Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 extensions as adblockers 'for as long as possible'

Brave will continue to support various Manifest V2 extensions “for as long as possible.” Google plans to stop supporting Manifest V2 in Chrome in the coming months.

Brave says that existing Manifest V2 extensions will continue to be supported for as long as possible. Even if Google completely removes MV2 support from the Chromium codebase, Brave promises to provide limited support for these extensions by adding its own patches to the open source browser engine. Brave does warn that the company is dependent on cooperation with the makers of the extensions for this.

The browser says it plans to continue to explicitly support AdGuard AdBlocker, NoScript, uBlock Origin and uMatrix. According to Brave, such privacy-oriented extensions are mainly affected by Manifest V3, as this successor makes it more difficult for plugins to block things like ads and trackers. Even if the V2 versions of these extensions are removed from the Chrome Web Store, they will still be installable via a new settings page in Brave.

It has been known for years that Google plans to discontinue with the support of Manifest V2 extensions. This extension format was initially intended to be completely phased out a year ago, but now Google plans to automatically disable such extensions in Chrome in 'the coming months'. New MV2 plugins have not been allowed in the Chrome Web Store since 2022.