Manifest v3: The New Reality for Chrome Users

Unless you’ve been in Amish paradise for the last couple of years, you’ve probably at least heard the phrase MV3 by now. If you’ve actually been so blessed to be unaware, it stands for Manifest Version 3, and it’s Google's latest way of sticking it to the consumer, by way of new guidelines for extensions available for any Chrome-based browsers. Google has changed the rules of the game, and those who wish to keep playing must abide by their rules. In a perfect world, those who have issues with the rules would take their business elsewhere. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world. Let’s start with some of the ways that Google’s business practices and MV3 affect you in ways you may not realize.

Google is a monopoly. This has been proven in court. While the court ruling is specifically about their search traffic, their monopoly ostensibly crosses into the browser marketplace, and by extension (pun intended), the extension marketplace as well. At this point it’s worth mentioning that there is an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and they have established a universal set of rules and guidelines for “open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.”

Included in these standards are the concepts of "user-centered", "compatibility", "performance" and "maintainability" design principles, all of which Google is currently violating by forcing all extensions to be rewritten to comply with their new rules, which provide no visible corresponding benefits to the users themselves. To be clear, these changes are largely good for corporations and/or the industry of data tracking and collection (also by extension, governments and Intelligence services), and largely bad for the individual user.

How and Why MV3 is bad

At a high level, MV3 is bad because it removes most ad blockers' ability to filter out ads and tracking at a granular level that they could in the MV2 days. It also affects a huge ecosystem of browsers, pretty much any browser that uses the Chrome web store for extensions: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, to name a few. 

uBlockOrigin, one of the most used ad blockers and the backbone of the Windscribe extension’s ad blocking capability, will completely cease to function once the full rollout of MV3 is complete (the exact date of the switch from MV2 to MV3 is still unconfirmed). In its stead, uBlock Lite will do its best to combat the incoming influx of unstoppable ads, but it’s significantly less capable of blocking incoming tracking requests. Currently, MV2 allows for the blocking of the root element of a web page from loading, which could be coupled with a custom uploaded filter list with UBlock to then block a web page from loading if it was found in one of the malware domain lists.

How the Windscribe Extension Is Impacted

At Windscribe, we have been working for over a year to rebuild our extension for MV3. Wherever possible, we aimed for 1 to 1 parity from MV2 functionality to MV3. Excluding the new limitations on ad-blocking as outlined above, we pretty much nailed it. The vast majority of features/functionalities should be indistinguishable across both MV2 and MV3 (if there are discrepancies, please tell us!). The codebase is completely re-written which means it’s easier for us to maintain and update quickly and should result in overall performance improvements for you!

Of course, the shift from MV2 to MV3 is part of a larger game of cat and mouse with companies like Google who have a significant financial incentive to ensure ad blocking technologies don’t work properly on their platforms.

But there is a silver lining in all of this: There are browsers that will remain unaffected, like Firefox. In fact, MV3 is not being enforced on Firefox, so you can continue to use our OG MV2 version of the extension with its full ad-blocking capabilities:

• Download Firefox
• Download Windscribe for Firefox
• Enjoy an ad-free browsing experience

It’s as simple as that really. 

And if you aren’t ready to bounce out of that Google ecosystem, remember our desktop app also has ad-blocking capabilities (at the DNS and IP level). In fact, we recommend always using the extension and desktop app together.