Google has announced that Manifest V3 is set to roll out on Chrome’s non-stable branches as early as June 2024, deprecating Manifest V2 in the process. Many popular ad-blockers like uBlock Origin rely on Manifest V2 for their functionality, but the developers have released a Lite version that is Manifest V3-compliant, although it is not a complete substitute. Unfortunately, Chrome’s changes threaten the existence of ad-blockers in their current form, actually causing the disabling of uBlock Origin.
The deprecated Manifest V2 extensions will be disabled in Chrome Dev, Canary, and Beta builds starting in June 2024, and users won’t be able to install these extensions from the Chrome Web Store once Google makes the switch. Manifest V3 restricts certain capabilities to a certain class of extensions and forces developers to migrate away from older APIs due to their negative impact on user experience. This move has been controversial due to changes with the Web Request API and the introduction of the Declarative Net Request API.
Ad-blockers like uBlock Origin use the Web Request API to provide an ad-free user experience, and deprecating it will essentially kill off uBlock Origin. The alternative, the Declarative Net Request API, has been criticized for being limited. While Google has made changes to the Declarative Net Request API to allow certain ad-blockers to function, it is unclear whether uBlock Origin will switch to this API or not. This means that users who want to continue using uBlock Origin may need to switch to Firefox or find other solutions. However, the developer has released uBlock Origin Lite, a Manifest V3-compliant version that uses the new API and may offer a similar ad-blocking experience.