This always bugged me. Are they expecting Firefox to die? If that happened, there would be little reason for Mozilla to exist.
The project lives and dies with the browser. Having a "plan B" is complete nonsense and an unnecessary distraction.
I'm glad they're shifting focus back on the browser.
One browser engine would be really bad for the web
Brave pushed back as hard as possible against Manifest v3, Google refused to budge, and ultimately Google got its way, because Google, the corporate entity, completely controls Chromium's development.
OK, thanks for that, but Brave's decision might've been informed by the fact that Manifest v2 seems to make the user too vulnerable to purveyors of shady extensions, and is not really needed except for adblocking (or at least I'm unaware of any use cases except adblocking where Manifest v3 does not suffice). Brave comes bundled with an adblocker that can read the uBlock Origin lists, so whether Brave's aforementioned bundled adblocker uses Manifest v2 to communicate with the browser or some other (possibly private) API might not matter.
Also, just because the Edge team at Microsoft likes web advertising does not mean it has no influence on the evolution of the Chromium-based browser ecosystem.
Pardon my ignorance, then. Your "ultimately Google got its way" led me to conclude that Brave must have indicated that it will stop shipping v2.
Let me summarize. Google completely controls Chrome's development, but at least 2 organizations (Microsoft and Brave) seem willing to maintain their own forks of things in Chromium even if Google abandons those things. Although it doesn't care about empowering users to avoid ads and consequently doesn't care about Manifest v2 (especially since v2 is a big source of malware and spyware) Microsoft does care a lot about Electron, and would gladly maintain its own fork of any code files necessary for Electron if Google decides it no longer wants those code files in new versions of Chromium.
Do you agree with that summary?