You Have until June To Dump Chrome
Google has announced that starting in June 2024, ad blockers such as uBlock Origin will be disabled in Chrome 127 and later with the rollout of Manifest V3 (#Mv3).
Resuming the transition to Manifest V3 – Chrome for Developers
Firefox is RIGHT there
This post is teaching me a lot about what people know about browsers and browser engines.
There are ONLY three major browser engines, the piece of software that renders the HTML/CSS/JS/etc into what you see as a web page:
- Blink (from google, forked, or derived, from WebKit)
- WebKit (from Apple, forked from KHTML)
- Gecko (from Mozilla, this is as old as Netscape)
All major browsers run ONE of these three engines.
Manifest V3 is going into the Chrome engine, Blink.
Blink is also the engine for the following:
- Microsoft Edge
- Opera GX
- Brave
- Vivaldi
I can’t for sure say all of them are going to disable Manifest V2, but the only way it *won’t* happen in the long term for each of these browsers, is if the companies devote development time to either re-porting Manifest V2 code to the browser engine going forward in perpetuity or back-porting new features and bug fixes into earlier versions of the engines.
My read on it? The only company that would have the dev resources to keep up with Google’s changes to Blink would be Microsoft.
Microsoft also does not have the perverse incentive to make adblock worse since they’re not primary an advertising company (unlike Google.)
So yes, *for now* you can switch to Opera GX or Brave or Edge or whatever, but they all use the same browser engine from Google.
I can’t recommend that as a long term solution.
Firefox is right there.