Misleading title. This is nothing new, just Manifest V2 being removed. Ad blockers like uBlock Origin Lite still work.
I’m worried about the direction of Mozilla, though. We need another :'(
LibreWolf for desktop, Mull for Android.
Keep in mind both LibreWolf and Mull are very slow because LibreWolf disabled WebGL, enabling higher privacy features, and Mull disabled JIT, a massive performance hit.
This is for people who don’t know then blaming Firefox being slow, LibreWolf and Mull are slower version of Firefox, just that.
Aren’t those Firefox with some patches?
Well yes, but it’s the patches that make them special. Every Firefox fork that disables Mozilla PPA by default is another browser that cuts into Mozilla’s attempt to resell private data to advertisers while marketing it as private (which is, I kid you not, a reason they say they needed it enabled by default).
And considering Firefox itself is still open source, it’s a completely valid browser to base a fork off of. Especially when the only serviceable alternative is Chrome right now.
Isn’t chromium open source too?
Ladybird is slowly being worked on but I doubt we’ll see people daily driving it for a few years yet.
I wouldn’t worry too much about Mozilla when it comes to Firefox at least. As long as they keep up with the backend then forks can clean the crud off.
Ladybird needs to support openness & stop using MS GitHub & Discord as their only means of communication/collaboration.
I wonder how NEW open source project are still hosted on MS GitHub. I mean, yes, legacy projects hosted there are fine (but should work on leaving Microsoft behind) but new projects? Someone using MS GitHub doesn’t really understand the open source culture. Same with Discord (which is neither a support platform, nor a bugtracker, nor a help articles resource).
I installed ZenBrowser and it’s pretty good. It’s pretty, it works
It’s just reskinned Firefox though.
I won’t be surprised at all. They bought an advertising network company and most of their user-tracking always was opt-out and “hidden” in
about:config
and this won’t change now.They also released this pamphlet against an ad-free internet, so instead of being less intrusive with their spam and user tracking, this will become more and more annoying and complex to circumvent.
While at the same time Firefox implodes
It really isn’t all things considered
The average person doesn’t care. The average person doesn’t even know what a browser is. They think a browser is The Internet.
They think Google is the internet. They will most likely type Google into the search bar to get to Google.
The sad reality is, there was no significant change when they intentionally crippled the API to fight against ad blockers and there won’t be a significant change now.
You would hope so but some chromium forks still try maintain their own ad blockers. And I’ve seen people just jump between what ones still work, or those few who just give up on ad-blocking all together.
There are also projects like qutebrowser which allow external programs to be plugins. In case of qutebrowser it uses the Chromium open source platform as rendering engine, etc. but completely relies on external Python scripts for plugins (including ad blocking).
If Firefox goes down the Chrome route with their forced advertisement I can totally see something like this happening.