Mozilla is the maker of the famous Firefox browser which has been using its own web engine called “Gecko” since forever, and hence, is not affected at all by these moves from Google.
You answered your own question. It doesn’t effect FF.
But, I do agree they should use the downgrade in functionality of V3 as a point for advertising FF.
What good would advertising “Still supporting Manifest V2” do for your average user? They also wouldn’t want to openly advertise that “Your ad block still works with us”.
that’s also probably a factor in why they don’t say anything, big moneypants might say something
Didn’t they remove XUL extensions to make their extension interface compatible with inferior chrome web extensions?
I just did a quick online search and it seems like the reason for removing that was that it was way too much work to maintain and stopped them from implementing performance improvements for Firefox. Apparently it was also a lot of work for extension developers, since they had to update their extensions constantly.
That’s just what I read tho, I wasn’t there when XUL extensions where still a thing.
Mozilla is silent about Firefox in general, not just about Manifest v2 and v3. I assume there is nothing new to report. Mozilla already stated somewhere they will support V2 and the extensions will work as before. But I don’t understand why Mozilla does not use this moment from marketing standpoint to market the Firefox Extension Manifest V2 the hell out of it.
Don’t they need to pay the bills if they don’t want to get in antitrust investigations?
That check is going to run out sooner, rather than later
Because it doesn’t make sense for all Firefox marketing material to be how shit chrome is. Save that bullshit for American president elections
It will be exciting to see Kamala and Trump debate whether Gecko or Blink should be the industry leader.
Kinda off topic, but I find it weird that Kamala is usually referred by first name, and trump by surname.
I think it’s because that’s the more distinctive part of her name. “President Harris” sounds kind of generic, like the fictional president from an action movie.
It may start to constitute a pattern that the same was true of Hillary Clinton, though in that case it was likely that just saying “Clinton” might cause confusion with Bill.
Also Bernie Sanders is mostly referred to by his first name, so…
Not saying anything bad about chrome is probably in the contract they have with Google which is most of their income
Nah I doubt, it would be a huge lawsuit if google was found to pay competitors for staying quiet about their flaws
… because Mozilla already clarified their position on this last year.
TL;DR
No, Mozilla is NOT ditching manifest v2.
Well what’s happening with MV2 you ask? Great question – in case you missed it, Google announced late last year their plans to resume their MV2 deprecation schedule. Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future. And even if we re-evaluate this decision at some point down the road, we anticipate providing a notice of at least 12 months for developers to adjust accordingly and not feel rushed.
Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/
Did you read the article? Your link supports the point it was making: Mozilla doesn’t mention ad blocking anywhere. It’s immediately brought up in the comments, but Mozilla itself doesn’t want to broach the topic.
Years ago, Mozilla would explicitly call ad blocking a privacy feature, and proclaim it explicitly.
Now they don’t.
but Mozilla itself doesn’t want to broach the topic.
Again, a reminder that Mozilla plans to continue support for the Manifest Version 2 blocking WebRequest API (this API powers, for example, uBlock Origin) while simultaneously supporting Manifest Version 3.
Years ago, Mozilla would explicitly call ad blocking a privacy feature, and proclaim it explicitly.
Ahem! https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/ > https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/adblocker/
Cooking up conspiracy theory instead of research is easy, is not it?
Manifest v3 extensions work in Firefox, too. Its just the new thing. Its way easier to build cross-browser extensions with, too. V3 is actually a good thing overall, as its led to a lot of extensions being available for Firefox when the devs might have just targeted chrome. Way more feature parity between browsers with v3.
Chrome dropping support for v2 doesn’t merit a response from Firefox because nothing changes for Firefox users and they’re not going to drop support. Any one who actually cares (and they should) will move to Firefox on their own, so why waste advertising money on that? Eventually Firefox and any other browsers who want to allow stuff like ublock will probably have a way to do the same tasks in v3 (and the Firefox Dev team has said as much in blog posts for ages), then it’ll just be a feature that doesn’t work in chrome. V3 just simply doesn’t have the API that ublock uses in v2.
There have been discussions for years in the w3c standards group about this whole shitshow and this is one the chrome team have basically refused to budge on despite all the other browser teams. Its honestlu a mirscle they delayed it as long as they have. This was originally supposed to happen at the start of 2023.
Chrome is kinda like a country with a overrule veto vote at the UN when it comes to w3c working groups since they can just do whatever they want anyway, and nothing will change until they no longer have that power. That said, browser feature parity is at an all time high recently and its because all the browser teams are working together better than ever. There are just these hard limits chrome chooses to stick to.
What you said makes sense from a technical standpoint but not from a practical standpoint. If I’m losing good adblock on Chrome, but good ad block still works on Firefox, it would be easy for Mozilla to put up some blog posts or tweets or whatever to point out that they are a great option, because they’re adblock isn’t going anywhere.
This is an obvious concern for many users, Mozilla has the capability to issue a press release or anything at all, and they’ve chosen not to do so. Therefore, people are reasonably questioning why they’ve chosen not to do so. Free marketing but they’re throwing it away, and their best defense for doing nothing is essentially what you wrote, which is essentially to dodge the precise issue at hand.
