Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge
www.neowin.net
Microsoft is now in the process of turning off Manifest V2-based extensions in Edge, such as uBlock Origin. However, not everything is lost at this point.

The latest Edge Canary version started disabling Manifest V2-based extensions with the following message: “This extension is no longer supported. Microsoft Edge recommends that you remove it.” Although the browser turns off old extensions without asking, you can still make them work by clicking “Manage extension” and toggling it back (you will have to acknowledge another prompt).

At this point, it is not entirely clear what is going on. Google started phasing out Manifest V2 extensions in June 2024, and it has a clear roadmap for the process. Microsoft’s documentation, however, still says “TBD,” so the exact dates are not known yet. This leads to some speculating about the situation being one of “unexpected changes” coming from Chromium. Either way, sooner or later, Microsoft will ditch MV2-based extensions, so get ready as we wait for Microsoft to shine some light on its plans.

Another thing worth noting is that the change does not appear to be affecting Edge’s stable release or Beta/Dev Channels. For now, only Canary versions disable uBlock Origin and other MV2 extensions, leaving users a way to toggle them back on. Also, the uBlock Origin is still available in the Edge Add-ons store

  • Balder@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I feel like this sort of thing should be more modular. Maybe on Linux we could in theory have multiple packages that could have different implementations and the browser UI would just use the underlying packages with their specific extras on top.

    That would also align well with the Unix philosophy of each component “doing one thing well” and composing small tools to achieve complex tasks.

    But discussing this with an LLM, it pointed out that “Browser engines are among the most complex software systems in existence. Breaking them apart would require a deep understanding of their internals and a clear vision for how the pieces should interact” which is fair.

    Splitting things add a different level of complexity, such as creating public APIs, deprecations, etc. but it would make the web much more free as a result, because we could have different individuals maintaining different bits and no organization would have too much control over the direction of the web.

    I believe it is possible because we have very complex stuff like entire Desktop Environments on Linux which are made up of multiple packages that just do a well defined thing and build on top of each other.