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!
?
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:
How are people without phones expected to pass the captcha?
Don’t worry, there’s still hope: use Librewolf or Brave
Helium is a Chromium based browser that will still support ad blockers, whose devs (unlile the CEO of Brave) seem like good peeps - https://helium.computer/
Besides Librewolf, Waterfox is also a good Firefox/Gecko basd option - https://waterfox.com/
Vivaldi too
this aged like milk - RIP vivaldi
For the record, you can re-enable it by toggling it but, yeah, it’s not the best.
On the other hand, the built in tracker replicates most of UBO, especially if you enable Easylist or add your own filterlist subscriptions.
Thanks, I’ll look into the lists I guess. My main complaint is the element zapper however!
Yeah, that’s definitely one area where it lacks. When you do add subscriptions, it will tell you which rules didn’t match too (at least a count of them) but I’ve found MOST carry over.
(I do go between Librewolf/Firefox and Vivaldi so I’m not married to Vivaldi for the record)
I like the messaging I see from Vivaldi’s ceo, and it looks like it has a nice feature set, but they still keep some parts of its code closed source, so I don’t choose it for myself.
Oh look all the “chrome but in a different outfit” browsers are doing the same terrible shit? What a shocker, no one could have predicted that the many many things all on the same base where actuality just fake competition.
Firefox has webserial support now. I no longer need anything chromium. Let them rot.
Where oh where is my PWA…?
Firefox and its derivatives (and Safari - sorry Apple users) are the only browsers not using Google’s Blink web engine these days - at least until Ladybird is released.
Despite the Mozilla Foundation’s many stupid decisions, Firefox (and Safari) is starting to look like the only thing stopping Google from completely controlling the internet.
Why not servo? Iirc, they already have a release.