alt Hacker NewsTo my knowledge the “big” chrome engine alternatives aren’t either. I know that Vivaldi and Brave plan on keeping around v2 as long as it is economically feasible
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This sounds like Android phone manufacturers making fun of apple for removing the headphone jack and then doing it themselves a year later. Are they seriously going to maintain V2 support for a relatively small percentage of Powerusers which probably are mostly already using Firefox anyways? The point of being economically infeasible is probably in a month or so.
Microsoft Edge announced the move to Manifest v3 back in 2020 and stopped accepting new code on v2 back in 2022...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-...
That is easy talking as long as it is still a config flag, then after a compile-time flag. Once the internal APIs for MV2 or where MV2 get removed or changed it becomes very difficult to maintain. Never mind the possible security issues you introduce, but won’t get so quickly discovered.
Brave is an odd one. They've publicly stated[1] they plan to support parts of Manifest v2 for a handful of popular addons (uBlock Origin included) by making limited patches, but they make no promises.
It seems Shields was their main focus for MV3 mitigation, much like Vivaldi's now native content blocker made for the same reason (though Vivaldi has said[2] they won't be supporting MV2 past the last Chromium build that includes it).
[1] https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
[2] https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...
Aren't these v2 extensions being removed from Chrome's store? If so, are the alternatives based on Chromium running their own store?
I think the supermium chrome fork plans to keep V2 in.
Though it is less of an issue for those two, given that they have built-in adblocking. Still a laudable effort.
Are you certain? The last I heard about it from Vivaldi[0], they were only going to keep the MV2 code around so long as it's in the upstream codebase:
> We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium. We expect to drop support in June 2025, but we may maintain it longer or be forced to drop support for it sooner, depending on the precise nature of the changes to the code.
Note that June 2025 is the same date Google plans to drop support completely[1].
[0] https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...