Some extensions suddenly turned off because they are "no longer supported"

Brave Browser Desktop Support
1

Description of the issue:

Some extensions were turned off today in Brave. At brave://extensions/ there was a warning: “These extensions were turned off because they’re no longer supported.” I can’t figure out how to turn them back on. I was able to find alternatives for most of them, but one of them (Violentmonkey) has data that I want to recover. I would prefer to keep using the extension if possible because I tried alternatives OrangeMonkey and WildMonkey but they wouldn’t work for me.

How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Start Brave
  2. Notice the warning about disabled extensions
  3. Spend time finding alternatives and otherwise dealing with the issue

Expected result:

Brave starts as usual without disabling any of my extensions

Brave Version (check About Brave):

Brave 1.92.134 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Chromium: 150.0.7871.63

2

Happened to me too. Suddenly my Violentmonkey was turned off without any way to turn it back on and Adguard adblocker MV2 was replaced with “Brave-hosted” version which didn’t even work at all. I managed to get back working Adguard adblocker from adguard adblocker mv2 store page. Surprisingly, Add to Brave button was greyed out now when it wasn’t ever before so I ungreyed it using devtools (removed the attribute ‘disabled’ from button.) I have yet to figure out how to enable Violentmonkey again.

I can’t believe Brave browser out of all browsers chose the Chrome way. Why forcefully disable my extensions without any way to re-enable them just like Chrome did it? I’m now considering changing browsers as soon as possible.

Edit: This is insane. I just found out that Brave resets my changes every single time when I restart Brave browser. Every Brave startup my Adguard extension is replaced by Brave-hosted version which doesn’t work.

3

To be clear, we are not doing this electively. This is a change that has been coming from upstream for a long time. You’ll note that any other Chromium-based browser (that I’m aware of) will also no longer support manifest v2 extensions.

When Google says they’re “dropping support” for MV2 extensions, what this means is that:

  • Chrome (and subsequently Chromium) will disable these extensions if they’re already installed and they won’t work when enabled.
  • Those extensions won’t receive updates
  • Eventually those extensions will be removed from the Chrome web store entirely (August 31st of this year is when this takes full effect, according to Google).

Since Chromium removed the MV2 code from the browser itself, any browser that regularly rebases onto Chromium (Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, etc.) eventually inherits that removal unless it deliberately restores the code.

That last bit – restoring the MV2 code – is non-trivial and requires a good amount of work to upkeep in general, let alone that it would need to be done every time there is a new Chromium update that needs to be pushed into the build (which is fairly frequent). At this time, Brave simply doesn’t have enough developers and/or developer bandwidth to do this.

However, what we can and are actively doing is self-hosting a few select MV2 extensions (such as uBlock) that will continue to work in Brave. While this still requires a significant amount of work, it is doable and we believe is a better alternative than dropping support for all of them. You can find and download/enable these extensions in Brave by going to brave://settings/extensions/v2.

It is disingenuous to say we’re going “the Chrome way” as this implies that we agree with or don’t care that Google is implementing these restrictions. This is not the case and we are doing what we can with the resources we have to ensure some of the most popular privacy/security related extensions stay available to you in Brave.

For further reading, we wrote a blog post this a while back:

@somehundred if you are having issues with the built-in adguard extension, can you please open a thread here on Community and include more context about what specifically is happening/what’s not working?

4

Thanks for the tip. Could you please also add Violentmonkey to that list?

5

Same here, I couldn’t even backup my scripts. Thankfully I just copied the extension settings folder to older brave install in a virtual machine, cut off internet to stop updating and I was able to backup and import them to tampermonkey. But this is not cool to just kill of an extension that hosts many scripts I need daily.

6

It was my assumption that Brave intended to continue supporting the MV2 code. It seems the current “support” for MV2 is to just host a few adblockers (which I don’t understand why you would be using them over Shields, but I digress). There are several extensions that will never receive a rewrite for MV3, so I am a little disappointed in the approach that Brave is taking. I am aware that the level of effort to keep maintaining the legacy MV2 code is a large undertaking, but I think that to say “MV2 extensions still work in Brave” is a bit misleading. I wouldn’t call self-hosting a few adblockers supporting MV2 in Brave. This was one of the major reasons for moving to Brave.

7

Or is there a decent MV3 alternative with feature parity?

8

Maybe put a message directly within the extensions page to let users know they can visit brave://settings/extensions/v2 to enable and install those extensions.

9

All these turned off for me… I’ve been using them for more than a decade :sad_but_relieved_face:

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That said… Brave rulez :rocket:

10

This could have been handled differently. My ScriptSafe addon just has been disabled now. No warning in advance! just disabled! Great!

11

The same thing happened today with the Feedbro extension. I click the on/off switch in the bottom right corner of the Feedbro extension on the brave://extensions/ page, but it doesn’t open. And unfortunately, I can’t export the website addresses I’ve collected over the years as an OPML file.

12

A temporary solution is to revert to a previous version. 1.91.178 does not have this issue. This version can be downloaded from Brave’s GitHub Release section. You should also disable Brave’s auto updater. On Windows this can be done by removing all Brave entries from the Task Scheduler I believe.
I also use the Violentmonkey extension and the scripts were not lost in the process.

13

Someone please make social fixer for facebook keep working.
Until then how do I roll back and disable auto updates. I need the extension settings to set up on a Firefox based browser. I will not do without my social fixer so I guess I will just have to use Facebook over there in the meantime. (Don’t want too but FB without it is horrible!) Greasemonkey will still be able to run social fixer as a script, but I need to retrieve settings.

14

What’s really strange about this is that Manifest V2 itself isn’t disabled, you can still unzip the extensions and use developer mode to force them to run. So this is something that brave could still enable at this point.

15

No, you guys should have done more to reject and get this working right. I’m done with this browser and team. There’s already so much evidence you’re still very complicit with Google and your refusal to move away from Google because “it’s hard” just enables more evil by Google.

This is literally the reason I moved off of Chrome in the first place.

Ridiculous update. Pound sand

16

Is there some way to enable these extensions in the meantime?
You guys are pretty good at making changes, and diverging as a hard-fork isn’t good for compatibility, so it makes sense as to why you still follow upstream changes.

brave://settings/extensions/v2 was mentioned, but that only applies to 4 specific extensions, and doesn’t allow a general exemption.

Is there a way to extract the extension files and recompile them as “developer” extensions, since they aren’t affected?
Unfortunately, I use Imagus and Per Tab Zoom daily, so it affects me every day now.

Ironically, uBlock Origin is actually enabled, yet also shows on this list (Chromium built-in upstream nonsense). Also love how every mention of “Chrome” or “Chromium” becomes “Brave”, so some sentences can misrepresent Brave (like below) :smiley:

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17

Yeah, my issue is that it has permanently disabled Session Manager with no warning. So now I can’t access all my old saved sessions. Therefore they are completely lost.

Anybody know where I might find the actual .txt files on a Windows PC?

18

There’s a way to recover, and I’m moving to FireFox after this.

I think the extension data might not be stored in plain text. Might be indexDB at least for session tab manager. Make sure to backup all the files removed in case anything went wrong.

  1. For windows (win10 x64, should apply to win11?), download from GitHub the zip file version (credit to C0D6) (direct link: brave-v1.91.178-win32-x64.zip)
  2. You should find brave.exe, chrome_proxy.exe & 149.1.91.178 folder after extraction
  3. Go to your Brave installation folder (most likely in C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application)
  4. Backup the old brave.exe, chrome_proxy.exe & whatever newer version digit folder (rename or move them elsewhere)
  5. Copy the extracted brave.exe, chrome_proxy.exe & 149.1.91.178 folder into the installation folder
  6. Launch brave by brave.exe
  7. You might need to enable developer mode or click some keep using extension to re-enable some extensions.
  8. After re-enabled, might need to restart browser to load the index db data
  9. After it’s working, go to settings of every extension to export their settings/scripts/data
19

I am having the same issue :frowning: It was fine yesterday, logged in this morning to get notified that my Social Fixer extension has been disabled and I can’t even get a backup of my setting.

PLEASE make Social Fixer for Facebook keep working. There are many folks that have been caught off guard and we are all now scrambling to find a workaround.

I guess you are forcing many folks to switch to the Firefox browser now. Not thrilled that I am being forced to start using firefox because you will no longer support Social Fixer on Facebook.

I need to at least be able to retrieve my settings and look into using the social fixer as a script until you screw with that as well or go to firefox.

20

Yes, it’s absurdly ridiculous. I can’t even recover my old scripts without a massive workaround. Why not warn us in advance? Where’s the convenience and the user experience into them opening up their browser and finding out all their scripts they used for years are gone?