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.
laughs in Firefox/Librewolf
No worries, play store-recaptcha is coming for you too!
Waiting for another player…
PRESS START TO JOIN
?
affects mobile the most obviously… but google’s playbook is to basically have forced telemetry always and enforce integrity of their telemetry, and by extension advertising etc.
https://piunikaweb.com/2026/05/07/google-recaptcha-play-services-requirement/ - this just seems like an ok article for it, I did a simple web search and it came up, but others certainly exist if you dislike the source.
Looking forward to when they remove the old options & force PC users to scan reCAPTCHA QRs:
Those sites will be dead to me :)
QR codes are like the popups of days gone by. With incredibly few exceptions, I refuse to scan them. They are so easy to redirect for nefarious purposes, and you can’t easily inspect the url to know, assuming thats something you even do. Also my phone case covers the camera and it’s a bitch to get open so I’m very choosy with what gets camera time.
On my phone I use URLCheck (available in f-droid). You set it as your default browser app, but instead of opening a browser, it opens a popup where you can see the URL, and use some useful tools like removing tracking parameters or automatically rewriting x.com to xcancel.com. The rewritten URL can then just be forwarded to your actual browser (or whatever app is set up to handle that particular URL).
I still won’t actually open random qr code URLs though, especially not ones from google.
Thats new. Thank you for the tip. Installed!
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
Unfortunately, we’re fighting an uphill battle here.
We’d need government regulation “protecting privacy”, instead they seem all too eager to concede that in a futile effort to " protect the children ".
At which point they cease to be your favourites, I hope. There are so many alternatives in that space that only inertia keeps people using the Empire of Evil.
You’re forgetting other countries that will just stop using American tech companies
I doubt SearXNG is going to integrate it lmao, and if they do, someone will fork or i will keep using older versions
Zen is excellent.
For people who want an opinionated browser… Yes. They have sponsored shortcuts which cannot be disabled and they ghost out the option to in the settings. If you want to dig around the about:config and tweak things, fine, but I’d rather use a browser I can make my own. Librewolf is excellently bare bones.
Sponsored shortcuts? They don’t have them, i did a clean install only some week ago so i doubt it’s a new thing
I haven’t seen any of those things yet, but I’ll try to keep an eye out. The only one I noticed was a default search engine to Google, but DDG was an easy enough option. I like libre wolf as well, but I’m not a fan of the updating scheme on my system.
The MV3 support in firefox is even stricter than in Chrome. I found that chrome will let you sidestep CSP to make an HTTP request. Firefox won’t.
I don’t understand what you found, but firefox still supports the web request blocking API for Mv3 extensions, which is what ublock needs.
I was debugging one of my favourite extensions this week to figure out why it didn’t work on firefox. It hadn’t been updated in years, so something changed in firefox in the last few months.
I assume the Chrome version still works. I’m not installing it.
Corpo banned it for compatibility with crap code apparently
FF support is getting worse and worse though.
Barely any of the sites I use for work support FF.
Laugh all you want but shit is a bit fucked.
Ladybird is our last best hope and its barely a glimmer.
why would those sites support ladybird if they don’t support firefox?
That isn’t FF support. That is chrome doing the same thing as Internet Explorer did by implementing non-standard functionality to abuse their market dominance.
Sure but if devs don’t test sites in Firefox then very they don’t support Firefox.
Fun fact: many sites that say that they don’t support firefox lie, their sites usually support it but they never tested it or they deem firefox “less secure” or some bullshit, but with an useragent spoofer, they will work
(Not all sites ofc)
Fun fact: you don’t seem very bright.
By “support FF” I mean “can be used in firefox or a derivative with comparable features to chrome”.
I think you should read my reply again, slowly
I’m not talking about sites that claim not to support FF. I’m talking about sites that have broken features when visited in FF.
Do you have any example? Can you send any link? I never experienced those problems myself so i want to try
This is very well documented, and a very common experience.
They were talking about exactly this on late night linux podcast just last week.
Chrome is doing the same thing as Internet Explorer did by not following web standards. There are several websites I have used where the payment process or uploading process only worked in chrome.
Again, this is a problem with chrome doing things that breaks consistency between browsers that are supposed to be following the same web standards.
This should be seriously addressed tbh, someone should make an european initiative to sanction whoever don’t follow web standards; I’d make it but i am not really the right person to do it, sadly