this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
1464 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
66067 readers
4818 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But ublock origin lite is by the same dev.. Not as many features but it conforms to the new rules and is still much better than not having a blocker if you use chrome or edge.
Missing critical features:
Filter lists only update with the extension, you cannot update them dynamically
No making your own filters and thus no element picker for blocking annoyances on a webpage (a feature so good apple literally baked it into safari)
No support for external lists (which means if you back up your own filters into a list you cannot easily reimport)
No changing behavior on a per site basis
A number of other features as well that are more strictly power user features but still really handy like dynamic filtering and strict blocking domains.
If you have the option stop using chrome and edge, they are some of the worst options you could choose. Even outside of adblock and manifest v3 chrome is horrendous for data harvesting bullshit and edge isn’t great. If you don’t have the option because of an overzealous it dept or whatever and are forced to use it ubo lite is your best option probably and my heart goes out to you
I'm a bit confused as an Adblock Plus user, why did the ublock dev drop those features? ABP uses manifest v3 too and it still has all of those. So it's clearly not about them being impossible.
According to Adblock Plus' own blog post about the matter:
Re: Element Blocker:
So this says to me that baked in filter lists are now required, custom lists will not work, and Block Element is probably functioning illegally if it is indeed still functioning though that may change in the future in either direction.
Changing blocker behavior on specific sites is the only thing in that list that I see UBO disallow and ABP not mention at all. Not sure why that was changed.
I've read that too, but I still have the ability to add a custom list. It says initially, so I assumed they got around that issue by now, considering it isn't the case for me.
I technically use Edge which afaik still allows MV2, so in case the extension somehow implements both and defaults to mv2 if available, I've decided to install Chrome and get ABP there to test. Even in Chrome, the ability to add a custom list is still there. As are all the other features, like manual updating. With custom list I mean both the ability to add a list per URL, and the ability to add custom arbitrary rules directly.
I don't really see why element blocking wouldn't be possible or allowed under Manifest v3. Like, it's entirely client-side. Manifest never comes into play there.
What I can imagine is that custom lists might work that same way too, removing the ads from the page after they've already loaded rather than blocking the web request directly which is afaik how adblocking works in mv2. I can't tell you if that's the case or not.
Lol who downvoted this
Probably because of the Adblock Plus mention. It's mired in controversy because of its acceptable ads toggle and requiring ad giants to pay for it. So I can imagine people downvoting comments that put it in a positive light compared to other adblockers.
You may be right, but whether you hate ABP specifically or not should be irrelevant to the question. The question was why other extensions - like Adblock - can have those feature but uBlock Lite can't. What's different?
I'd also like to know, personally. I'd wondered the same thing.
Or just use Firefox
Or just use a fork of firefox. Firefox isn't looking very favorable lately.
I'm giving Floorp a try right now. It's actually pretty good.
Try zen browser too!
Who will develop the underlying browser then?
My work uses a web-based interface that's very annoying to use on Firefox. I'm unfortunately tied to Chrome in the meantime, so uBlock lite is a lifesaver.
Firefox was stubborn enough not to support H.265 till JUST recently and only on windows.. Doesn't work with my 4k security cameras as well as Chrome or Safari based browsers.
H.265 is patent encumbered. Blame the 2 or 3(?) patent pool holders (for-profit corporations, unlike non-profit -and-slowly-losing-market-share Mozilla) for not making it free to use for everyone.
This is why AV1 is preferred, it saves bandwidth and there's no threat of being sued into oblivion.
The best option here is to just tank Chrome's market share instead of making something that's obviously not ideal, work.