Notably, Firefox is not removing v2 support (at least for now as of March 2024)
> Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future. And even if we re-evaluate this decision at some point down the road, we anticipate providing a notice of at least 12 months for developers to adjust accordingly and not feel rushed.[1]
To my knowledge the “big” chrome engine alternatives aren’t either. I know that Vivaldi and Brave plan on keeping around v2 as long as it is economically feasible
Are you certain? The last I heard about it from Vivaldi[0], they were only going to keep the MV2 code around so long as it's in the upstream codebase:
> We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium. We expect to drop support in June 2025, but we may maintain it longer or be forced to drop support for it sooner, depending on the precise nature of the changes to the code.
Note that June 2025 is the same date Google plans to drop support completely[1].
Vivaldi team does not respond to any comments asking about ongoing v2 manifest support; safe to assume it's gone as soon as it's out of Chromium upstream. Given Tetzchner's continual messaging on how important user privacy is to Vivaldi it seems like a strange decision, but I don't know how much effort would be required to maintain the support. They're a small team, so it would be understandable if they would just say it's too hard, but instead they have avoided the topic entirely, which suggests they agree with the direction.
Well Vivaldi is open source, right? Personally I would be reaching out to Brave, who already plans on maintaining V2 support, and see about a joint venture with a forked chromium.
I was intensely interested in this, and after much reading, here's my best understanding:
Neither Brave nor Vivaldi are proposing to maintain engine support for v2: they both point to the codebase retaining support after Chrome drops support (likely for enterprise) as being the driver of their ability to offer v2. Both say that once those codepaths are removed, so too will v2 support be removed from Vivaldi and Brave.
In case of Vivaldi, it's features like vertical tabs, and extreme customizability for the built-in stuff (for tabs alone the options dialog is like 3 pages of checkboxes for all the various aspects of how they behave).
Also for those who use cloud bookmark/history/tab sync, people might just not want Google specifically to have that data; Vivaldi does its own sync.
I use both Vivaldi, Brave and Firefox, all have their own strenghts.
Brave now has built in vertical tabs as well: https://brave.com/blog/vertical-tabs/
What makes you an expert on what makes a feature a gimmick? You have no idea of how other people use and optimize their productivity workflows around the use of this "gimmick". Your opinion is far from "objective" .
Split screen done well would be a killer feature for me. Last time I looked Edge support was ok, but not great. But what kills Edge for me as a daily driver is the basic usability in managing bookmarks and tabs. It's stop and go for every basic operation like dragging objects while Firefox is simply a continuous flow. Firefox is invisible, Edge just gets in the way all the time.
Otherwise Edge is not bad at all. Chrome without MV2 is dead to me.
People spend a lot of time in the web browser. So yes, they want to have a comfortable experience with it. And those features are deal breakers for a lot of people. So stating that they are not killing features is just unreasonable at best and ignorant at worst.
It does makes the difference to people who use browsers for something more than reading HN or Reddit. That's the point. What arguments do you expect? Specific use cases for every feature each browser has? That's a different discussion completely.
It is all a gimmick but as long as people are switching to a chromium based browser and not Firefox I'm happy. With that said, I don't know how anyone would trust a small team to build them a secure and safe browser. Chrome is so battle tested at this point and Google puts a lot of resources in maintaining it, they stand to lose a lot more given their scale.
This sounds like Android phone manufacturers making fun of apple for removing the headphone jack and then doing it themselves a year later. Are they seriously going to maintain V2 support for a relatively small percentage of Powerusers which probably are mostly already using Firefox anyways? The point of being economically infeasible is probably in a month or so.
I think it comes down to how aggressive Chrome will be at changing the internal APIs that it uses. They could choose to make it a very expensive patch to maintain. But I think they would have to go out of their way to do that.
That is easy talking as long as it is still a config flag, then after a compile-time flag. Once the internal APIs for MV2 or where MV2 get removed or changed it becomes very difficult to maintain. Never mind the possible security issues you introduce, but won’t get so quickly discovered.
Brave is an odd one. They've publicly stated[1] they plan to support parts of Manifest v2 for a handful of popular addons (uBlock Origin included) by making limited patches, but they make no promises.
It seems Shields was their main focus for MV3 mitigation, much like Vivaldi's now native content blocker made for the same reason (though Vivaldi has said[2] they won't be supporting MV2 past the last Chromium build that includes it).
Yeah that's the problem. I used to be on Brave but having to download v2-only extensions[1] manually from each developer's website was a pain. I am on a Firefox-based browser now and extensions are synced across all my computers and it just works.
While adblocking has gotten most of the focus, it isn't the only functionality that is being limited or made more complicated. One of my favorite extensions is still not available for MV3 because of complications: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus/issues/1430
At least when I last tested, Vivaldi on Android's adblocking is pretty far behind uBlock Origin -- it doesn't get nearly as many anti-adblock interstitials as it should.
It blocks trackers, which means ads usually get caught up in the net. It's anyone's guess if the ones that makes it through aren't tracking, or are successfully evading (I'd wager the latter).
Thanks, I'll check it out - I'm surprised more browsers don't have vertical tabs - when I used Edge for a bit they were fantastic. Though I hear they're coming to stock Firefox soon
> Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future. And even if we re-evaluate this decision at some point down the road, we anticipate providing a notice of at least 12 months for developers to adjust accordingly and not feel rushed.[1]
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manif...