>As Vivaldi is built on the Chromium code, how we tackle the API change depends on how Google implements the restriction. The assurance is, whatever restrictions Google adds, in the end, we’ll look into removing them.

Is this not a serious wake up call for all these companies relying on Chromium? You are staking so much of your business on a giant conglomerate that does not care about you or your users, whose only aim to sweep up as much data from the web as possible to feed their ad machine.

Glad to hear it. I’ve been using Vivaldi as my main browser for a while now and I’d hate to give it up, but if it’s a choice between Vivaldi and a fully functioning ad blocker I’m probably choosing the latter.

Sure, Vivaldi's AdBlocker might not be impacted a lot, but it does not matter because it is terrible anyway and it triggers every "adblock detection script" I've ever seen. While I like rest of the browser it is unusable without customised uBlock Origin.

I was hoping some company would fork Chromium before Manifest V3 change and apply patches from mainline as necessary but it seems less and less likely with every day. If Vivaldi manages to patch out Google's changes and keep uBlock working as it is now they will have me as their user until heat death of the universe.

Yeah... relying on Chromium and "don't be evil" Google definitely sounds like fun.

It's sad that Firefox engine is so difficult to embed and we could have seen more projects using it.

> Vivaldi comes with [...] a built-in Mail and Calendar

Why? Why on earth would anyone want those built into their web browser?

Pretty much every browser that isn't Chrome or Edge, has put out a similar message to Vivaldi's team. If that's not enough for Google to get their **** together, and stop pretending like they're doing this for the good of the end-user, I dunno what is.

It is hard to over-state the impact that MV3 will have on the current extension landscape!

This move is a blatant attack from Google on power-users, always in the name of "security" and performance.

Having built something that had to use the netRequest API due to new extensions being forced into MV3, I can attest to it being viciously limited and complex.

Ads will win if MV3 is mass adopted and enforced. Time to set-up Pi-hole.

I use Vivaldi with NextDNS and LuLu blocking a layer up so between the 3 I get great blocking and love Vivaldi.

not just ad blocking, user scripts are going away too.

Next year is going to be the year of Firefox. Mozilla team intend to keep these APIs around.

Google made a faux-pas with this one...

Their stated goal is to improve the performance of the web request blocking API.

Their (unstated but suspected) goal is to neuter adblocking chrome extensions.

They should have made extensions get auto-disabled if they 'slow down web page loading too much'. Set the threshold for that to be say more than a 20% increase in page load time, but make the threshold decrease with time - eg. 10% in 2023, 5% in 2024, 2% in 2025, to finally 1% in 2026 etc.

Eventually, that would achieve both of Googles goals - since adblockers would be forced to shorten their lists of regex'es, neutering them, and performance would increase at the same time. Extension developers would have a hard time complaining, because critics will always argue they just have bloated inefficient code.

Brave will probably be the only remaining chromium-based browser to have a solid adblock system that's low level enough to not be affected by the manifest changes.

Vivaldi is great and all but they suck at privacy.

Source: https://privacytests.org