Chrome's Manifest V3 transition is here. First up are warnings for any V2 extensions.

Reminder to switch browsers if you haven’t already!

  • Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
  • The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
  • Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.
  • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    I remember it also let you spoof your user agent, and had a built in email client. It was just generally feature rich.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Later versions had a built-in BitTorrent client too. It let you not only spoof the user agent, but it let you disable images, disable JS, block content, and a bunch of other settings per site.

      It showed a loading progress bar indicating how much of the page content had loaded.

      It had an option to only show images that were already cached - useful on very slow connections and better than just turning off all images.

      It had mouse gestures for going back/forward, opening new tabs, etc. Oh yeah, it was the first browser to ever implement tabbed browsing.

      They had an experiment where you could run decentralized services directly within the browser, called Opera Unite: https://www.howtogeek.com/3468/turn-your-computer-into-a-file-music-and-web-server-with-opera-unite/. They were trying to bring the web back to its original form, where everyone hosted their own content.

      All of this was built-in, and yet it was somehow lighter (in terms of RAM usage) than other browsers?

      They were truly innovating. We just don’t see a lot of software doing that any more. So many companies these days are trying to figure out how to extract more of your personal data and show you more ads.