On June 30th, Chrome 150 is set to be released with the removal of support for the kExtensionManifestV2Disabled flag, which allowed users to install add-ons using the second version of the Chrome manifest from the Chrome Web Store. The code implementing the AllowLegacyMV2Extensions parameter was removed from the Chromium database for Chrome 151, scheduled for release on July 28. This parameter allowed manual downloading of add-ons based on the second version of the manifest in developer mode. The kExtensionManifestV2Unsupported and ExtensionManifestV2Availability parameters, which were declared unsupported a year ago, were also removed a few days earlier.
Users of Chrome have been advised by the uBlock Origin project to switch to other browsers or use the uBlock Origin Lite add-on, a variant of uBlock Origin translated to the declarative API in the third version of the Chrome manifesto. Firefox and Safari currently support the second version of the Chrome manifest, and this support will also be retained in Brave and Opera, both powered by the Chromium engine.
The third version of the Chrome manifest was developed to make it easier to create secure, high-performance add-ons. However, there has been dissatisfaction with the translation of the webRequest API into read-only mode in the third version, which limits the ability to connect custom handlers to network requests. Instead, the third version introduced the declarativeNetRequest API, which only allows access to the built-in filtering engine without the use of custom filtering algorithms.
The uBlock Origin Lite add-on (uBOL) implements only part of the functionality of the original uBlock Origin.