Manifest V3 is the latest version of the Chrome Extensions platform, designed to improve security, privacy, and performance. It replaces Manifest V2 and introduces changes like service workers instead of background pages, and restricts blocking capabilities, which has led to concerns about ad blockers
Google made an addition of Manifest V3’s in Chromium to hurt the security extension platform. To start with Manifest V3 will make it more difficult for adblockers and ad trackers to function effectively. This affects extensions like AdBlock, Ghostery and UBlock Origin, AdGuard, NoScript, and uMatrix to work to protect the user from tracking information.
Since browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and others are based on Chromium all browsers will stop supporting security extensions. At the moment of writing this UBlock origin Lite still works on Chromium-based browsers for now.
Google is pushing Manifest V3 as a security measure in Chrome but what this really is going forward is Google’s ad business. At Google’s core, they are an ad business, and extensions that block tracking and ads are not Google for Google business and that is why Google wants to get rid of all Manifest V2 extensions and push users and developers to Manifest V3.
Browsers like Firefox made by Mozilla and LibreWolf which is a free and open-source fork of Firefox, with an emphasis on privacy and security are not affected. Firefox and LibreWolf are both great browsers based on the Gecko rendering engine which is developed by Mozilla and not affected by this change. Safari which is made and distributed by Apple is not affected by this change as well. Safari is based on the open-source “WebKit” rendering engine, which is a fork of the KHTML browser engine originally developed by KDE.
Brave which is a browser based on Chromium is not affected by this change as Brave Shields block ads and trackers by default, and they’re built natively in the Brave browser—no extensions required. Since Shields are patched directly onto the open-source Chromium codebase, they don’t rely on MV2 or MV3 in any way. Thanks to this independence, Google’s forced removal of MV2 will not weaken Brave Shields.
If you are concerned about privacy and security when browsing and would like to use security extensions I would recommend Firefox, Librewolf, or Brave on any platform. If you are on Mac or iOS Safari might be your safest best with security extensions.