Posted by eternalreturn 7 hours ago
It's a great demonstration of how Chromium's open source nature is something of a technicality. Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google, you're eventually going to wind up living with Google's decisions whether you like it or not.
The only projects which have a hope of maintaining MV2 compatibility are those who are a hard fork of an earlier version of chromium or a totally different engine.
To my point: The article mentions that Opera still says they will maintain MV2 for as long as it is “technically reasonable.” Mark my works, Google will find a way to break Opera’s MV2 patches that makes it too hard to maintain.
No, but maybe this highlights that it's never accurate to conflate "open source" or "free (as in speech) software" with end-users having power over the people providing resources to the project.
The main thing that is affecting adblockers with this MV2/MV3 change is the ability to dynamically block requests themselves rather than have to give a pre-computed list of patterns to the browser.
We're talking about hooking into right before http requests go out and make them fail here. Let's not pretend that maintaining this capability is out of reach for any serious fork if they actually cared. Let's also not pretend it's more than a few hours per month of dev time per month to maintain it (and most months it will be 0 hours).
And before you ask: Yes, I have worked extensively with chromium's codebase when I worked for a kiosk company.
And then they complain about Safari.
Had it been today, and Google would have no issue pushing for PNaCL.
Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.
I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.
I worked on multiple projects modifying Chromium and V8 a decade ago, and the GP matches my experience exactly. Absolute mountains of dev time just tracking the latest release and what we wanted to do wasn’t limited to one module or subsystem.
Microsoft repurposed Google's adware in Chrome into Edge telemetry/spyware to feed your browsing directly into windows telemetry to watch everything you do, they wanted that back when IE lost the war.
Google already went evil and set the precedent removing adblocking capabilities, now Microsoft can just blame them and feed everything you do into Bing for ad money as well as telemetry/spyware without you blocking it, that's effectively double-dipping all in on stupid windows users.
Nerds used to know how to computer, is what i'm saying.
If we lose Firefox the web is going to be a worse place to be in.
(There's a steelmanned form of their argument - that Mozilla ought to be held to a higher standard than their commercial competitors - which you might think would speak in favour of LibreWolf and the like. But those who complain most forcefully about Firefox often turn out to be Chrome / Opera / Brave users)
Microsoft's current privacy statement also says "Depending on your settings, this browsing history is sent to Microsoft"
Edge allows to sync history (as Chrome and Firefox also do). Given that functionality, what else do you want them to say in their privacy statement..?
Firefox is pretty great. But IMO they have some poor ux defaults that make it unappealing to random people who simply want a browser.