Adoption of New MV3 Standards for Browser Extensions

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Created Jul ’22

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As with the adoption of MV3 standards among all major browser vendors that allow browser extensions at the client-side, I understand that this is the same with Safari as well, as mentioned here (https://www.wwdcnotes.com/notes/wwdc22/10099/). However, as with Firefox, browsers may choose to adopt them incompletely and with few changes. I had a few questions regarding how Safari views this transition and what would be the next steps from here.

Thus, it would be really great if the browser team could provide your insights on any or all of the following points:

Would Safari adopt the exact standards proposed by the Chromium ecosystem such as with functionalities like header-based modifications in the coming days.
What would be the general timeline be for this in general?
Does this also translate to the fact that existing standards with MV2 standards would not be allowed to operate any further, as with the timeline with Chromium?

Regards

Answered by Systems Engineer in 721955022

Safari 15.4 introduced support for manifest version 3. Safari 16 continues to support both manifest version 2 and version 3. Manifest version 3 brings new and improved APIs for developers but if you have an existing mv2 extension, it will continue to work in Safari 16.

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Answer 1

jw732 OP

Jul ’22

Good questions.

Just a note:

header-based modifications in the coming days

Even with mv2, Safari lacks some of the implementation for modifying headers compared to all other modern browsers. You can check out the support on the MDN docs for webRequest which I believe is deprecated in favor of declarativeNetRequest.

I've used declarativeNetRequest with both mv2 and mv3 Safari extensions and was disappointed to see that header modification still lacks with that API implementation. action.type: "modifyHeaders" is not supported as of writing this comment :/

I'm hopeful they will reverse their current stance on header modifications.

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Answer 2

Systems Engineer OP

Apple

Jul ’22

Accepted Answer

Safari 15.4 introduced support for manifest version 3. Safari 16 continues to support both manifest version 2 and version 3. Manifest version 3 brings new and improved APIs for developers but if you have an existing mv2 extension, it will continue to work in Safari 16.

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