"uBOL is entirely declarative, meaning there is no need for a permanent uBOL process for the filtering to occur, and CSS/JS injection-based content filtering is performed reliably by the browser itself rather than by the extension."
I do know that Firefox has no plans to deprecate webRequests API (that the non-lite version depends on), while also supporting declarativeNetRequest (that the lite version depends on) for compatibility.
What I don't know is:
1) whether their implementation of declarativeNetRequest has that arbitrary limitation
2) whether uBO Lite ships the same (limited) filters in the Firefox release.
I'm guessing 2) is true for simplicity, but that's purely a guess.
I don't believe the full version is planned to be replaced by this one. I think this is basically since they did the work to get this version that would work in Chrome after they reduce the permissions available to adblockers, they just launched it for firefox too in case anyone is really bothered by ublock's permissions.
The remedy is to switch to Firefox and continue using the extensions that aren't being broken on purpose by a company abusing their monopoly position.
But there will be a bunch of posts in this thread about people bemoaning Firefox because they have to have thousands of tabs open all at once everyday and Firefox renders them a second or two slower. There will also be people who will complain that the dev tools aren't exactly like what they learned in college/their boot camp so they can't spend dozens of minutes learning the Firefox tools so they can make their CRUD SPA can load megabytes of JSON outside of Chrome
I don't particularly blame Mozilla/Firefox for this but it is obvious to me the writing is on the wall for the "non-lite" version of the extension, due to Chrome stealing all the manpower towards the lite version. The fact that the author is now publishing the "lite" extension also for Firefox itself looks as confirmation to me. The author's description even seems to praise Manifest v3 in the same way Google PR did.
Who wouldn't? It's one less version to maintain, and you're not going to stop maintaining the one most people use.
> The author's description even seems to praise Manifest v3 in the same way Google PR did.
No, it simply declares the goal of that add-on: to fully comply with declarative ways of MV3 AND its limitations, and no uBO extended features that need workarounds to be implemented.
I'm not so pessimistic that no maintainer would be interested in maintaining the full fat uBo. I've got to imagine there's still quite a few people using the project.
To some extent I have to ask - who cares that Chrome is more broadly used? That never stopped Firefox and its extensions from becoming popular in the first place. All it took for Firefox to rise was the competition being crap, and well the competition is becoming crap. Chromium's monopoly doesn't stop a few contrarian developers from continuing to keep their websites Firefox compatible.
Google pushes Chrome across all its web properties. Between Chrome itself and its soft forks I see little reason for hope. Especially since Mozilla gets so much hate from power users such as those here.
All snark aside, Firefox is probably the last browser you should use if you care about extensions (or other functionality) not being broken on purpose or arbitrarily removed with no notice, recourse, or opportunity for feedback.
Firefox has done this to me multiple times. As someone who uses a web browser as a tool for both business and pleasure, and as someone who does not appreciate flag days forced on me for no good reason, I am perfectly happy and have been encountered far fewer surprises with a chromium fork.
Thing is, Firefox doesn't break extensions with malice. I'll take a hundred "oops, our update broke some extensions", or, more fairly, "we broke a lot of extensions to provide orders-of-magnitude better performance", over a single instance of "Fuck your AdBlocker, it's cutting into our profit margins".
That latter category of breakage, which Firefox has never done, and has no motive to, is the reason I will never use the shameless antitrust-case-in-waiting Chrome, or any of it's pseudo-independent offspring.
Do you have an example of an addon this has happened to you for? I've had the opposite experience (stuff breaking on Chrome and well, never had an issue with it on Firefox).
The purpose of Manifest V3 is to be less capable. uBOL, implementing this, is less capable by design.
This won't be remedied because it is the point of Manifest V3. Google is an ad company. The next step is the Web Integrity API, where the website can block you if you have even uBOL.
I have a question about this. The page says that uBOL has "limited capabilities out of the box" due to it "not [requiring] broad 'read and modify data' permission". But you can give it broad permission ("Complete mode"). Does that mean that if someone uses uBOL in Complete mode (a) it will have the same capabilities as uBO", and (b) it will use less resources than uBOL (no permanent process)?
(a) No, uBOL will still have many missing capabilities comparing uBO even in full mode, more prone to anti-adblock/ads-reinsertion (problems with `redirect-rule` and unable to fast updates) and ads/trackers/popups can slip through if cannot be caught by regex filters.
