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I always thought that open-source licensing (which Chromium uses) means that the maintainer does not have much control over the software.

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Not legal control, just de-facto control because no one else seems to have the knowledge & resources to build a browser enginer other than Mozilla (and Firefox's market share keeps shrinking).

Brave and all the other browsers based on Chromium have said that they can only keep support for Manifest V2 extensions as long as support remains in Chromium; meaning they don't have the ability to maintain it themselves and are at the mercy of upstream.

But there is a reason an organization might not want to maintain Manifest V2 that has nothing to do with whether they have the ability: namely, V2 has been a massive security headache: any V2 extension can totally pwn the browser. Brave and Microsoft have made changes to Chromium that they care about (i.e., not V2) and they continue to maintain those changes.

P.S. Brave has integrated ad-blocking (i.e., blocking not implemented as an extension) which some say is comparable to Ublock Origin.

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