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Comment by EasyMark | Hacker News Reader

To my knowledge the “big” chrome engine alternatives aren’t either. I know that Vivaldi and Brave plan on keeping around v2 as long as it is economically feasible

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Are you certain? The last I heard about it from Vivaldi[0], they were only going to keep the MV2 code around so long as it's in the upstream codebase:

> We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium. We expect to drop support in June 2025, but we may maintain it longer or be forced to drop support for it sooner, depending on the precise nature of the changes to the code.

Note that June 2025 is the same date Google plans to drop support completely[1].

[0] https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...

Vivaldi team does not respond to any comments asking about ongoing v2 manifest support; safe to assume it's gone as soon as it's out of Chromium upstream. Given Tetzchner's continual messaging on how important user privacy is to Vivaldi it seems like a strange decision, but I don't know how much effort would be required to maintain the support. They're a small team, so it would be understandable if they would just say it's too hard, but instead they have avoided the topic entirely, which suggests they agree with the direction.

Or they just don't want to admit publicly that they're too small to maintain a fork when it diverges this much

Well Vivaldi is open source, right? Personally I would be reaching out to Brave, who already plans on maintaining V2 support, and see about a joint venture with a forked chromium.

Vivaldi is not open-source: https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...

> Even though our license doesn’t strictly allow this, we welcome it and we encourage users to share these code modifications on our forums.

lmao wtf

Ah. They can go fuck themselves then. I had assumed given the fact that the source was available.

c++ sources are available.

I was intensely interested in this, and after much reading, here's my best understanding:

Neither Brave nor Vivaldi are proposing to maintain engine support for v2: they both point to the codebase retaining support after Chrome drops support (likely for enterprise) as being the driver of their ability to offer v2. Both say that once those codepaths are removed, so too will v2 support be removed from Vivaldi and Brave.

No idea when Google will make that call.

Alright, so they’re both literally just useless wastes of man-hours then. Good to know.

But... what could possibly be the point of using a chromium based browser that is not Chrome, if not for MV2 support?

In case of Vivaldi, it's features like vertical tabs, and extreme customizability for the built-in stuff (for tabs alone the options dialog is like 3 pages of checkboxes for all the various aspects of how they behave).

Also for those who use cloud bookmark/history/tab sync, people might just not want Google specifically to have that data; Vivaldi does its own sync.

I use both Vivaldi, Brave and Firefox, all have their own strenghts. Brave now has built in vertical tabs as well: https://brave.com/blog/vertical-tabs/

MS Edge, Arc, and Sidekick have features Chrome doesn't such as split screen, side panels, and vertical tabs. Likewise for Firefox forks such as Zen.

None of those things are anything close to killer features much less reasons to switch. Verticle tabs, seriously?

It is all a gimmick but as long as people are switching to a chromium based browser and not Firefox I'm happy. With that said, I don't know how anyone would trust a small team to build them a secure and safe browser. Chrome is so battle tested at this point and Google puts a lot of resources in maintaining it, they stand to lose a lot more given their scale.

And so you throw in your lot with the strongest warlord on the block, and then they turn your shelter into a prison.

sir, its a browser

Split screen done well would be a killer feature for me. Last time I looked Edge support was ok, but not great. But what kills Edge for me as a daily driver is the basic usability in managing bookmarks and tabs. It's stop and go for every basic operation like dragging objects while Firefox is simply a continuous flow. Firefox is invisible, Edge just gets in the way all the time.

Otherwise Edge is not bad at all. Chrome without MV2 is dead to me.

> Verticle tabs, seriously

Yes, I use Edge due to its vertical tabs

Same. And I only finally switched away when Zen had Vertical tabs. So I'm now on Zen because it jas vertical tabs.

Zen doesn't have tab groups yet, but vertical tabs are a far more important feature for me.

cool I also like to send msft extra telemetry

Sorry that your personal use case doesn't match my use case and workflow. You keep using your tools and I'll keep using the ones I like.

Sorry, but I mean objectively it is not. Its a gimmick, not a UI defining feature. You are using the exact same tools I am: chromium.

Chromium but with more invasion of privacy.

What makes you an expert on what makes a feature a gimmick? You have no idea of how other people use and optimize their productivity workflows around the use of this "gimmick". Your opinion is far from "objective" .

neither is yours but okay

People spend a lot of time in the web browser. So yes, they want to have a comfortable experience with it. And those features are deal breakers for a lot of people. So stating that they are not killing features is just unreasonable at best and ignorant at worst.

Okay but counterpoint: it doesnt actually make any difference whatsoever. The fact that you dont make an actual argument proves it.

It does makes the difference to people who use browsers for something more than reading HN or Reddit. That's the point. What arguments do you expect? Specific use cases for every feature each browser has? That's a different discussion completely.

Customization. There are a lot of bad designs in the original Chrome that can be fixed in a fork

This sounds like Android phone manufacturers making fun of apple for removing the headphone jack and then doing it themselves a year later. Are they seriously going to maintain V2 support for a relatively small percentage of Powerusers which probably are mostly already using Firefox anyways? The point of being economically infeasible is probably in a month or so.

I think it comes down to how aggressive Chrome will be at changing the internal APIs that it uses. They could choose to make it a very expensive patch to maintain. But I think they would have to go out of their way to do that.

Firefox (and uBlock and BPC etc) works great on Andriod, but you have to disable Chrome to get Google apps to play nice.

Microsoft Edge announced the move to Manifest v3 back in 2020 and stopped accepting new code on v2 back in 2022...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-...

That is easy talking as long as it is still a config flag, then after a compile-time flag. Once the internal APIs for MV2 or where MV2 get removed or changed it becomes very difficult to maintain. Never mind the possible security issues you introduce, but won’t get so quickly discovered.

Brave is an odd one. They've publicly stated[1] they plan to support parts of Manifest v2 for a handful of popular addons (uBlock Origin included) by making limited patches, but they make no promises.

It seems Shields was their main focus for MV3 mitigation, much like Vivaldi's now native content blocker made for the same reason (though Vivaldi has said[2] they won't be supporting MV2 past the last Chromium build that includes it).

[1] https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

[2] https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...

Why use uBlock on Brave when Brave already blocks ads natively?

uBlock does have some things that are pretty unique, and useful outside of ads for some websites. Element Zapper is a good example. https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Element-zapper

Does brave also block YouTube ads like ublock origin does?

Aren't these v2 extensions being removed from Chrome's store? If so, are the alternatives based on Chromium running their own store?

Yeah that's the problem. I used to be on Brave but having to download v2-only extensions[1] manually from each developer's website was a pain. I am on a Firefox-based browser now and extensions are synced across all my computers and it just works.

[1] while pre-existing v2 extensions are still on the store at least for now (e.g. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal... ) newer ones haven't been able to be added to the store for a long time already, e.g. see https://libredirect.github.io/faq.html#chrome_web_store

I think the supermium chrome fork plans to keep V2 in.

Though it is less of an issue for those two, given that they have built-in adblocking. Still a laudable effort.

At least when I last tested, Vivaldi on Android's adblocking is pretty far behind uBlock Origin -- it doesn't get nearly as many anti-adblock interstitials as it should.

While adblocking has gotten most of the focus, it isn't the only functionality that is being limited or made more complicated. One of my favorite extensions is still not available for MV3 because of complications: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus/issues/1430

Yes, hence "less of an issue," not "not an issue."

At this point, I wonder why Firefox doesn't have a vivaldi-like tracker and ad block interface.

Perhaps it has to do with being a Google-funded browser.

I wonder how hard that would be to implement for someone who knew how to do it? Or if the code for that in vivaldi is open source?

It does. Click the little shield in the address bar. I assume it blocks some ads even if it's not as effective as uBlock Origin.

It blocks trackers, which means ads usually get caught up in the net. It's anyone's guess if the ones that makes it through aren't tracking, or are successfully evading (I'd wager the latter).

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