Many addons/extensions have begun to be disabled with Chrome’s latest updates as part of Google’s transition from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3. This EFF article from 2021 covers the issues (Google has long delayed this V2 end-of-life but in recent days, extensions have been disabled).
Google has naturally long tried to paint this move as a safety related move; while part of this is true, they also try to downplay just how much this also affects privacy and tracking related extensions. Like one major fatality in all of this is uBlock Origin (one of the most effective ad blockers). Guess what drives Google’s revenues? Advertisement. Thus their ulterior motive is to make sure ad blocker addons aren’t that good as before.
A majority of the mainstream Chromium-based browsers (Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge) collect huge amounts of our personal data in order to feed the big tech business model. Thus our activities, habits, preferences, and search history are all tracked as ways to build profiles in order to perform highly micro-targeted marketing (of things like ads and recommendations). And that isn’t the really nefarious stuff when taking into account AI.
Now there are ways to allow Manifest V2 extensions to continue working in Chrome (by making changes in some hidden developer settings). But rather than doing that, it’s just better (as part of de-Googling) to switch to the more privacy focused browsers. Some of these are planning on continuing support for Manifest V2. Opera doesn’t plan to end V2 support yet. Vivaldi still seems to be running my Manifest V2 extensions (including uBlock Origin) as does Microsoft Edge (though this is another one users may want to consider getting rid of as well since Microsoft does its own tracking). I’m not sure about Brave (I don’t use it since I don’t want any crypto related stuff in my browser).
It remains to be seen though how the developers of those Manifest V2 extensions will continue updating them if more users do not move to these other browsers.
Note: Safari isn’t Chromium based (it’s WebKit). Firefox also uses its own engine called Quantum/Gecko (LibreWolf is based on Firefox but with a privacy focus). DuckDuckGo’s Chromium based browser doesn’t even support extensions (it just bakes in those privacy features).
I mainly use Vivaldi (most of the devs who worked on Opera now work on Vivaldi) but also use LibreWolf, Orion (a WebKit browser that also offers Chrome and Firefox addon compatibility), and Safari. For search, I stopped using Google a while ago. Instead, I’ve been using SearXNG (a federated metasearch engine for search; I previously was using DDG on its own which was good, but it’s nice to have a larger aggregate of results).
This is like one of the simplest steps to at least take in order to control some of your privacy while browsing and searching.
