Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

Post by HWR_14 » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

Lex-2008 wrote: post #203

ravenstine wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these changes actually needed, though? As much as it makes sense to use service workers, for instance, this seems like a rationalization to shoehorn in Google's anti-features. It's not like background webpages are broken or even hard to use. It's not like everyone's clamoring for their ad blockers to use less resource or for Chrome to be faster. There was a time when I switched to Chrome because I believed it to…

While I agree with you in general, I'd like to comment on > It's not like everyone's clamoring for their ad blockers to use less resource or for Chrome to be faster. some people do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28672377 - "Brave reduces the page load performance cost of its adblocker" original article having some impressive improvement numbers.

Post by asdff » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #22

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I am really not sure why they keep losing users. Because, number one, they keep constantly making radical UI/UX changes that frustrate and alienate their long term users who would rather they keep the "older look" which they got used to and works just fine for them, and number two, most websites are lazy so their devs only optimize for Chrome, even going the extra mile to explicitly state that "For best experience u…

> Because they keep making stupid UI)UX choices than alienate their users Cannot overstate this enough. They keep randomly changing their UI constantly , and it's especially frustrating when you have a bunch of custom CSS. I'm a bunch of versions behind & dreading updating because I don't want to spend the hours it'll take to fix my shit for their new version. I honestly hate this browser so much at this point, but e…

Post by asdff » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #218

ikt wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but you recognise you are in likely a sub 0.5% of users with custom css? chrome gained a lot for two reasons, it was a hell of a lot better than firefox and they advertised the crap out of it. Firefox has caught up significantly since then but doesn't have the advertising the adblock debate will push a lot of users back to firefox and it feels like the ui is in a much better place than it was

> but you recognise you are in likely a sub 0.5% of users with custom css? People don't want to do custom CSS, they have to in order to get the workflow back that they had last week. It's annoying and a lot of work. Firefox changes probably cause >3% user attrition every single release.

Post by NovaS1X » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

joelthelion wrote: post #114

I don't understand why this (and all the rest) is not driving people back to Firefox. Are we really going to wait for Mozilla to die, and then lament that Google has taken over the web?

Post by smaddock » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #162

smaddock wrote: post #19

As someone who is intimately familiar with the Chrome extensions internals and is not employed by a big tech company, I believe most of the changes seem like a step in the right direction.* I've been working towards implementing greater support for Chrome extensions in Electron which has involved reading and interacting with Chromium code [0]. - Using service workers instead of a hidden background webpage is more idi…

Your claim that service workers are more idiomatic than background pages ignores months of debate and examples to the contrary collected by the w3c web extensions group. [0] This could be an area where MV3 walks itself back. One proposal creates an Extension Worker which is a new concept like a Service Worker but better matches the use cases for background scripts. Another simply puts background pages back, but behin…