For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
Without those, what can you recommend to someone who is not tech-savvy but willing to learn?
Firefox or a fork of it. You can just install uBlock Origin from the Firefox addons.
Though YouTube likes to shadowban comments if you have the Quick Fixes list on, so if YouTube adblocking works without it, then turn it off.
Bruh when I first got my computer the first thing I did after getting a browser was install AdBlock except it was a virus site posing as adblock. I feel so dumb right now. I think I need to just pay someone to sit with me for an hour and teach me computer basics. It feels like I missed a step and everyone knows what’s going on but me
Just use the Firefox extensions store and search for “ublock origin”. It’s like really hard to mess up.
If Chromium becomes incompatible with privacy, the only real and broadly accepted alternative is FireFox. Which implementation, and as always in these kinds of discussions, that depends on your threat model: On desktop, I am very happy with LibreWolf. Mullvad Browser is also great, especially with Mullvad VPN, though it breaks pages a little more often than LibreWolf. On Android, I am quite happy with IronFox.
Firefox. They basically were the ones who kicked off good browsers originally
Waterfox. It’s Firefox sans some of the baggage that comes with Mozilla.