Manifest V2 phase out is a big deal, as Google is pushing towards Manifest 3 only. Google’s version of Manifest 3 is hobbled by removing WebRequest blocking which breaks privacy and ad blocking tools - an obvious benefit to Google as an Ad and data harvesting company.
Firefox is implementing Manifest 3 with WebRequest blocking, as well as supporting Google’s hobbled version declarativeNetRequest to allow compatibility with chrome extensions.
As far as I know there is no plan to phase out Manifest V2 at Mozilla. As long as V2 and V3 are active in parallel it shouldn’t have a negative Impact on adblockers etc.
We also wanted to take this opportunity to address a couple common questions we’ve been seeing in the community, specifically around the webRequest API and MV2:
The webRequest API is not on a deprecation path in Firefox
Mozilla has no current plans to deprecate MV2 as mentioned in our previous MV3 update
That said, I believe Firefox users have gotten a lot of benefits by having extensions made that work in both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. I don’t believe there will still be as much effort for a Firefox-only extension but I believe there will be a sufficient number of motivated users and developers to still develop blockers and other extensions that take advantage of Firefox continuing to support MV2 and webRequest.
Manifest V2 phase out is a big deal, as Google is pushing towards Manifest 3 only. Google’s version of Manifest 3 is hobbled by removing WebRequest blocking which breaks privacy and ad blocking tools - an obvious benefit to Google as an Ad and data harvesting company.
Firefox is implementing Manifest 3 with WebRequest blocking, as well as supporting Google’s hobbled version declarativeNetRequest to allow compatibility with chrome extensions.
As far as I know there is no plan to phase out Manifest V2 at Mozilla. As long as V2 and V3 are active in parallel it shouldn’t have a negative Impact on adblockers etc.
Until MV2 API is shut off completely. What will FireFox’s V2 do then?
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/05/14/manifest-v3-updates/
That said, I believe Firefox users have gotten a lot of benefits by having extensions made that work in both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. I don’t believe there will still be as much effort for a Firefox-only extension but I believe there will be a sufficient number of motivated users and developers to still develop blockers and other extensions that take advantage of Firefox continuing to support MV2 and webRequest.
But at least Firefox is just compatibility, and not phasing out v2
Yeah, it’s still worrisome. This makes Firefox a lynchpin for whether ad blocking works for the foreseeable future on the whole web.