine with them. Firefox usually does okay, but not always. And now Firefox is requiring you to hand over your data to them.
Can any Chromium-based browser refuse to turn on V3 or is it too baked-in without forking the entire project?
I imagine so, but the technical burden is at risk of growing over time as the upstream chromium may significantly deviate from or remove some of the functionality.
And now Firefox is requiring you to hand over your data to them.
If you’re talking about the most recent news about the Terms of Service, that is a gross misreading of what they said.
IIRC Vivaldi and Brave promised to prolong it for a year.
And now Firefox is requiring you to hand over your data to them.
If you’re talking about the recent news, that’s not what the updated privacy notice says.
Mozilla will be adding opt in LLM functionality to Firefox. It can use third party LLM providers. The privacy has been updated to say “btw, any info you give to this LLM will be processed by the LLM by a third party.” I.e. the LLM provider has the data once you send it to them.
That’s not what that Firefox thing was about at all.
Just in case you needed another reason not to use Edge.
Chrome* or Chromium based browsers*
Oh no, like I ever use Edgeplorer.
Ok
Ok maybe off topic, why does a web browser have to be one of the most complicated software artifacts on earth? So expensive to write and maintain that only a few orgs with huge developer resources can do it?
What would it look like to start from scratch with a massively simplified standard for specifying UIs, based on all we’ve learned since html/css was invented? A standard that a few developers could implement in a few weeks using off the shelf libraries. Rather than reimplement every bizarre historical detail in html/css, have a new UI layout system that’s simple and consistent, and perhaps more powerful.
What would it look like to start from scratch with a massively simplified standard for specifying UIs, based on all we’ve learned since html/css was invented?
Probably a lot better. The difficult, and expensive, part is getting everyone to migrate over to this new standard, not because it’d be unfeasible but because companies don’t want to spend any time or money on things that they don’t think will make them profit.
What we’d need is, for example, the EU realizing that Google’s attempted monopoly on the internet is dangerous and requiring a certain standard for private consumer-facing websites to get the ball rolling.
Probably a lot like Gemini web. No, not the AI bauble.
If you don’t want to be compatible with what millions of websites are written in (because that’s the complicated part), you now have to convince all of them to invest lots of money to migrate to your new web standard… Good luck…
You don’t have to replace the html web. If a new system was sufficiently fun to create with, people might use it for all kinds of cool new projects. Kind of like Flash used to be. You’d go there for a specific thing you heard about.
A new web free of cruft might turn out to be cheaper to develop for, and that might appeal to the corporate types. Maybe useful for intranet type apps where the browser is specified anyway and you have a captive audience.
Basically browsers are big because they are operating systems for web hosted applications with huge attack surfaces and lots of legacy compatibility requirements amassed over 3 decades.
A rewrite isn’t the answer. Putting limits on browser functionality is. JavaScript was the turning point IMHO.
I think it could be sensible to come out with a subset of modern web tech stack, and just use that. There could be even a lightweight web browser just for this subset. The problem is of course on agreeing with what would be included.
Sounds like you’re describing pure HTML5
JavaScript partially took off due to HTML’s limited functionality at the time. This was also around the time that web media was becoming really big, which before HTML5 it wasn’t easy to integrate into a webpage without turning to extra libraries or extensions
I feel like this sort of thing should be more modular. Maybe on Linux we could in theory have multiple packages that could have different implementations and the browser UI would just use the underlying packages with their specific extras on top.
That would also align well with the Unix philosophy of each component “doing one thing well” and composing small tools to achieve complex tasks.
Splitting things add a different level of complexity (public APIs, deprecations, different versions, etc.) but it would make the web much more free, since we could have different individuals maintaining different packages and no organization would have too much control over the web.
I believe this is possible because we have very complex stuff such as entire Desktop Environments on Linux that are made up of multiple packages and each package just do a well defined thing and build on top of each other to create a “whole” experience in the end.
Did both Edge users complain?
Unfortunately Edge is the 2nd most popular browser, with double the market share of Firefox.
I’d direct people to Firefox, but Mozilla is doing some weird shit right now and I just can’t. And the forks are always with some weird limitations or issues. Why does it all have to be shit these days?
Lol Microsoft really using their browser market share effectively
Yeah, if you didn’t see that writing on the wall you need your eyes testing.
No Chrome browser will be maintained to keep using Manifest V2.
Use Firefox.
Mozilla sucks as well
We’re truly doomed
oh look at that. It’s ‘chromium based browsers are garbage o’clock.’
People actually use that thing?
It’s the number one browser to download other browsers, so yeah, sure!
Perfect time to check out AdGuard Home. Trivial to install locally. Probably took less than 3 minutes to install and get it operating. Hardest part was updating my router config. (Goddamn Google WiFi!)
Then you can focus on getting a better browser. Support libre software and check out LibreWolf.
Right, you don’t need extensions, because you don’t need customization, because what you need is what we the corp say you need.
I think Web as it exists is a failed branch of evolution.
A networked (solved) hypertext (solved) document (solved) system - yes. A networked hypertext system with one or two unbelievably complex clients, where only enormous corps have enough resources to change something, - no. One can add steps - E2E encryption, dynamic services, scripts, all not requiring a monolithic piece of nonsense.
BTW, those hating Flash, I hope, do realize that its proper, paradigm-abiding replacement would be a FOSS plugin with similar goal, not what we have.
I feel similarly. Javascript was made to add some functionality to documents and now we’re basically running Doom in a word professor. I don’t know what a better system would look like, but I’d draw a line between document-type pages and pages that you want to do more on.
For flash I think you’re describing Ruffle
Microsoft is a spineless removed.
Why is it that when I see removed, it’s always from lemmy.ml, is that the only instance with the filter enabled
It’s the biggest one still federated with .world with that filter.
Removed? What could the comment possibly say in this context that would warrant removal?
God, .ml manages to be the worst parts of both shitlib civility bullshit and tankie bullshit.
It’s slowly turning, too. Start looking for something else.
It’s almost like this not-for-profit, for-profit subsidiary thing is a cancer (or at least, my selection bias of late thinks so).
Can someone ELI5 why a foundation can’t develop these products directly, with a for-profit subsidiary? Is there something forbidden about rasing revenue for a not-for-profit via product sales? Would this even fix anything?
We need a truly FOSS browser that developed and maintained by the community. Librewolf isn’t it unless it fully forks away from Mozilla. We need a new engine and we just don’t have one yet.
Ladybird Browser is coming, but could be a couple years still
From scratch, BSD licensed, non-profit managed
Backed by Shopify, huh? Bet they wish that wasn’t the case, given recent events.
BSD licensed
Ew. It ought to be AGPLv3.
(I almost just said “copyleft,” but as Chromium proves, even LGPL is insufficient protection from corporate usurpation.)
An AGPL license is a verdict that the browser will not be successful.
In addition, Ladybird is under the guardianship of a non-profit organization.
Truly; it’s shocking how much people are still clinging to permissive licensing in the middle of everything going on.
Huh? The goal of the chromium project was to facilitate a corporate browser in the first place. It’s why they don’t have a more permissive license. They want to be able to use everyone else’s work if anyone forks it.
Permissive license doesn’t mean that corporations suddenly get the ability to completely change existing work for the worse, or change its’ license. They can bloody well do that with GPL too if they own the project including contributions, so it doesn’t matter if it’s BSD or GPL, the only protection that the open source users have, in any case, is that licenses can’t be changed retroactively, so if Firefox, Chromium or Ladybird went completely closed source and proprietary today, we’d still have the right to use the code as it was yesterday. Permissive licenses just mean that someone somewhere can create a closed source build without the permission of the person or company who owns the project and that doesn’t particularly matter for anyone using Ladybird or any future open source derivatives. Permissive licenses are useful for libraries, but also for software that could be bundled as part of a bigger solution. Maybe you want to embed a web browser in your proprietary application and don’t want to use webview because its’ usability differs platform to platform.
Also why AGPLv3 and not GPLv3? I don’t think the “A” part is even necessary here, that’s needed more for server side applications, I.e if the end user is using online without the code running on their own computer, AGPL is the one to use.
Anyway, in the modern age, (A)GPL is used by a shit ton of corporate software. Oftentimes with an (A)GPL open core and a bunch of proprietary functionality not included in the core. I should know, I work with one example on a near daily basis. This way, nobody can just take their core functionality and develop a closed source alternative, while they can sell you an enterprise license for full functionality on their “open source” software.
The reason why Chromium uses LGPL is because they forked the code from Safari, which had previously forked the code from KHTML (KDE’s web rendering component, used in Konqueror). The LGPL was provably insufficient to prevent corporate usurpation of the project, as a historical fact.
As for the “A” part of AGPL not being relevant for locally-run software, (1) it doesn’t hurt either, and (2) having maximal protections could prevent weird corporate shenanigans that we haven’t thought of yet.
The LGPL does its job, it’s not as copyleft as GPL or AGPL, but having those licenses doesn’t guarantee that companies will use it, like Gab, which used a fork of Mastodont, Truth Social, or Pawoo. If you want a more restrictive license, the OSI basically won’t accept it as open source because it doesn’t meet their guidelines.
Also, there are no other browsers due to the standards set by W3C and therefore browsers have to have corporate support.
The web platform is huge… It’s going to take a long time to reach parity with other browsers.
I agree. I’d even be willing to regularly donate to a foundation that would have this aim as their goal and have their acts matching their promises.
Although, not necessarily a new engine. Going from scratch is a good way to remake a lot of mistakes, while reusing old code is a good way to keep old debt. That’s not a decision I would like to have to take.
Why a new engine, Firefox is open source?!
Fork Firefox.
But good luck funding a team to keep up with commercial companies’ pace. It needs funding.
If Mozilla made a way to donate in a way that I KNEW it would go towards the maintenance of the browser, and not another crappy thing they’re trying to be profitable, I’d donate in a second. I spend about £30/month on OSS donations and I’d happily add £5/month to Mozilla if I trusted them not to misspend it.
Sounds like a job for JoMiran! Rooting for you!
Not for much more, it seems.
Sam Reichfox
The only way to learn, is by playing
Lil arms!
