Brave GitHub issue 56654:
Also probably important - re social media - issue 55277:
Extension issue > Temporary workaround:
Brave Browser stable release v1.91.178:
‘https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v1.91.178’
I know the developers couldn’t care less if a few people complain about Manifest V2 being disabled, but doing it without warning—while claiming “Chrome doesn’t support Manifest V2 anymore, so neither will we”—is ridiculous. The extensions actually *do* work, yet the browser disables them anyway; it’s a total failure. I already disliked their moves regarding VPNs and cryptocurrency, so how are they any different from Chrome now? It’s incredibly annoying to have to switch browsers every 2–3 years because of stuff like this.
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:
Join the dev team since you’re so smart.
It has been known for literally years the MV2 was being phased out.
Any idea which of those versions I need for Win 10? I’m not clear how to roll back - I need to re-enable long enough to get the script.
Brave had led us to believe that they would keep it active longer than Chrome. And there was no reason to believe they would do remove extension access with an auto update that gave NO warning. This didn’t even give me a chance to backup. I for one feel deceived. If they hadn’t let us think they were keeping it longer, I’d have made more backups…and had another browser ready most likely. I guarantee it won’t be a Chromium one.
Switch to Microsoft Edge, they still support all MV2 using the flags, not just 4, and they have their own webstore to store/maintain the extensions… even their development branch works fine whereas Brave volunteered to join the google bandwagon at the first opportunity.
All this effort to only allow 4 extensions, what a joke
I update my sideloaded extensions using scripts; it would be quite simple to build a custom repo for mv2 extensions that keeps them updated automatically and allows users to continue using mv2 indefinitely.
For brave, it would be as easy as adding an option to add extensions by their git repo.
1.91.178 is what I reverted back to and has been good for the old extensions so far. The rollback did break one other random extension of mine but wasn’t important, and really I haven’t tried force enabling it to see if it works anyways
Dev teams like this don’t need more help being evil and you clearly don’t understand the office politics that goes on with projects like this. The devs who were a part of the team who had a problem with it were hitting brick walls against the other half of the team. So they left the team. And now we are left with a team of stubborn, Google enabling and complicit developers. The people who tried to join and change it were ousted.
You don’t clearly don’t understand open-source projects and development and just naively believe it’s as simple as “just join and contribute!”. Hilariously naive.
I bet you’re fun at parties.
great job bending the knee to google
how to downgrade to extensions back to work & block updates
Today i received message about disabled extensions
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Brave Version( check About Brave): 1.92.134 (150.0.7871.63)
Additional Information:
Worth a look:
Short answer for anyone finding this, no matter how much noise this guys made pretending MV2 would be supported, is just not. Sadly the only real alternative is FireFox
What is disingenuous is you people making supporting MV2 a HUGE media talking point and then sneakily doing it the google way anyway and without any warning (literally i couldn’t even find this information right away is very well hidden) You did an excellent job doing this Bait and Switch to mislead people into migrating to Brave thinking you will keep the MV2 support going. Congratulations!
Helium (Chromium-based web browser):
We’ll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible.