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.
Chromium contributor Andrey Bershanskiy shared details about recent Chromium changes and according to comments from Google engineer Devlin Cronin, Chrome has now started removing the flags that previously controlled MV2 availability. kExtensionManifestV2Disabled, the Chromium feature flag that allowed controlled disabling of MV2 add-ons, is now completely removed, which means you will likely no longer find uBlock Origin in your browser extensions list.
He wrote: “The kExtensionManifestV2Disabled feature has been default-enabled for
over a year. Remove the feature and the effectively-dead code. … Any tests that relied on being in the “warning” phase (i.e., with the kExtensionManifestV2Disabled) for their sole behavior testing are
removed, since this stage is no longer reachable.”
Cronin further explained why MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in supported Chrome versions as maintaining the associated functionality indefinitely is no longer possible. He cited growing technical difficulties and implementation complexities as well as security concerns.
He wrote: “MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won’t be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we’ve actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire.
Unfortunately, we won’t be putting code behind a compilation flag … We won’t be removing all the MV2 code wholesale right away, so many of these things will continue working for awhile (but they will go away eventually, and some may go away sooner than others).”
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.
Here is a rundown of the changes coming in the final such releases of Chromium releases:
Other Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Microsoft Edge could soon follow suit too. Although it is not specified, Edge began disabling uBlock Origin back in February, and Opera could also stop the functioning of MV2 add-ons, even though it had committed to support MV2 for longer in October 2024.
uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill (gorhill) apparently stated the following: “For Opera I did submit 1.70.0 rather late, but this was weeks ago. A while ago I received an email from Opera that they plan to abandon MV2-based extension so maybe they are no longer allocating resources for reviewing such extensions.”
The email which developers like Gorhill mentions was received from Opera last year. Here is what it seemingly said:
Dear Developers,
This message is to inform you of important upcoming changes regarding Opera extension support.
Chromium, which powers Opera, is completely removing support for Manifest Version 2. If your extension currently uses Manifest Version 2, it is crucial that you update it to Manifest Version 3 as soon as possible to ensure continued compatibility.
We strongly advise taking action to update your extensions to Manifest Version 3 to avoid any disruption of service and to ensure a smooth transition.
—
Sincerely,
Opera Extensions Team
Hence for now the only Chromium browser that seems to be on-board fully with MV2 support is Brave, and perhaps Vivaldi as well. Meanwhile if you want to ditch Chromium browsers entirely then Mozilla Firefox is an excellent alternative as MV3 and MV2 are both supported.
Of course the easiest solution is to switch to uBlock Origin Lite if you want to remain on Chrome, as it is MV3-based, but from our experience, uBO Lite does not seem to be as good as the original non-Lite version.
Source: w3C (GitHub repo)
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