What’s happening ?

Recently the chromium team led by Google engineers reiterated their will to phase out manifestv2 for the brand new manifestv3. If you didn’t understand the above sentence, it means you have a life aside from web developpement. Which is good.

What does it mean ?

Well the way addons work and communicate with your browser will change. The permissions those addons will have will be more limited and it will have impact on some functionnalities.

Why was it done ?

This change was started because the chromium team noticed that a staggering amount of extensions were used with malicious intent. User trusting those extensions could have website data tempered with or session cookies stolen. The main push for this change is to allow the user more control on what the respective extension can do or can’t do. It will also set stricter default and even if the user wanted to give every rights to the extension their would still be limits to how much an extension could do.

Why is it a problem ?

What is the most commonly installed extension ? You guessed it ADBLOCKER With those new rules the most efficient of adblockers, ublock origin, will have a much harder time blocking every kind of ads on your webpage. Simplifying the situation, extensions used to have access to the entire webpage before it was rendered for the user. With manifest v3 you can only tell the browser to block every link with a list that you set beforehand. This is good but not enough, not enough at all to block ads and trackers on every news page, ecommerce sites etc…

But this begs the question: How peculiar is that a Google engineering team wants to make change that disarms adblockers when the main revenue stream for Google is advertisement…

Firefox: the only survivor

Out of all of those announces, the Edge team said they would continue to support Manifestv2 but being based on chromium it will a lot of extra work. How long before they decide it’s okay for them to drop support too ? I mean they benefit from the good PR now and can still benefit from a world without adblockers so this is just win-win for them.

Now we are only left with browser that are not based on chromium: Safari and Firefox. Safari is not even a contender, it’s closed source, and only has market share because it is the default web engine on iOS. You could ask a web developper what he thinks of Safari but be ready to be met with a storm of complaints because of how much it is out of date and not standard compliant.

Firefox it is then, but the title of this post gave it away. The open source and free browser still holds strong for now but it falling behind in terme of standard compliance and speed. The marketing and business decisions of the corporate entity managing the brand and associated product is really dragging it down. I hope that it can recover and only focus on being a viable alternative to chromium because that would be really bad for the internet.

Brave: the other option

Also based on chromium but with an integrated adblocker Brave still has your back. This integrated adblocker is a modification from the upstream code. There is nothing Google can do to prevent this blocker from working. Still Brave is not without issues and it is up to you to decide to trust them with all the crypto shenanigans they are into, the weird takes of their CEO, their unclear business model and the way they tried to tamper with reward URLs to gain money on the back of unsuspicious users.