Google Chrome’s plan to limit ad blocking extensions kicks off next week

UngodlyAudrey🏳️‍⚧️@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 203 points –
Google Chrome’s plan to limit ad blocking extensions kicks off next week
arstechnica.com
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::Laughs in Firefox::

Who knows... Firefox might just follow suit. If devs have to write their extensions one for Chrome and once for Firefox, the Firefox one will probably be the first to die.

Anti Commercial-AI license

That's not how it works. Firefox has full support for Manifest v3 extensions, but it does also support MV2 at the same time, and aims to keep MV2 support alive in the future.

From the article:

Firefox plans to support Manifest V3 because Chrome is the world's most popular browser, and it wants extensions to be cross-browser compatible, but it has no plans to turn off support for Manifest V2.

I doubt they'll ever choose to shut down V2, but Google is already forcing their hand a little by making them require supporting V3 to stay relevant

Not if more people use FireFox...

Firefox also supports mobile extensions, unlike Chrome.

Unfortunately, as much as I like and use firefox on both pc and mobile, chrome and chromium based browsers dominate the market. It doesn't help that they come pre-installed in both cases.

Then there will be thousands, millions of people continuing development of FF extensions.

Isn't that already how it works? Are there extensions trust work unchanged on both browsers? At the very least they'd have to maintain them on both addon stores.

There's a common specification called WebExtension, which is used by all modern browsers. Firefox had their own API (XUL/XPCOM) before that, but they deprecated it in 2017. Safari also used to have its own system for extensions, but it's been deprecated since 2019. The Manifest API is a subset of WebExtension, which defines an extension.