The article argues that Firefox has become the last major browser where the original uBlock Origin still works as designed, because Google’s Manifest V3 changes cut off the older extension APIs that made full network-level filtering possible in Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. That lands as more than a niche extension story. People read it as a visible example of what happens when the browser market converges on an ad company’s engine and extension model.
The strongest reaction was simple: full ad blocking is now a product differentiator again, and Firefox finally has one people can explain in one sentence. Several commenters said that for normal browsing,
uBlock Origin Lite or built-in blockers in Brave and Safari are “good enough,” but the more technical users pushed back hard. They pointed to missing capabilities that matter in practice, not theory, like per-site behavior, stronger rule handling, and better removal of page clutter instead of merely suppressing some requests. That is why many treated “Lite works for me” as a consumer comfort, not a substitute.
People also corrected the clean headline. Brave still exposes a
Manifest V2 path for uBlock Origin, at least for now. Vivaldi says it has re-enabled and extended Manifest V2 support temporarily. Edge still lists uBlock Origin, though commenters noted that Chromium-based support keeps getting squeezed and any vendor carrying old APIs will have to pay to maintain that divergence. The practical conclusion was that Firefox is the only large non-Chromium holdout with durable first-class support, while the Chromium exceptions look transitional.
A second thread widened the issue from ad blocking to browser power more broadly. Manifest V3 was not dismissed as pure villainy. Some agreed that limiting extension access is a reasonable security goal because extensions have been a major malware channel. The punchline was that the current tradeoff is badly shaped. It cuts power from trusted tools like uBlock Origin without solving the full extension threat model, since malicious extensions can still scrape page content, forms, and the
DOM. That left many wanting a permission model with real gradations of trust rather than the current slide from “full control” toward “glorified bookmark button.”
Firefox still did not get a free pass. A few people raised Mozilla
telemetry and last year’s terms-of-use uproar, while others complained that some sites now fail more often on Firefox, especially on Linux or where teams only test against Chromium. Even so, the dominant mood was that the web needs at least one viable browser that is not downstream of Google’s incentives, and that keeping full uBlock Origin alive is one of the clearest reasons to care.
pcworld.com