Manifest v3 for expansions coming November 21

Mozilla will continue to support MV-2 extensions, at least for the foreseeable future. However, the course is already set for Manifest v3. This will be available to developers on November 21, paving the way for wide availability in Firefox 109. With Firefox 109, you want to regularly use the MV3 extensions from January 17, 2023. At the moment, these are only available in the Nightly, because you want to let MV3 mature a bit and get some feedback. In this process you will also decide the future of MV2.

Since very few readers here are certainly add-on developers, you are probably wondering about the innovations and added value of Manifest v3. In MV3, Mozilla simplified Firefox APIs and improved security and privacy mechanisms. There are also functions that should lead to better availability of extensions on mobile platforms.

Mozilla points out that Firefox MV3 – unlike other browser vendors – continues to support web request blocking. In the future, a compatible version of declarativeNetRequest (DNR) will also be provided, but blocking is currently considered more flexible. Nevertheless, DNR should be supported due to its performance and compatibility properties.

Instead of service agents, event pages are provided as background scripts. Also here one wants to use the other browser technology in the future for compatibility reasons. With Event Pages, you can see the benefits of DOM and Web APIs.

The user interface has also been overhauled with MV3. One support in Firefox Nightly is that the new Unified Extensions Buttons already provide control over which extensions can access certain websites. For MV3 extensions, users can grant or revoke access to any webpage.

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