Don’t worry, Firefox isn’t killing your ad-blocker
Summary
- Firefox continues its support for extension developers, has no plans to deprecate MV2 or critical webRequest API like Chrome.
- Mozilla is making it easy to port extensions from Chrome to Firefox with API parity for developers.
- Chrome users should prepare for warnings on outdated extensions, while Firefox’s MV3 support grows on mobile.
The Manifest V3 train is full steam ahead. Many on the internet are not happy about the ongoing changes to how browser extensions work. The fear is that these changes will impact the effectiveness of ad-blockers to make the internet a tolerable place to be. The ad-blocker apocalypse has yet to play out, but this is a big change in how extensions work. For its part, Firefox, the perennial browser underdog, is doing a solid for all the extension developers out there trying to develop for two platforms by adding support for the Manifest V3 framework.
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Today, Mozilla posted to its Add-Ons Community Blog some of the new MV3 implementations it’s adding to Firefox’s latest update, 127. The new implementations are kind of boring and basically create an API parity between Mozilla and Chrome, but it shows that Mozilla is going out of its way to support developers by removing as many friction points as possible when porting an extension from Chrome to Firefox.
Firefox isn’t killing your ad blocker
Unlike Chrome, Firefox has no plans to deprecate MV2 extensions, so if you’ve been using Firefox for a while, nothing will change with your extensions. Even better, Mozilla makes it clear that it has no plans to deprecate the webRequest API that’s critical to how many ad blockers work. The nerfing of the webRequest API is what triggered the uproar against MV3 in the first place, so it’s nice to see Mozilla’s keeping it around.
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If you’re a Chrome user, you should expect to start seeing warnings about using outdated browser extensions in the coming weeks and months. If you’re using the Chrome Beta, Dev, or Canary channel, you may have already seen some. The Chrome team has said that this will propagate to the broader Chromium ecosystem, followed by the disabling of all Manifest V2 extensions. As for the future of MV3 on Firefox, more “compatibility enhancements” are coming, starting with MV3 support on Firefox for Android in version 128, which means you should see Firefox’s mobile extension library continue to grow.
