> By releasing an extension built with Manifest V3 today — first among developers of ad blockers – we can say that we've met the challenge that Google posed to us.
They shouldn't do this IMHO.
Manifest V3 is a horrible attempt to kill adblocking (under the banner of "security", as always). But, the web is completely unusable without adblocking.
If there are no more (effective) adblockers for Chrome, users will frantically begin to search for an alternative; there are many: Firefox and Brave to mention just two.
Giving a boost to alternative browsers can only be a good thing; and it may also, eventually, make Google rethink this policy.
Firefox is building MV3 and while they are coy with deprecating MV2, we all know, c'mon, they won't keep MV2 even a day after their minimum year promised.
Their track record speaks against them.
XPCOM extensions? Killed, but don't worry, we will re-implement all the needed APIs as WebExtensions (didn't happen).
Fennec to Fenix mobile extensions? Killed, you get these 10 blessed ones, don't worry, we will eventually re-enable all of the webextensions on mobile, any day now, (didn't happen, you have to do hacky hacks involving nightly version to do un-blessed extensions).
This will likely be their third strike.
UPDATE: Or it's not nearly as bad as I expected. Per [1], while Firefox will be eventually deprecating MV2, the Firefox MV3 is much less 'evil' than the Chrome MV3, in that Firefox will continue to enable the WebRequest API without all the lock-down restrictions.
This makes a competitive advantage for Firefox in terms of adblocking power, if anything.
Thanks for the summary. I had perceived the betrayal but I had never organized the thoughts nor verified the claims.
What do you think is the future (+2 years) for people with hatred for ads? For now I am using Firefox on computer + Kiwi in Android, but I also expect those two to go awry in the mid term.
* I see that after the edit, it doesn't look as bleak for Firefox PC. But what about Android?
For now, because I don't want to be hit by security vulns in the browser itself, I'm holding my nose and doing plain old Firefox mobile, leaving some of the tracking stuff blocked on my Pi-Hole, then letting my wireguard VPN ensure that even when I'm off Wi-Fi, my signal gets routed to my home connection so the Pi-Hole can stop some of the telemetry (but not all! some gets through no doubt).
Why am I holding my nose there? Because my planned next browser, Iceraven [1], is not yet out of alpha and published to F-Droid. I check every 3 months or so, once it is, that's where I'm going, because it's as close as I can get to Firefox Desktop, but runs on Android.