To the surprise of nobody that has more than a passing understanding of Google’s business model, the whole Manifest V3 situation has been a long time coming and the changes that it’ll do will affect browsers donwstream from this technology. Even if they fork, it’s unlikely that they will keep feature parity without asking the impossible from the dedicated communities that support them. Already memes have been flying and angry people on the internet staking the claim of Firefox as the one true browser. And I agree with them as a Firefox user since the days of it being the punchline for hilarious RAM usage.
I only hope that those people that are doing this commit.
I’ve reason to be somewhat skeptical about moves of this nature. After all, wasn’t it just over a year ago that people had decided that they’d finally enough of WhatsApp? “Facebook wants all of our data,” they said, “And they shouldn’t be trusted with any of it.” And so, hundreds of thousands of people decided to move to the next best thing, Telegram. And Telegram’s numbers soared much to the chagrin of those people that want everyone to use their preferred messaging app. That is, until they actually do so.
But what was the actual result of that giant move? Well, my telegram contact list now has a dozen or so “Deleted Account” names. Some chats still have messages, which is how I can figure out that they at least made an effort to switch. Most, however, just have that annoyingly chipper $CONTACT_NAME HAS JOINED TELEGRAM!. An automatically generated reminder that, so far as you are concerned, that contact may as well have stayed wherever it is that you generally sent them a message.
So for all the pomp and outrage, most people went right back to the uncaring apps of WhatsApp, no doubt as many people on strategy meetings expected. It’s not surprising. Swapping apps may have been much easier a decade ago, but as in real life, inertia is remarkably hard to fight against in the digital space.
Now, there’s good reason to think that people swapping to Firefox from Chromium-based browsers are going to be having a much easier time at it than they did switching messaging apps. For one, you can run WhatsApp as well on Firefox as you can on Chrome. Or Telegram, or indeed almost anything that you can run on Chrome. The names of the extensions (Add-ons) may change, but you can get all the same functionality on one or another browser. The big one, AdBlock, is basically a wash for now but if Google is to continue down its current path it will quickly become a selling proposition. And because Firefox is also open source it means that there are indeed people creating forks, such as the long-lived WaterFox. You also have account sync that’s Mozilla backed, not merged with your UUID like on Chrome or Edge.
Google is amazing at ignoring messages, but switching to Firefox at least nets you a damn good browser to enjoy as google ignores them. Manifest V3 is designed to improve the experience of the ads that you are not supposed to be looking at anyway.
