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zephyreontoday at 3:13 AM4 repliesview on HN

Could definitely be writing on the wall that MV2 support will be deprecated in the future but imo not necessarily a bad thing if it’s not actively developed anyways. Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.

That said, if this is writing on the wall I’d hope they’ll listen to the community this time and allow the engine to be extended / make it such that a block all ads feature always exists. I’m cautiously optimistic given Mozilla’s track record just over the past year-ish. They have released some great new features that help bring Firefox closer to feature parity with other browsers.

I am a Firefox hopeful and recently switched back to using it as my daily driver when Arc went belly up (but mainly for uBlock Origin support).


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charleslmungertoday at 3:25 AM

>Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.

There is no feature Firefox provides that is more differentiating than ublock origin. As long as pages load and security issues are patched it is the reason to choose Firefox as a browser. What would they prioritize over it?

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tostitoday at 5:42 AM

Why does everything have to be "actively developed"? Sometimes a program is just done. Better not touch it. I actually do downgrade packages when "actively developing" causes regressions. Not curl or anything sensitive like that, but local programs definately yes.

In case of the extension manifest, that's probably layered on top of the JS engine which does get attention and scrutiny. It's not like an API needs to be updated. If you'd always do that, nothing would ever be interoperable and we'd likely have a hard time trying to communicate.

Dylan16807today at 3:48 AM

> Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.

The feature that better adblockers need is one callback that's similar to one that's still in V3. It's not difficult to keep if it's your own codebase.

strikingtoday at 4:05 AM

Try Zen! Firefox fork with Arc-like UX.

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