FF is an option for now since they say they'll maintain the slightly more powerful v2 chrome web extensions (still gimped compared to the old actual FF extensions they dropped). But they've tied their horse to Goog and are now being led, even if it takes a few years to bring the pot to boil.
When that day comes, I'll drop Firefox like a bad habit as well.
Whoever keeps full-strength ad blocking working is going to be my browser provider. I don't mind paying. Heck, maybe we can just crowdfund someone to operate a minimal fork of Chromium that just keeps Manifest V2 running.
I can't emphasize enough how little brand loyalty I have for any browser that breaks ad blocking. They may as well be removing the back button, it's that boneheaded of a feature removal.
i mean in the near future if all ads are preventable. we probably will just be paying to use internet products. i mean its the only reason its free right? or maybe the isp will become the new apple google fb and they will provide browsers and websites. and most likely these isp will lock exclusives. eek
we DO pay for internet and internet products, in so far as actual internet and actual internet products. I pay ISP, I pay VPN, I pay some security services.
further in my humble poor opinion; If the only way to secure funding/guarantee your product/job/life is by having completely irrelevant, predatory ads hosted in your space, maybe you should go int oa different field, or not expect to make money off of a niche hobby application.
Hosting a website, app, service, (if not a paid service), should be "cost of doing business". Or "cost of maintaining a hobby which I'm broadcasting."
It is a great disservice to our children that the "default" in life is "you will pay for this ,and you will watch brain rot ads"
Yeah, all commercial outfits need revenue, and if they don't have ad-based revenue they need their users to be customers paying for the service. Right.
This said, I see three more ways for free (like gratis) services (at least free for users):
1. Government-funded services. If some online services are deemed to be very important for public wellbeing, the government might decide to pay for a service or to run it themselves. One example is public databases like a list of medication covered by health insurance.
2. Non-profits. They can live off voluntary donations from users, governments, and companies.
3. Hobbyist-supported services. People work pro bono to support a service and some hobbyists even pay for third-party services (like hosting).
These are not sharply discerned categories. A service might nominally be run by a non-profit, but the non-profit is staffed by hobbyists and the government might pay for hosting and other costs. Such a service would be a government-funded hobbyist service run by a non-profit.
If you're not trying to be global scale and/or the only site in your market segment, you can go pretty far off of voluntary donations. As far as I know, even the largest Mastodon sites are Patreon/Liberapay/etc funded.
It will probably be Opera. The only reason I don't use their browsers is because I don't like running non-free software and really don't like using it heavily or for anything important but losing ad block would push me into it.
They didn't declare anything about that. Vivaldi said they have their own ad blocker not dependent on V2 [0]. Edge is in process of updating their timeline [1].
I think the problem is. What if Chromium won't have code supporting V2 anymore? This means, it is just impossible to run V2 extensions because V2 is not only turned off but completely removed.
Vivaldi seems to have decided that they will provide a built-in feature for advanced ad blocking and Edge seems to be undecided yet.
Oof, sorry for spreading misinformation.
I could've sword that I read an announcement years ago by Microsoft, stating that they're not planning to deprecate V2 and keep supporting both. I cannot find this announcement anymore, and it seems the deprecation is already in effect.
Thanks for acknowledging. Mistakes can and do happen, or information has changed since the post. I also accidentally wrote misinformation here on Hacker News.
But it won't help if manifest V2 supporting code is finally deleted from Chromium.
Vivaldi already has a built-in adblocker in place, so Vivaldi ad-blocking doesn't depend on V2 being available.
This said, V2 shouldn't be removed at all because this will stifle the extension ecosystem. I predict that extensions will stagnate. Just because some ad-obsessed company killed V2 to stop an extension threatening their revenue.
Will be interesting to see what happens then. Will those who are 100% invested in "browser extensions" be able to transition to methods that do not require the cooperation of the financed by advertising browser vendor.
In theory Chrome users should be able to just keep using old versions or edit the source to remove the offending changes and re-compile. In practice, Google's version of "open source" offers little control to end users. The program is far too large and complex.
It seems likely the remedy sought for Google's antitrust violations will affect Chrome in some way, not to mention affecting Google's continued support of Mozilla. It is unclear what the future of web browsers may look like.
