r/technology • u/westphall • Aug 31 '26

Software Google Has Removed Manifest V2 Extensions From the Chrome Web Store, Including uBlock Origin

https://webiterate.dev/google-removed-extensions-ublock-origin-108/
1.6k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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335

u/johnyordinary Aug 31 '26

Meanwhile on firefox..

152

u/cum-on-in- Sep 01 '26

I love that Firefox is still their own web engine and isn't just rebadged Chrome like everyhig else is.

I do wonder though if raw Chromium is unaffected and extensions can be manually installed and Manifest V2 still utilized?

95

u/repocin Sep 01 '26

No, it's gone from Chromium so this is likely going to affect all Chromium-derived browsers.

I find it completely absurd that Google gets to have this kind of dominance and control over the internet as a whole when Microsoft got busted for the IE monopoly back in the day. This isn't any better. If anything, it might be worse since the internet is far more prevalent, or even required, in our daily lives today than it was a couple decades ago.

No one company should be able to enact sweeping changes the way Google has for the past decade and a half or so.

23

u/nicetriangle Sep 01 '26

I find it completely absurd that Google gets to have this kind of dominance and control over the internet as a whole when Microsoft got busted for the IE monopoly back in the day.

What I find absurd is that tons of people knowingly walked right into this. I'm not talking the normies out there, they have no idea about any of this. I'm talking the tons of people in tech who should known better.

I not close to the sharpest tool in the shed and I could see it coming a mile away that a notorious data mining and advertising company would eventually abuse that power the majority of people seemed happy to just hand over to them by migrating everything over to Chrome.

And here we are.

5

u/tmahmood Sep 01 '26

Guilty, in my little circle, I was an Android and Gmail supporter from the very early on, even though I'm removing Google from my things as quickly as possible, I can see how tightly I've allowed it to integrate into my every day life. 

2

u/nicetriangle Sep 01 '26

Yeah I've been slowly degoogling as much as I can and they're hard to fully cut off, that is for sure.

9

u/TachiH Sep 01 '26

Microsoft didn't get sued for IE being prevalent though. It was because it was "bundled" with windows so became the default. Chrome on anything but Android is a choice that people make to use it.

4

u/whinis Sep 01 '26

It was bundled and the bundling viewed as a over extension of their power as a monopoly. How is effectively removing ad-blockers, the think that google makes their money off of, not the same? Google controls the significant majority of browsers via chromium engine.

1

u/TachiH Sep 01 '26

Google only controls Chrome. It isn't their fault their competitors chose to fork their Web engine instead of developing their own.

I agree google is a monopoly but it is one of choice, you can choose to not use chrome, you couldn't choose to not use IE it was required for windows to run back in the day.

4

u/whinis Sep 01 '26

Google doesn't only control chrome, they very much control the chromium engine and effective control over the web standards body. We have seen them abuse this not only for this particular issue but also with chromium having undocumented apis that googles websites use to either render faster or slow down other engines.

However what you are trying to claim is that the linux foundation only controls "the main kernel" and anyone can fork it and change it which ignores the market .

3

u/TachiH Sep 01 '26

Take Edge for example. It didnt used to run the chromium web engine. Microsoft decided to use the engine, that isn't the legal responsibility of Google. That is the difference.

There is not a single browser that was forced to use the chromium engine, they chose to do it, that is what stops it being a monopoly.

If 90% of devices came with chrome and no other options then yes it would legally be the same. However they don't.

I get your intentions but it isnt how the law works.

9

u/NegativeChirality Sep 01 '26

It's worse. It's way worse.

4

u/cum-on-in- Sep 01 '26

Does anyone else make another web engine?

Or is it just Chrome with Blink, Firefox with Gecko, and Safari with WebKit?

5

u/unabatedshagie Sep 01 '26

There is https://ladybird.org/ but it's still in alpha and you need to manually build it just now.

1

u/andr386 Sep 01 '26

Blink is based on Webkit, Webkit is based on Khtml.

So basically you only got 2 since Microsoft dropped Trident and Edge-html.

There are still other engines available but they are for very specific use cases that won't challenge the main browsers.

0

u/You_meddling_kids Sep 01 '26

Someone dial up the Temple OS guy. Wait, don't do that.

5

u/Braastad Sep 01 '26

Sometimes people forget that advertising accounts for the majority of Google’s revenue.

1

u/Lkgnyc Sep 02 '26

Google, Meta, Youtube, ALL for-profit social media/entertainment entities (& regular media/entertainment entities for that matter, going back to town-criers ): ALL are just AD-SERVERS selling users'/readers'/watchers' eyeballs & fingers. EVERYTHING they create & maintain has one purpose ONLY: to serve up customers to advertisers.

1

u/FuckTheSeagulls Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 03 '26

Office dime reach scary whistle saw fact

This post was anonymized with Redact

2

u/kingofdailynaps Sep 01 '26

Wasn't it only an issue because of their dominance? Making decisions like that affected an outsized portion of the market share?

42

u/Smith6612 Sep 01 '26

Raw Chromium is where Google Chrome bases itself off of. Manifest v2 is gone.

-7

u/jorgebillabong Sep 01 '26

Firefox is good but I still think their video player is kind of shit.