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.
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.
Not true — Safari is still based on WebKit. And Safari is still the default browser on over two and a half billion mobile devices currently in use. And say what you might about Apple, but at least they aren’t in the business of selling ads, and thus don’t have any business interest in allowing you to block them effectively, unlike Google.
They don’t sell as many ads, but they do sell ads. It was only a few months ago they announced that ads would be coming to their maps app. There’s ads in news, the App Store, music, and settings on iOS. Maybe more than aren’t coming to mind immediately
Oops. My bad. I swear I read somewhere that Safari was switching to Blink, but that isn’t the case.