Brave vs Manifest v3

In the past few days, there are news that Google will stop the support for Web Request which it is commonly used in ad blockers to block off a domain wholesale.

So, how does this will affect Brave?

1 Like

@irfanaffandys

@fanboynz is probably the fellow to ask.

General Ref. material:

Shields v1 illustrations:

Shields v2 illustrations:

Brave History, Papers, and Plans

The Road to Brave 1.0

Brave AMA (Ask Me Anything) Series

Brave Blog (and latest news)

Brave, Fingerprinting, and Privacy Budgets

Brave Release Schedule - (Chromium Release Schedule)

Brave Research Papers

Comparing the Network Behavior of Popular Browsers on First-Run

Ephemeral Third-party Site Storage

First-Party Sets: Tearing Down Privacy Defenses Just as They’re Being Built

Improving Privacy By Improving Web Compatibility

New Features

Privacy Updates

Web Standards at Brave

Example: Privacy And Competition Concerns with Google’s Privacy Sandbox (Jan. 26, 2022)

About that: “Google resumes shoveling stuff into its ‘Privacy Sandbox’ (Mar. 29, 2022; The Register)

Brave Browser - GitHub - Deviations from Chromium (features we disable or remove)

1 Like

In short, brave sheilds which is used for ad-blocking will not be affected whatsoever. Brave shields is native to the browser rather than an external extension and has never used any extension api, so any changes to the extension api will not affect ad-blocking done by brave shields in brave browser.

6 Likes

That’s very short and consice. Just what I need to know. Thanks!

2 Likes

The fact that Brave Shields are integral and not an extension is a huge part of why I love Brave. The deliberate stripping of things that feed information back to scrOOgle is most of the rest of it. However, the EFF has some very negative things to say about MV3 here https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening and here https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation and it would be interesting if some of the high level devs here could comment on what other issues might arise as a result of scrOOgle manipulating the extension engine which Brave also uses.

It does raise a question: could Brave simply refuse to go along with it, and keep MV2 active, perhaps with a defaults-to-off setting to “Allow older extensions to run (Manifest v2 support)” that people who know can re-enable? I realize that this won’t help the majority of developers much when scrOOgle starts blocking their work, but it might drive some users to Brave.

I know it would be a big undertaking with many drawbacks, but I personally wish Brave would go back to its non-Chromium roots. I understand why it left them, and agree that the reasons were good at the time, but perhaps it is time to revisit that issue.

1 Like