What's even the point of disabling Manifest v2 in Firefox? Is there something wrong with it or that significantly different that Firefox can't support aspects of both v2 and v3? Having just made a Manifest v3 extension for Chrome, I don't really see how it's so wildly different that Firefox would have to do that much to support it. What am I missing?
The world of software sure is good at "fixing" things that aren't broke.
Also, this article doesn't seem to make it clear what Firefox is doing to "save" ad blockers other than continue to support Manifest v2. If they're making ad blocking possible with v3, there doesn't seem to be a lot of detail around it. Yes, I can go research it, but the point of articles like these should be to aggregate that information so people don't have to do all the work for themselves.
The problem is that Google removed a very important API that is crucial for ad blockers. They did that change along with the update to Manifest V3. Mozilla is trying to do the right thing by implementing Manifest V3 without the problem introduced by Google. It will "save" ad-blockers by not removing a specific API that is important for them.
Firefox will keep supporting both V2 and V3. They want to implement V3 in order to avoid forcing most developers to have different manifests for different browsers. This is a good thing in general.
If you want details on what Mozilla is doing, here's a snippet from the linked blog post:
> While other browser vendors introduced declarativeNetRequest (DNR) in favor of blocking Web Request in MV3, Firefox MV3 continues to support blocking Web Request and will support a compatible version of DNR in the future. We believe blocking Web Request is more flexible than DNR, thus allowing for more creative use cases in content blockers and other privacy and security extensions. However, DNR also has important performance and compatibility characteristics we want to support.
Your answer is hiding in your comment. You wrote a Manifest v3 extension instead of a v2. If Firefox, an underdog, wants to maintain compatibility, they're going to have to adopt v3. However, they don't want to adopt v3 with the blocking choices Google has made. So they had to do this, unless they wanted Firefox to fade into further irrelevance through extension developers refusing to support it.
Also, technically, Firefox is supporting both 2 and 3, their solution here isn't magical wizardry. It's just maintaining those specific features (blocking Web Requests) on top of adopting 3.
> Also, this article doesn't seem to make it clear what Firefox is doing to "save" ad blockers other than continue to support Manifest v2.
Yeah, that's a misleading title; the authors explain why extension-writers are going to switch to the "common platform", which will be V3, whatever Mozilla (or AdGuard) do.
I was looking for an account of some cool Judo move that Mozilla had pulled off, to draw the teeth of V3. That's not what it's about.
The world of software sure is good at "fixing" things that aren't broke.
Also, this article doesn't seem to make it clear what Firefox is doing to "save" ad blockers other than continue to support Manifest v2. If they're making ad blocking possible with v3, there doesn't seem to be a lot of detail around it. Yes, I can go research it, but the point of articles like these should be to aggregate that information so people don't have to do all the work for themselves.