For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
What is it used for?
Communicating with external devices via USB or the old D-Sub connectors.
Printers, microcontrollers, instruments, etc… Directly instead of through the OS.
Notably, ESPHome Programmer uses it for flashing ESP32s wired. Other companies like Solo Motor Controllers use it for delivering a user GUI to customers that is always updated but that can switch between versions instantly for production without having to having to deal with window’s broken method of having to manually search and download .exes for every program.
I had to use Brave earlier this year to flash firmware onto a Meshtastic device. It’s good to hear that Firefox has that option now.
never heard of it till now. neat!
Even grapheneOS use it for adb into your phone to flash the images.
they use WebUSB in GrapheneOS