Keep manifest V2 compatibility!

Goolag is about to disable support for manifest V2, so I would like Brave to keep this so that the browser will still be able to run extensions that absolutely require it.

Question #16 Will Brave ever go away from Chromium and develop its own browser?

Answer No intent to ever get away from Chromium at this point. Of course, we’re starting to see some things diverging, such as how Google is talking about Manifest V3 and everyone is committed to try to make sure V2 and everything remains available. So I think at some point in time there will be enough functionality built on top of Chromium that there will be a lot of meaningfully different pieces of Brave. It’s a little tough to imagine ripping it out and replacing it or rewriting it at this point. Who knows though? Maybe we’ll eventually get to a point we’re at a size and level of resourcing where we’ll do just that.

Question #21 Do we see Manifest V3 having an impact on Shields?

Answer Not at all. This Manifest V3 been delayed for a couple years. They first announced it in 2019 and our team put together a rewrite of our adblocking engine with Rust and then put it into the core for the browser for the network request. So we’re not coming in on the same API that’s affected by Manifest V3. Brendan has also talked about possibly providing support for other adblocking extensions too, but that will be disclosed at a later date. When this rolls out, most likely you’ll see a softer experience on blockers that aren’t on Brave, but Brave will still have the blocking you expect.