Raymond Hill, the creator of uBlock Origin, explained<\/a> that MV3 did not make it impossible to offer ad blocker extensions in Chrome, but severely inhibited their ability to do certain advanced filtering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chrome\u2019s transition from MV2 to MV3 also wasn\u2019t a sudden, unexpected change. Google has been talking about Manifest V3 since October 2018<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To prepare for the shift, Hill developed uBlock Origin Lite, a version of his popular extension designed to be entirely MV3-compliant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because the change from MV2 to MV3 is so dramatic, Hill said he would not automatically transition uBlock Origin users to uBlock Origin Lite in the Chrome Web Store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI consider uBO Lite to be too different from uBO to be an automatic replacement,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou will have to explicitly find a replacement to uBO according to what you expect from a content blocker. uBO Lite may or may not fulfil your expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other popular ad-blocking extensions have adapted to the new standard, but Hill explained that this required making significant trade-offs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He said the trickery other content blockers use to try and keep their level of filtering the same between MV2 and MV3 meant they risk being less reliable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hill published a video showing that AdBlock Plus did not always block ads immediately after Chrome started up. uBlock Origin did, but at the cost of many filtering capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Google announced<\/a> more details about its plans for MV3 in 2019, it said there had been a lot of confusion and misconception around the motivations and implications of the change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis included speculation that these changes were designed to prevent or weaken ad blockers. This is absolutely not the goal,\u201d Google stated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn fact, this change is meant to give developers a way to create safer and more performant ad blockers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In comments included with the source code commits that removed support for Manifest V2 extensions from future versions of Chrome, the developers explained the reason for the change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality,\u201d said Devlin Cronin, extensions platform technical lead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe won\u2019t be able to provide or maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cronin said they had found a number of bugs that were specific to MV2 recently. He also noted that other browsers could continue supporting the standard if they wanted to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI can certainly understand the desire to keep using these extensions, and if I recall correctly, many of the Chromium forks plan to continue supporting MV2 indefinitely.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among Chromium-based browsers, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi have pointed their users towards their built-in content filters, which are not impacted by changes to the web extension API.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Manifest V3 era<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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