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?