this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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It's been Chromium based for ages now. Meaning they'll likely eventually stop supporting manifest V2 too, unless Google makes it easy for them to keep supporting it.
It's a bad take, open source projects can be spun out to whatever branch you want and not needing a host support to keep it going..that's why browser like brave can have its own hard coded adblock without relying on extensions like ublock and things like manifest V2 and V3 support, as it doesn't need it as it has nothing to do with Google other than using their open source engine.
And yet many Chromium forks are following suit and disabling Manifest v2 support. The idea that these things "don't need support" is silly when we're talking about the Herculean effort of maintaining a browser. Yes, anyone can but when the vast majority of browsers are Chromium forks instead of individually created and maintained ones, how much effort do you think those organizations have?
It's good that browsers like Brave have an alternative means of ad blocking, and Firefox even has Brave's exact same blocker built in now, but the idea that "you can just fork and block" is missing the point.
Google has effectively won. They are the de facto controller of web standards now that the majority of browsers use Chromium. When they began dropping support for Manifest v2 in 2019 it was the same year they said ad blockers were a major threat to their revenue in their publicly filed shareholder statements. This isn't some conspiracy theory either, you can literally go look that up. They dropped v2 because ad blocking was too powerful and gutted it in v3. They know that the ecosystem of browser forks they helped create depends on their dev effort and won't keep v2.
Even if v2 and ad blocking stay around, people still need to get the fuck off of Chromium. It's ads today, but could be something else tomorrow. The problem is Google getting to easily control what like >80% of browsers see and do all because they control Chromium. Even if Google was suddenly like "you know what, we're turning v2 back on," I'd still be practically begging everyone to stay the fuck off of Chromium and get into something Firefox based. This is about so much more than just ads.