this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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Privacy
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No, open source chromium parts are not fine. You can see this with the effort from Google to limit adblocker extensions with manifest v3, now backed in chromium. In the past other browsers had to strip privacy sandbox from chromium. Google tried to put WEI directly in chromium before it was stripped in November 2023. Google has become the cancer of modern web and abuses chromium to impose control over 80% of browser market, the same way Apple does on iOS. Long gone the time when Google motto was “don’t be evil”.
What do you mean? Manifest v2 and v3 are still available in other Chromium browsers
V3 yes, obviously. V3 is what caused the reduction in API that prevented proper adblocking. V3 adblocker are less capable, cannot do dynamic blocking and delegate the blocking to the browser that can impose rules.
Brave work around this by directly injecting the adblocker in the browser, bypassing extensions API entirely. Other browsers do not do that. As of today I do not know of any browser maintaining a fork of v2. When Google killed it with v3 it was gone. Which browser are you talking about?
I know Helium still supports V2 extensions including being bundled with uBlock Origin pre-installed. That and Brave are the only ones I really use or recommend so I can't account for anything else.
Both of them simply patch support back in, but they will not be able to do that once the code is actually removed from chromium upstream on later versions. They are not going to maintain it. Helium will take Brave route and integrate the Adblock (probably brave one that is open source). But this is irrelevant, at the end of the day the main topic is the fact that google decided v2 had to go, and other derivatives browser had to comply as they have not enough resources to maintain a full fork of chromium.
I have been able to install ad blockers into Chromium, but I can remember if I had to change something somewhere. The point is, that it can be done... But overall I do agree that we Chromium is not fine overall. It needs to be forked to have full community control. FF has been forked a lot and I think that is the only reason we currently have functional browsers. Apparently this is a big problem, because you don't see other much work in this area apart from servo, which would be great if it could get enough traction to be a full blown browser soon. I will switch on day 1.