🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
Other groups don’t agree with Google’s description, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which called Manifest V3 “deceitful and threatening” back when it was first announced in 2019, saying the new system “will restrict the capabilities of web extensions—especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit.”
Google, which makes about 77 percent of its revenue from advertising, has not published a serious explanation as to why Manifest V3 limits content filtering, and it’s not clear how that aligns with the goals of “improving the security, privacy, performance and trustworthiness.”
Like Kewisch said, the primary goal of malicious extensions is to spy on users and slurp up data, which has nothing to do with content filtering.
Google now says it’s possible for extensions to skip the reviews process for “safe” rule set changes, but even this is limited to “static” rulesets, not more powerful “dynamic” ones.
In a comment to The Verge last year, the senior staff technologist at the EFF, Alexei Miagkov, summed up Google’s public negotiations with the extension community well, saying, "These are helpful changes, but they are tweaks to a limited-by-design system.
For a short period, users will be able to turn them back on if they visit the extension page, but Google says that “over time, this toggle will go away as well.”
Saved 67% of original text.
::Laughs in Firefox::
Who knows… Firefox might just follow suit. If devs have to write their extensions one for Chrome and once for Firefox, the Firefox one will probably be the first to die.
From the article:
Firefox plans to support Manifest V3 because Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, and it wants extensions to be cross-browser compatible, but it has no plans to turn off support for Manifest V2.
I doubt they’ll ever choose to shut down V2, but Google is already forcing their hand a little by making them require supporting V3 to stay relevant
Not if more people use FireFox…
Firefox also supports mobile extensions, unlike Chrome.
Isn’t that already how it works? Are there extensions trust work unchanged on both browsers? At the very least they’d have to maintain them on both addon stores.
There’s a common specification called WebExtension, which is used by all modern browsers. Firefox had their own API (XUL/XPCOM) before that, but they deprecated it in 2017. Safari also used to have its own system for extensions, but it’s been deprecated since 2019. The Manifest API is a subset of WebExtension, which defines an extension.
I wonder what would happen if µBlockOrigin was just pulled from the Chrome Webstore. Would that drive people to other browsers?
Some would switch, some would install another ad blocker extension, and some wouldn’t know any better and do nothing.
Unfortunately, most people don’t care all that much.
There’s uBO Lite, which is an MV3 version so one step towards making adblockers less useful as Google planned.
Many people have said they have switched already and have said it works without issues (as far as they know). I’m sure there is a huge amount of sites and configs that didn’t make it into the lite version, I guess we’ll find out when a huge userbase refuses to migrate from chrome and installs the uBo-lite
37 million Chrome users have downloaded Ublock Origin (if that isn’t including duplicate downloads/multiple accounts on one user).
5.3 billion people use the internet. 307 million in the U.S. as of 2022… what is that, 10% of Americans using Chrome using adblock? Less?
So max 37M users possibly willing to switch away from Chrome should it not be available anymore. Not nothing.
8.2% isn’t nothing but I also wonder if it’s worth anything to Google. That would bring Firefox from ~3.3% to 11.5% of the browser market share if everyone switched to non-chromium browsers.
I just wonder if that’s enough for anything. It’s better than nothing of course, and for those users that switch there’s almost nothing but benefits, It’s more just that I have doubts about the willingness of the general public caring enough, and if 10% of people will have an effect for Firefox or against Google
Firefox plans to support Manifest V3 because Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, and it wants extensions to be cross-browser compatible, but it has no plans to turn off support for Manifest V2.
If Google decided to break V2 compatibility with V3, Mozilla should announce V4 (or V3 extended), which is V3 but with the missing stuff readded.
That’d be a good practical and great product/tech marketing move. Just like most people won’t see how V3 is worse than V2, V4 will indicate it’s the evolved and improved V3.
It would also simplify supporting V3 and V4 at the same time for extension authors. A great practical gain for extension authors, not having to read and understand two manifest schemes and APIs.
Mozilla’s V3 implementation already extends out removing artificial limitations from it. Mozilla’s doing a reverse E3 and I’m all here for it.
Now if only the nincompoop IT dept on my company allowed me to run Firefox…
We went through all this shit with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. It’s time to break up Google’s monopoly.
