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Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

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Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or will be when they think they can get away with it. Every time they try the backlash is weaker and weaker because people get tired, or have other things to worry about.

or they install higher-order ad-blockers, like pihole / diversion

Blocking ads at the DNS level is very limited. All that has to happen to bypass it is the site you're visiting serves the ad data directly or really just from any domain that also serves up info you don't want to block. It also can't do anything to counter anti-adblock mechanisms or to clean up the layout which might have space already reserved for the ads.

Using a MITM to alter the responses is an option, but you're likely to run into issues with sofware and devices not being able to handle a custom CA.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#42
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing that I'm sure about V3 is that it isn't well thought-out at all. that's because it's been invented for the sole purpose of making "breaking effective ad-blocking" look legitimate

And similarly, FLoC was invented for the sole purpose of making targeted advertising look legitimate.

There was also a lot of futile searching for use-cases for Signed Exchange spec, which was just AMP letting Google host and monitor other pages' traffic.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#44
> As we head towards Manifest V3 migration, we are intently monitoring comments from the developer community to help inform our timelines.

Here's some feedback:

If uBlock Origin loses full control over what gets loaded and what not, I will immediately uninstall Chrome from all my and my family's devices and switch back to Firefox, after a decade of using Chrome as the main browser. I will then also recommend the exclusive use of Firefox.

Why not offer MV2 and MV3 in parallel, where MV2 is a per-extension opt-in with a prominent security warning during opt-in?

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#45

As someone who has made an extension for an actual product, this whole rollout/situation has been an absolute shitshow. This is, what, the third pause of the rollout? Google stopped accepting V2 extensions sometime last year, pushing V3 but totally ignoring MANY of the current use cases of extensions that V3 just doesn't work for. Firebase auth, a Google freaking product, doesn't work in V3 (you can make it work with…

This isn't a new pause of the rollout. It is a message giving a general update on changes made to the APIs since the pause announced months ago began.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#46
post #44

> As we head towards Manifest V3 migration, we are intently monitoring comments from the developer community to help inform our timelines. Here's some feedback: If uBlock Origin loses full control over what gets loaded and what not, I will immediately uninstall Chrome from all my and my family's devices and switch back to Firefox, after a decade of using Chrome as the main browser. I will then also recommend the excl…

You can just do this anyway, you know. Firefox is pretty great these days.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#47
post #4

Great news. One thing that I'm sure about V3 is that it isn't well thought-out at all. For example, imagine your extension has to cache data for a browser session (across tabs but with a single cache), it's impossible as of now. The only workaround to do that has a 1MB storage limit, essentially forcing you to have a server-side cache mechanism (redis or whatever) for this trivial use-case. And worse, Google develope…

This seems to be a pattern among Google employees, as least as I'm seeing from the outside. They have their own company reality bubble, and clashes or inconsistencies with the outside world are met with disbelief.

For this specific case of MV3, I wonder how many of those developers are actually writing and maintaining extensions. Yeah, I know one suspected motivation of this change is disabling ad blockers but IMO even if we ignore this aspect this migration is planned badly everywhere. If they really wanted to focus on just kicking ass of ad blockers, it would be done much quicker without facing this level of backlashes.

Not just for MV3 (or even Google), but many of those "API teams" actually don't have a good understanding on its actual use cases so the incentives are usually aligned with their own goals and directions rather than the actual customers because what they see everyday is just their code base and some OKR. I guess they really didn't want to miss out the opportunity to clean things up so they put every single wish list into the bucket without much user study and then it's spectacularly exploded as we know.

I've seen a bunch of "internal migrations", which is supposed to be a way easier than this kind of external ecosystem migration. Unless it was planned and executed very well, those teams are usually shocked by the initial backlash and how "creative" their users are. Sometime those teams are able to come up with reasonable compromises, but in many cases they just deny the reality then blow things up (which sometime works if there's not much dependencies though, but many case it's just wasted as soon as upper managements kick in). This is why almost all successful API migrations are accompanied with some sort of extensive user study from the beginning rather than some arbitrary metrics/goals set by themselves.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#48
post #45

As someone who has made an extension for an actual product, this whole rollout/situation has been an absolute shitshow. This is, what, the third pause of the rollout? Google stopped accepting V2 extensions sometime last year, pushing V3 but totally ignoring MANY of the current use cases of extensions that V3 just doesn't work for. Firebase auth, a Google freaking product, doesn't work in V3 (you can make it work with…

This isn't a new pause of the rollout. It is a message giving a general update on changes made to the APIs since the pause announced months ago began.

My reading is that this announcement indicates a new quasi-indefinite pause, beyond what was previously announced. They will probably still phase out v2, but every additional message about this pushes the timeline back further (even if it’s not explicitly mentioned).

BTW, does anyone know how to subscribe to these Chrome updates? I’m kinda surprised not to get them via email, considering I manage multiple Chrome extensions.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#49
post #16

Just fine tuning how slowly to boil the frogs. At some point, they will pull the trigger. My hypothesis is that the various entities that want to work around ad-blockers hold back for now, because they don't want to push people from the more basic blockers to the more advanced ones. Once this is in place, pretty much all adblockers of note are dns based, or semi-static list based...."basic". I wonder if there's a ren…

Or working on pressuring Firefox to implement MV3.

firefox already implements mv3 as much as they can, but without removing what mv2 offered don't they?

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#50
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a pattern among Google employees, as least as I'm seeing from the outside. They have their own company reality bubble, and clashes or inconsistencies with the outside world are met with disbelief.

The customer is always right - except when I think I'm smarter than their stated needs.

The customer, eg. the advertising industry.
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