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.
I’m wondering what the decision making was when they were starting (which is now 10 years ago already, time flies, yo).
From today’s perspective, a Firefox fork sounds way more logical. Back then maybe things with Blink/Chromium weren’t looking so grim, maybe they were relying on the experience of that part of the team that moved over from Opera…
10 years ago Google was trusted and liked. The cracks were starting to show, but we’re talking about the Google that was still open sourcing a lot of their products and loudly opposing government censorship of the internet.