For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
Firefox is partially in this position because the community really does not support Firefox. Every decision Firefox makes or Mozilla makes in an attempt to try and claw back their financial freedom away from Google, the community dumpsters them on. Then, on posts like this, the community turns around and dumpsters Firefox for being so financially dependent on Google.
FireFox was and is an awesome project, but unfortunately, without the financial backing of a large for-profit business, they cannot keep up with Chrome. Even then, FireFox, with an engineering team a quarter the size of Chrome’s, still manages to keep up, which is a god damn miracle.
Developing a browser that is fast, actually works with new web standards, stays up to date, and is adding features is incredibly difficult. It is a stupidly expensive endeavor, similar to the level of effort necessary for operating systems.
And unfortunately, there is no Linux equivalent for web browsers, at least not right now. There are some up-and-coming projects, but it’s going to be decades before they reach the level of maturity necessary to start competing against Chrome. At which point there may be so much standards capture that some of these browsers may find it impossible to actually catch up.