Those in the know will more or less understand that it’s sort of an inevitability that once Google Chrome drops support on Manifest V2 extensions platform – which allows adblockers like uBlock Origin to work with full functionality – about two years ago, other Chromium-based web browsers will eventually follow suit. One such case is Microsoft Edge, which announced that MV2 will “gradually” go offline by the end of this year.
Microsoft Edge Drops MV2 Support
As the second most-popular Chromium-based browser (which isn’t anywhere close to Chrome’s market dominance, mind you), Edge will “will start the consumer transition away from [MV2] extensions and toward MV3” starting this August, and Microsoft is targeting to “complete the consumer transition by the end of 2026, with enterprise deprecation following in early 2027.” In other words, there’s only a few months left to go.
While it was quite the unpopular move when Google made the switch, Microsoft noted that it has committed to MV3 as early as 2020, and noted that “95% of the top MV2 extensions on the Edge Add-ons store already moved to MV3.” More specifically, there are 58 extensions with “meaningful usage” remaining (uBlock Origin being one of those) that still rely on MV2, and among these, only three have yet to feature an MV3-based equivalent.
It should be made clear that MV3 does introduce some level of limitation to adblockers, which the creator of uBlock Origin noted includes the limits on the number of filter lists, the lack of dynamic filtering capabilities, among others. The biggest difference is the capability to counter anti-adblock mechanisms certain websites impose, which MV2-based extensions could circumvent; the MV3 equivalent, uBlock Origin Lite, lack such capability.
In any case, those intend to continue using uBlock Origin will need to make the switch to other browsers, for which Firefox has promised that it will support MV2, and other Chromium-based offerings such as Brave and Opera also promised to support MV2 as long as possible. (Pro tip: if switching is too cumbersome for you today, I recommend using these options as a secondary browser in case you need uBO’s full feature set.)
Pokdepinion: If only the internet isn’t so riddled with obnoxious advertising.
