This is ultimately the endpoint of all Chromium-based browsers. Even the most stalwart will throw in the towel on MV2 support sooner or later, because the effort required to maintain non-trivial patches against mainline becomes too great for the team to keep up with.

It's a great demonstration of how Chromium's open source nature is something of a technicality. Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google, you're eventually going to wind up living with Google's decisions whether you like it or not.

This has been obvious to everyone who knows that the key feature to the devs of these browsers is “-based.” None of the chromium-based browsers are anything other than UI tweaks and certain extensions being included by default. None of them rewrite significant parts of the browser engine, because that would be too much extra work.

The only projects which have a hope of maintaining MV2 compatibility are those who are a hard fork of an earlier version of chromium or a totally different engine.

To my point: The article mentions that Opera still says they will maintain MV2 for as long as it is “technically reasonable.” Mark my works, Google will find a way to break Opera’s MV2 patches that makes it too hard to maintain.

> open source nature is something of a technicality

No, but maybe this highlights that it's never accurate to conflate "open source" or "free (as in speech) software" with end-users having power over the people providing resources to the project.

I keep telling that folks shipping Chrome forks and Electron junk have helped Google turn the Web into ChromeOS Platform.

And then they complain about Safari.

Had it been today, and Google would have no issue pushing for PNaCL.

I don't think this is the case.

Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.

I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.

That's kinda true with every open source software. As soon as some branch has a sizable chunk of developers, forks are discouraged, because either you need to keep up or give up eventually. That's what makes torvalds/linux special and why people want to upstream. If the upstream doesn't accept: oh well.

Brave's built in adblocker is on par to uBlock Origin for me.

Fortunately all you need is one clanker to maintain the patches. What used to be immensely expensive human work (and tedious!), is now just ”claude please re-enable manifest v2 and rebuild an installer”

Non-user hostile browsers will just build in the ad blocker. I have been using Brave Origin (the paid version of Brave that doesn't have all the extras) and the built-in ad blocking has been very good, including YouTube, etc.