Chromium disabled extensions "because they're no longer supported" after update, pin version

Ask Fedora
1

After a recent update on a system running F40, Chromium 135 disabled most extensions and “recommends that you remove them”.

Screenshot_20250424_102838
Screenshot_20250424_102838838×580 148 KB

Suppose the end user does not care about Google’s recommendations, the admin doesn’t have time to find out what’s behind those new recommendations when this pops up - but without those, say, without the proxy switcher extension, the user cannot work with Chromium.

Assuming there’s no way to stop Chromium from disabling extensions, can someone suggest a config for Fedora’s package management to downgrade and pin Chromium to the last working version, at least until an alternative has been found?

From chrome://settings/help:
Version 135.0.7049.84 (Official Build) Fedora Project (64-bit)

2

Firefox is a good alternative.
Downgrading and pinning will work for a while, but once security exploits get into the wild, it would be a good idea to upgrade to something recent.

sudo dnf downgrade chromium

and then in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
add

exclude=chromium

from 4 Ways to Disable or Lock Package Updates in Yum and DNF

You will find many tutorials on this subject and different ways to disable upgrades.

3

Using outdated browsers is strongly discouraged for security reasons.
Meanwhile, you can still allow the old manifest like this:

sudo tee /etc/chromium/policies/managed/local.json << EOF > /dev/null
{"ExtensionManifestV2Availability":2}
EOF

However, it is best to find alternatives supporting the new manifest, e.g.:

2 Likes
4

This is because of a deliberate change to the API that extensions use made by Google. My son faced the same issue.

He switched to another browser that would run ublock, but is a Windows user, so not a useful recommendation here.

5

Browsers are generally cross-platform. All Chromium browsers face this same issue and it’s likely that all of them will have to stop providing Manifest v2 support soon. Currently it’s deprecated but not yet removed from the Chromium codebase, that’s why you can still get v2 with a workaround like the one @vgaetera provided. But once Chromium starts to remove the v2 code altogether (ETA June 2025) then other vendors can’t provide support anymore even if they wanted.

The only alternatives in that case would be a Gecko (Mozilla) based browser, or a commercially supported browser like Edge or Brave that chooses to provide special support for (certain) v2 plugins.