There are plenty of chromium browsers like brave that will keep the feature alive. I suspect it’ll just become a compile time option. I’d be surprised if there weren’t enterprise customers on Chrome that will need v2 manifests for years.
The real question is what webstore will host the extensions…
There are a few more layers to this problem that no one seems to acknowledge.
What if someone DID come out of the woods and provided a Chromium fork that put Mv2 support back in. Then what? How do you install those extensions? Google won’t be allowing Mv2 extensions in their store anymore. Supposedly you’d need to download it directly from the developer and install it manually. That’s not great UX.
Maybe if the dev community came up with an alternative web store implementation that allowed Mv2 extensions, but that comes with a lot of other problems, to name a few: dev effort, costs for hosting the web app for the store and hosting the extensions themselves (which wouldn’t necessarily be expensive, but wouldn’t be free either), approval workflows for the extensions, etc. Thing is, though, all of that would require from devs a clear roadmap and a level of coordination that from my seat here, I don’t see a hint of it happening.
All of the above: either having a Chromium fork that allows installing Mv2 extensions manually, or implementing an alternative web store, is not a trivial effort, and then how many people will actually benefit from it? Those really concerned with effective adblocking, like us, are a tiny minority of the user base. Would the effort of maintaining a Chromium fork and/or a free(dom) webstore be worth it if very few people will actually use it?
I hate to say it, but yeah, Mv2 is doomed. I didn’t want to go back to Firefox, but I guess I’ll have to.
Maybe have the fork allow installing .xpi formats and freeload off the Firefox store? Since Firefox’s extension API is basically the same extension API but with the chrome namespace renamed to browser, it shouldn’t be that big of a hassle if someone was willing to do it
Why don’t you want to go back to Firefox? If you hate Mozilla just use a fork like Waterfox
Why don’t you want to go back to Firefox? If you hate Mozilla just use a fork like Waterfox
Nothing specifically against Mozilla. As far as big techs go, they all have their hands covered in mud in some way. If anyhing, Mozilla would be one of the less dirty of them. As most everything else these days, rallying behind a big tech (as if that made any sense at all) is a matter of picking your poison.
My peeve with Firefox is that I think that it’s just an overall worse browser, in terms of design and architecture, than Chromium, and it shows as it being mostly behind it in performance. As a software developer myself, this is important to me for an application that is a central part of my everyday life. I do use it sometimes as an alternate browser, and I realize that Firefox got a lot of improvement in the last few years, and that it’s performance nowadays is really close to Chromium, but it all feel like lipstick on a pig kind of thing. I also quite dislike Mozilla’s choices in UI design - every time they change it, it seems to be for the worse, as opposed to Chromium that has kept pretty much the same since its inception, with just relatively subtle changes since then.
I know I’ll eventually get used to it, I guess I just dislike being forced to change.
userChrome file could resolve the UI thing, use something to have chromium interface
for performance, all that i could see is that profiles are ignored, both on chromium n firefox, i use a lot of profiles to minimize addons impact on performance, and with a lowend computer i always got a smooth xp on firefox
I mean chromium changed its tabs look in version 69, but I get what you mean. Waterfox still has the older quantum tabs design and has a look a feel settings section, so I think it looks around the same and container tabs are pretty useful. Also, the tree style tabs extension (which apparently is also for Chrome now, but whatever)
My gripe is Mozilla not implementing PWA’'s (for reasons I have no idea), and then the whole thing with privacy pass (because they’re too afraid of centralization of any kind despite being a multi-million dollar non-profit).
I seriously do hate that Firefox is going to be my only option on a couple of months for ad blocking. Because I strongly doubt it’s going to get any better between now and June given the rate that Mozilla develops that and how little they listen to their userbase.
As for all the forks out there, they usually don’t have a mobile equivalent to go with them so they’re only half decent to me.
The reason was that it didn't have enough users and it costed resources to maintain and develop (despite Mozilla's- how many developers?- that needlessly removed GTK theming support from their apps). Personally I don't like web apps due to their memory footprint, so for the only times I use them, I just search it up.
I seriously do hate that Firefox is going to be my only option on a couple of months for ad blocking.
It isn't. uBO Lite and Adguard are already enough to block most ads since Google increased the adlist-without-extension-update-limits a bunch of times.
As for all the forks out there, they usually don’t have a mobile equivalent to go with them so they’re only half decent to me.
Firefox already runs a web store that supports v2 extensions and is open source. But… You’d just be chasing your tail forever trying to keep your fork of chromium updated until you gave up and forked it. We’ve seen this happen too often.
Try uBO Lite, which is official and MV3. It is very much good enough, it’s just the edges and user-defined filters that aren’t covered. Adblocking possibilities in MV3 have improved a lot, though they obviously still aren’t par and could probably never be par with MV2
I’m pretty sure ABP also had user-defined filters… I strongly disagree that user defined filters out of all things that makes uBO better. It’s the dedicated filter team, the advanced filter syntax, the memory consumption, the uWall integration…
Adblockers will still be allowed, they will just be crippled a lot. It will probably be the same as the adblocking situation on Safari.
If any 3rd party browser vendor wants to maintain a Chromium fork with Manifest V2, they can do so, but with the risk of code maintenance hell. They would also need an extension store for Manifest V2 extensions. Otherwise V2 extensions needs to be installed manually.
Browser vendors can also create their own separate ad blockers that aren’t affected by the changes. For example Brave Shields, Vivaldi adblock, Opera adblock, etc.
It is directly supported and maintained from Google, which then bases Chrome on that project adding some proprietary code. So I think yes, it is doomed
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