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What’s going on in the world of extensions

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#4
Some more detail about the control that the new extensions button gives users: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/unified-extension...

It allows you to disable extensions only on specific sites. (And presumably, that's also the reason you need to dive into about:config to remove it: if you remove it, it's pretty hard for casual users to find out why an extension isn't working. By gating it behind about:config, people who are able to deal with that can still remove it without rendering casual users helpless. That's my personal interpretation though.)

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#5
Need we play such language games? It's "ad blocking". People use those extensions to block ads.

If you asked the average user about their privacy preserving add-on, or their content blocker they would probably be confused.

Yes, obviously I understand the privacy dimensions of advertising, and I realize that this is all in the service of the good guys and against the bad guys, but that shouldn't affect our response to what seems to me to be unnecessary spin.

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#6
post #5

Need we play such language games? It's "ad blocking". People use those extensions to block ads. If you asked the average user about their privacy preserving add-on, or their content blocker they would probably be confused. Yes, obviously I understand the privacy dimensions of advertising, and I realize that this is all in the service of the good guys and against the bad guys, but that shouldn't affect our response to…

I see it as a good rhetorical move: Say it's ad blocking, and you get people coming in all po-faced about the need for platforms to make money and how horrible it is to have freeloaders blocking honest, legitimate adtech. Frame it as defense of privacy and malware-blocking and those adtech boosters are on the defensive, to the point they probably don't comment at all for fear of drawing attention to the correlation.

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#7
Firefox no longer allows extensions to have full control over requests in Manifest V3, despite their repeated public statements.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1786919

They have merged a change that makes it impossible to access and download certain website content the user is viewing and wants to process. Now that Firefox has introduced this limitation without offering an alternative, it is now much easier to port some of my extensions to Manifest V3 on Chrome, despite Chrome not supporting the blocking webRequest API.

It's disheartening to see how these changes are introduced without any planning or care for how it affects extensions that are being ported to Manifest V3, and the general lack of respect towards extension developers.

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#8
post #7

Firefox no longer allows extensions to have full control over requests in Manifest V3, despite their repeated public statements. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1786919 They have merged a change that makes it impossible to access and download certain website content the user is viewing and wants to process. Now that Firefox has introduced this limitation without offering an alternative, it is now much ea…

No fucking way - I guess its time to setup pihole again

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#9
post #7

Firefox no longer allows extensions to have full control over requests in Manifest V3, despite their repeated public statements. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1786919 They have merged a change that makes it impossible to access and download certain website content the user is viewing and wants to process. Now that Firefox has introduced this limitation without offering an alternative, it is now much ea…

Once again they ruin the extension API to please their overlord google.

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#10
post #7

Firefox no longer allows extensions to have full control over requests in Manifest V3, despite their repeated public statements. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1786919 They have merged a change that makes it impossible to access and download certain website content the user is viewing and wants to process. Now that Firefox has introduced this limitation without offering an alternative, it is now much ea…

Is the content-blocking model tied to the manifest version, or can you mix and match?

Or, rephrased: could gorhill conceivably upgrade uBlock Origin's manifest.json to v3, while still using the v2 content blocking APIs?

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