Google Chrome always fucks with me at the least opportune moments. Always when I’m in a hurry, trying to log in and do something quickly — BOOM — Chrome has updated (without my permission) and something is broken. This week, Chrome decided to disable all my extensions because of something called “Manifest v2 support” that apparently has been dropped in favor of something called “Manifest v3”. No warning, just forcibly turned off all my extensions. Isn’t that nice?
I’m not a developer of browser extensions, so I don’t give a shit what either Manifest v2 or v3 is. All I know is I’m in a hurry to do something else, and I can’t browse the web without two absolutely mandatory extensions: Dark Reader and uBlock Origin (UBO). I had to stop everything I was doing and find some way to get my extensions back.
Dark Reader already released an update for this Manifest v3 bullshit, so that was easy enough (albeit annoying). UBO, however, has not and/or can’t. Thankfully, I found this gem on r/uBlockOrigin which explains how to fix it (at least for now… until Google fully blocks it):
1) Go to chrome://flags/#temporary-unexpire-flags-m137 and set to “Enabled”.
2) Restart Chrome.
3) Now you can set the following:
chrome://flags/#extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-warning [Disabled] chrome://flags/#extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-disabled [Disabled] chrome://flags/#extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-unsupported [Disabled] chrome://flags/#allow-legacy-mv2-extensions [Enabled]
Immense gratitude to whoever came up with this, you are a life saver!
Now, time to ditch Chrome and find a better browser. Apparently dropping Manifest v2 is not just a Google Chrome thing, but actually a Chromium thing, meaning it also effects Microsoft Edge and other browsers built on Chromium. I already avoid Edge like the plague (PTSD from the Internet Explorer years — the rebrand didn’t fool me), but sadly I must now drop all Chromium-based browsers, including Vivaldi which I used to love. Maybe it’s just as well. Google has too much control over Chromium anyway.