We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.2

Now that it is finally happening, many seem to be oddly resigned to the idea that Google is taking away the best and most powerful ad content blocker available on any web browser today, with one article recommending people set up a DNS based content blocker on their network 😒 – instead of more obvious solutions.

I may not have blogged about this but I recently read an article from 1999 about why Gopher lost out to the Web, where Christopher Lee discusses the importance of the then-novel term “mind share” and how it played an important part in dictating why the web won out. In my last post, I touched on the importance of good information to democracies – the same applies to markets (including the browser market) – and it seems to me that we aren’t getting good information about this topic.

This post is me trying to give you that information, to help increase the mind share of an actual alternative. Enjoy!
TL;DR

Too long to read? I get it. Here’s the summary. Download Firefox. If you like beta software (you know who you are), download the beta version. If you like living on the bleeding edge, download the nightly version. If you want my recommendations on how to get started, check out my post on that.

Have a great rest of your day and thanks for visiting! You can follow me on Mastodon if you want.

TL;DR
Background
Chromium Browsers Are Affected
    Built-in Ad Blockers
Firefox
Addendum
    MV3 is more secure
    MV3 blockers have better performance
    You can opt into more effective blocking on uBO Lite
    I can use a DNS based ad blocker

Background

Let’s catch you up quickly. Back in 2018, Google announced that they were going to introduce a new extensions manifest version: MV3 (the existing version being MV2). Later on in 2019, Google announced that they wanted to weaken ad blockers to make them safer for users, as a part of the move to MV3. Commentators pointed out that the security arguments weren’t true, and users and developers of uBlock Origin (the best content blocker even then) began discussing the implications of Google’s proposal.

Raymond Hill, the primary developer of uBlock Origin quickly began to engage 3 with Google on the proposed design, pointing out how it weakens the very popular extension. In 2021, Google announced their deprecation timeline for MV2,4, with powerful content blockers scheduled to be deprecated in Chrome by June of 2023. A year later, Google announced updated timelines for deprecation, to January of 2024.

Raymond began a two week marathon coding session to build an extension that would work within Google’s less-effective extension model: uBO Lite. As expected, this version has many missing features and limitations compared to uBlock Origin.

Late last year, Google had announced that they were resuming the transition to Manifest V3, with a new end date for MV2 support for enterprises of June 2025. The Chrome Web Store was slated to disallow installation of MV2 extensions as early as June 2024.

This week, we saw that Google is making good on their promises, adding warnings to the Chrome Web Store for listings of MV2 extensions, including uBlock Origin. This is the beginning of the end for powerful extension-based content blockers in Chromium browsers.
Chromium Browsers Are Affected

If you use uBlock Origin but aren’t using Chrome or Firefox, you might think you have nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong about that.

A Google product manager announced the phase-out of Manifest V2 on the Chromium blog on May of 2024. The MV2 deprecation will affect all Chromium browsers.

Once deprecated, this code will be removed from the Chromium codebase; Google is not a fan of leaving dead code around in their projects – more importantly, they consider this set of features to be a security risk.

This means that if you use browsers like Microsoft Edge or Opera, the extension will stop working on your browser.

Other Chromium browser vendors have claimed that they will continue to support MV2 based content blockers, later revealing that they were unwilling to support the code once Google removed it because they “don’t write checks of unknown amount and sign them”.

📝 After publication, I was informed that Brave is misrepresenting their CEO’s stance on MV2 deprecation. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether this is mere puffery. I was also reminded that an oft-misremembered motivation to spread Brave is financial. 5 6

So for Chromium browsers, it is the end of the line for uBlock Origin.

But wait! Some of those Chromium browsers say “it’s okay, we built an ad blocker into our browser!”
Built-in Ad Blockers

Some browser vendors (and their adherents) try to sidestep the question of whether uBlock Origin will continue to be available on their browser by saying that the browser has an ad blocker compatible with uBlock filter lists – so people can use that browser and its built in blocker with no loss of functionality.7

Nice idea in theory, but these built in blockers pale in comparison to the real thing.

Vivaldi users point out that the built in blocker is noticably worse than uBlock Origin, with some guessing that Vivaldi doesn’t fully support uBlock Origin filterlists (Vivaldi is closed source, lacking open bug trackers or source code repositories, so it’s harder for users to investigate).

Brave has a number of feature gaps compared to uBlock Origin 8, resulting in worse effectiveness as well.

If none of the built in blockers fully support uBlock Origin syntax and filterlists, what can you do?

If you read the TL;DR above, you already know – but don’t take it from me, take it from the developer of uBlock Origin: uBlock Origin works best on Firefox.
Firefox

Yep, Firefox. Not a Pi-Hole. Just a browser with a cuddly mascot that you might remember from a decade ago.

A red panda in a bamboo tree
Zoo Atlanta’s Rose enjoying a bamboo for snack. (Photo credit: Zoo Atlanta)

Firefox is still around and (actually) better than ever. It’s got zero-knowledge encrypted sync (for your privacy), the ability to pop out web video from web pages onto your desktop, and it’ll even import your existing bookmarks. Oh, and they’re going to keep supporting MV2 extensions, including uBlock Origin. Yay! 🎉
Firefox Logo
Firefox

Free Download

📝 Read about my recommendations on how to get started with Firefox.
Addendum

This section is a grab bag for responses and thoughts that aren’t interesting enough for the main post. If you think I’m wrong about something or feel that I didn’t cover something effectively, @ me (no seriously, message me on Mastodon). I’ll make sure to update my post with any new objections or comments.
MV3 is more secure

I don’t take this argument too seriously. Others have delved into the security implications of the standard – I’m not covering that. To me this is a question of trust, not security. I trust the uBlock Origin team (along with the add-on marketplaces run by Google, Mozilla, Microsoft) to send me an extension that does what it says it is going to do.

Even if MV2 extensions were horribly insecure (if they are, why did Google host them for so long?), that is more of a concern if I am somehow tricked into installing a malware extension – not an argument against cripping known-good software like uBlock Origin.

This doesn’t feel like a serious argument - were you previously using uBlock Origin? Boo! 👻 You were running insecure code! If you trusted it yesterday, you trust it tomorrow, Google’s arguments notwithstanding.
MV3 blockers have better performance

You hear this one sometimes - “MV3 moves parsing of filter rules to the browser engine, making it superfast” or “the built-in blocker is faster than an extension can be, so what if it supports fewer filter rules?”

Unfortunately, this is a false economy.

Recent tests have shown that uBlock Origin is just as fast as a fork of its cut-down version (uBO Lite), while blocking more.

If your blocker takes up a tiny bit more processing power to block an ad that uses a ton more processing power, caring about the processing used by the ad blocker is engaging in a false economy.

There is no way that having a better ad blocker isn’t better. Performance isn’t a real argument, because the first tracker or ad that slips through your less-effective blocker obviates the seconds of gains you may have made over hundreds or thousands of page loads.
You can opt into more effective blocking on uBO Lite

On the README of the uBO Lite repository, developers note that:

uBOL allows you to explicitly grant extended permissions on specific sites of your choice so that it can better filter on those sites using declarative cosmetic and scriptlet injections.

Some people read that and believe that this unlocks the full power of uBlock Origin – that all that has happened in the MV2 to MV3 transition is permission gating. You have the same features, just behind a permission dialog.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

The filtering capabilities which can’t be ported to MV3 remain the same whether you opt into cosmetic filtering or not.

uBO Lite ships by default with cosmetic filtering disabled. People can then opt into cosmetic filtering on a site by site basis. In contrast, uBlock Origin ships with cosmetic filtering enabled on all sites. People can already run uBlock Origin with cosmetic filtering disabled by default - it’s just not an option most people are interested in, since it removes fewer ad trackers than having it enabled.

As an aside, this option in uBlock Origin negates the performance argument vs. uBO Lite: you can have the same performance profile as the cut-down version, but opting into the more complete mode is more effective in uBlock Origin.

The bit about “scriptlet injections” may intrigue you. Unfortunately, this too is a mirage. If this was a simple way to convert the missing features in MV3 to scriptlets, the uBO Lite developers would have already built them in. Imagining that this is a way to get access to the full effectiveness of uBlock Origin is pure theory - ask whoever suggests this how to make it work, today, not in some far away future that may never come.
I can use a DNS based ad blocker

Some readers have suggested that they could use a DNS based ad blocker - either one they host on their own, or by using a DNS server that blocks known ad hosts.

Unfortunately, while this may have worked well a decade ago, it really doesn’t do well today, and I would tend to actively recommend against it.

The most obvious reason is that since DNS servers only know what domain you are connecting to, if ads are arriving via the same domain as non-advertising content is hosted, your blocker is likely to let the ad through, to avoid you not being able to access the site. The second major issue with DNS based blocking is that there is no opportunity for cosmetic filtering, since DNS doesn’t know anything about web pages, nor does it run in browsers. That means that ad slots can’t get hidden, scripts can’t be injected, along with a host of other limitations.

The biggest issue with DNS based blocking (for me) is needing to be a network admin for your household, especially if you set if up for your network. Do you enjoy wondering why random websites that you never visit doesn’t work for your mother or brother? Does the idea of trying to remotely allow certain domains while you are at work to unblock your parents excite you? Then DNS based blockers are for you. The best part is when you’ve had it installed for a while and something stops working, but you forgot that you had set up the DNS blocker. Could be days of troubleshooting fun!