You probably have up to 2025 until Google starts disabling/deleting Manifest V2 extensions and forcing Manifest V3, making adblockers worse for most end-users. If you use Chrome Dev, Canary or Beta, they're starting that phase out process now (as described in the article above).
For comparison, Mozilla's plans are to adopt Manifest V3 (which has a lot of good things) BUT not to deprecate the webRequest API (which is what adblockers like uBlock Origin use to block ads and (more importantly) change blocking rules at runtime)) and NOT to deprecate Manifest V2 which at least means that-one-extension-you-might-rely-on-that-has-been-abandoned-by-the-dev(s) won't vanish anytime soon. EDIT: I'm also remembering that userscripts (through extensions like Tampermonkey) will be made harder to use as aprt of Manifest V3 on Chrome as well source 🫠
Oh and Vertical tabs, Tab Groups and better Profiles management are coming to Firefox:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/heres-what-were-working-on-in-firefox/
That whole thing is really a shame because, like, Manifest V3 has really good things as far as web extension authoring goes and the deprecation of webRequest makes sense on a technical level1 but also, you know, it's Google so of course they'd have a vested interest in making sure the more flexible adblockers aren't as useful anymore 🙃
If I'm being honest I don't know if this phase out will make a visible dent in Chrome's marketshare given how easy it has been for companies like Opera and Brave to repackage Chromium with bullshit on top of it but that won't stop me from simping for Firefox.
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the new system uses a list of "hardcoded" blocking rules so it's much MUCH easier for a given browser to make optimizations since it can know ahead of time what URLs the extension will act on.
I know people have plenty of perfectly valid reasons for sticking with Chrome and not using Firefox, a few of which are that Firefox straight up fails or breaks in some embarrassing way - I truly hope all those issues get prioritized and fixed so that it becomes a viable option for everyone. But this is one of the clearer cases where, compared to the corporate alternative, at least you have a chance at having some input into what its policies end up being. The changes Google has made to Chrome over the years have strictly made the web worse, and if you look at the rare support forum thread where they actually communicate with anyone about it, it's clear they are completely disconnected from users and from the idea of the open web as a public good. We are neither their customers nor their bosses nor their constituents. So I don't use Chrome because it will never be accountable to anyone but Google's shareholders.
And yes, Mozilla is an absolute mess, it's everything wrong with the nonprofit paradigm under capitalism. But the processes directing Firefox's development are at least slightly more democratic. This is also why Linux is my primary home OS; most of what I'm saying here generalizes to all free/libre software. And yes, it has all the problems that democracy has: vulnerability to corporate capture, mystifying priorities, trend-chasing, complacency, policy and behavior that are sometimes indistinguishable from "controlled opposition to the corporate alternatives", and plenty of gatekeeping by comfortable selfish people inside the system who want it to be less democratic than it currently is. But like... we live in a society. I want to be a citizen, not a consumer. And that's a nonzero demand on your energy, to be a citizen! And look at the bullshit we have to put up with! I get it. But if nobody engages on these issues then we'll get a web, and therefore a world, totally controlled by corporate interests; the only information in your head will have been put there by four or five corporations.
