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.
-
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.
as a web developer by trade I know all too well that ad and tracker blocking is core to having a decent experience on the modern web. google’s actions here, while couched in reasonable-sounding justifications, do not adequately address anything but their own business interests.
google are terrible stewards of the open web, and have far too much control for one dodgy adtech firm to wield over perhaps the most important communication medium of our time
I would urge you to consider your alternatives.
Use Firefox. Use Safari. Use Vivaldi if you must use a Chromium derivative. Restore the web’s health and wrest it back from Google.
i've had vertical tabs and tab groups in firefox that are better than either browser's built-in offerings, since before either browser offered them.
Simple Tab Groups (misleading name, it's actually quite advanced)
addons good
