Opera commits to supporting uBlock Origin ad blocker extension

Chrome is the undisputed king of the browser space, but the peasants are revolting over its shift to a new browser extension standard. Manifest V3 has left popular ad-blocking extension uBlock Origin in the dust.

Now, the perennial browser underdog Opera is committing to support uBlock Origin and other older extensions, despite relying on Chromium’s open-source codebase.

In a blog post earlier this month, the developers of Opera made it clear that they intend to keep supporting at least some Manifest V2 extensions. While Opera shifted to a Chromium engine years ago — Chromium remains the base for most popular browsers today, with one notable exception in Firefox — Opera’s developers are making changes to the open-source code to support major extensions, with an explicit mention of uBlock Origin in the announcement.

“Opera is built on Chromium, the open-source code that also powers Chrome. This means that changes in Chromium usually affect Opera as well. It also means that we can still make our own modifications on top of this shared codebase,” says the post. “You will be able to keep using extensions such as uBlock Origin uninterrupted, instead of switching to the more bare-bones version of uBlock Origin Lite.”

That’s a pretty huge commitment, as it’s a major break from its reliance on Google’s Chromium project. Keeping the extension component of the software maintained and functional will be a far greater task than some smaller customizations, the kind of tweaking that makes Chromium such a popular jumping-off point for other browsers.

But it might be a smart move for Opera, which has always trailed behind Chrome and Firefox as the preferred browser for power users. There seems to be a serious shift in momentum away from Google’s browser dominance, at least in the discourse if not yet in actual market share. (I recently spoke with Ghostery, another vendor of ad-blocking software and extensions, about why Google’s move to a new extension standard doesn’t seem to be entirely for the benefit of end users.)

Neowin notes that other Chromium-based browsers, like Brave, can only commit to supporting the original version of uBlock Origin provisionally. (Vivaldi is my own browser of choice, and that one is also based on Chromium.) Smaller and less experienced development teams can only hold out so long while Google fundamentally changes Chromium to make ad blockers less effective… or, at least, that’s Google’s intention according to many users and developers.

Google Chrome seems unassailable at the moment, but large and relatively quick shifts in the browser market are not unprecedented. It has shifted from Netscape to Internet Explorer to Firefox and finally to Chrome in the last three decades, and new generations of “digital natives” might find that an alternative that’s less integrated with a megacorp is more to their liking.

And if users won’t do it, regulators might. The United States Department of Justice has floated the idea of breaking up Google’s search, browser, and mobile triumvirate as possible restitution for an illegal monopoly.