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.
Because Firefox is a different engine and might not work well with certain websites.
My real issue is as a dev of a web application, using Firefox makes things occasionally render differently. It’s only once in a blue moon but enough to make me just accept using Vivaldi to be closer to the defacto user experience. And then I can’t be bothered to switch between FF (I use Zen) and Vivaldi and split my bookmarks, extensions, logins etc. it just doesn’t make sense.
I’ve only ever encountered one website where Firefox didnt work.
and that was because the website was coded maliciously to reject firefox… a plugin to make it think firefox was chrome and suddenly it ran fine.
Couldn’t use just set the user agent?
Well I did, the Amazon Prime Video has many weird behaviors on Firefox compared to the Chromium engine, even YouTube used to have before.
Any web developer knows it isn’t as simple as “code once, work everywhere”. If companies don’t test on Firefox (which is a reality nowadays given its small market share) bugs happen in very weird and unusual ways.
Only issue I’ve ever had with Amazon Video was the fact they artificially limit resolution to 320p for people on linux, regardless of browser.