My own observations:
Brave supporting a ManifestV2 extension as some desire, means something close to:
- ensuring the browser still exposes the MV2 APIs it needs,
- testing that extension against each Chromium update,
- fixing regressions when Chromium internals change,
- potentially adding compatibility shims if APIs disappear entirely.
If an extension depends only on APIs already preserved for another supported extension, then adding it might require very little additional work. But if it uses obscure or deprecated MV2 APIs, supporting it could require maintaining even more Chromium patches indefinitely.
The four extensions Brave currently supports:
- AdGuard AdBlocker
- NoScript
- uBlock Origin
- uMatrix
They all share characteristics that make them unusually important:
- They’re privacy/security tools.
- They have large, established user bases.
- Their functionality is difficult or impossible to reproduce fully under Manifest V3.
- Their authors have been active participants in discussions around browser extension capabilities.
That makes the maintenance burden easier to justify, but for other extensions, long-term engineering and maintenance costs need support from the authors and the users.
20260704 Saturday UPDATE
tophf is working on ViolentMonkey ManifestV3
Despite the prior:
The official Violentmonkey website states that a Manifest V3 rewrite “is not planned for the foreseeable future” due to the “considerable effort involved and the potential for losing existing features.”
So, encouraging the authors of the extensions to update to ManifestV3, seems to be a good cause.
June 27, 2024: