GoKawiilFor 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.
Chromium contributor Andrey Bershanskiy shared details about recent Chromium changes and according to comments from Google engineer Devlin Cronin, Chrome has now started removing the flags that previously controlled MV2 availability. kExtensionManifestV2Disabled , the Chromium feature flag that allowed controlled disabling of MV2 add-ons, is now completely removed, which means you will likely no longer find uBlock Origin in your browser extensions list.
He wrote: "The kExtensionManifestV2Disabled feature has been default-enabled for
over a year. Remove the feature and the effectively-dead code. ... Any tests that relied on being in the "warning" phase (i.e., with the kExtensionManifestV2Disabled ) for their sole behavior testing are
removed, since this stage is no longer reachable."
Cronin further explained why MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in supported Chrome versions as maintaining the associated functionality indefinitely is no longer possible. He cited growing technical difficulties and implementation complexities as well as security concerns.
He wrote: "MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won't be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we've actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire.
Unfortunately, we won't be putting code behind a compilation flag ... We won't be removing all the MV2 code wholesale right away, so many of these things will continue working for awhile (but they will go away eventually, and some may go away sooner than others)."
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.
Here is a rundown of the changes coming in the final such releases of Chromium releases:
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