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Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

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Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#91
post #23

Manifest V3 is a perfect example of "great idea but terrible execution". The ability to have extension pages be suspended when not in use is great. Improving (and having finer grained) permissions is great. It should have stopped there: introduce a new "persistent" permission that extensions can request to stay around permanently, and when not requested, introduce lifecycle events so extensions can properly handle su…

The primary idea is terrible, the good ideas are only there to cover up the primary purpose, kill tracker blocking. Terrible idea, terrible execution.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#92
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.

Not just Google, all of Silicon Valley. Here on HN, I regularly see comments along the lines of: "Wait, do people actually still use Windows on servers!?"

Yes, yes they do.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#93
post #34

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.

I remember getting into it with a Google person in a forum once. They kept insisting they couldn't do real, portable files in Google Drive for Docs because that would break collaboration. They didn't seem able to understand I didn't want collaboration. I wanted to be able to open my word processor/spreadsheet/etc files in other tools without needing to connect to the internet (predates offline mode). I wanted to be a…

Collaboration is the killer feature of the docs ecosystem. You will never convince them to break it for X reason.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#94
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wish Mozilla focused more on Linux support. I tried switching to Firefox multiple times, and in day-to-day use I always keep running into unfixable problems like bad font rendering, slow webgl performance, ui glitches etc. Problems like this never happen when I'm using Firefox on Windows, and honestly the state of Firefox on Linux is kind of surprising since it's the most commonly recommended and preinstalled brows…

Crappy font rendering is a Linux problem. The appearance of the same font in different applications can vary wildly. It’s really shit.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#95
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Switched to Firefox for like 6-12 months, eventually moved back to Edge a couple of weeks ago. Had to open it constantly anyways. I couldn't get used to Firefox's DevTools and the JSON viewer in Firefox is bad compared to the JSON Formatter chrome extension.

Well, Firefox's default JSON view is miles better than Chrome's JSON view.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#96
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen the main purpose is to increase secruity, privacy, and performance of the extension ecosystem. I have seen no sign of mv3 being for breaking ad blocking. MV3 and other parts of chromium have added features that help ad blockers.

That's lie pushed by Google. MV3 removes the ability to block requests, but keeps the ability to observe requests. Great for ads-related spying.

MV3 is more than declarativeNetRequest and the reason why declarativeNetRequest improves privacy is that users are not giving out as overly broad permission. A user may want to block ads, but may also want to not give the ad blocker the ability to observe the requests. Even if the user trusts the developer of the adblocker, there is always the chance they get hacked.

The average user should not be giving out the webRequest enabled for every website to an extension.

It makes sense for the chromium team to periodically evaluate the use cases of extensions and see if there are better APIs that it could offer to move the ecosystem forward.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#97
post #11
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…

It is hubris. Google thinks it can get away with anything, since they're the market leader. The reality is that a certain number of people will migrate to Firefox over AdBlockers not working well anymore, and will give FF a second life. And those are the people who helped get Chrome off the ground by installing on the computers of relatives and recommending to friends.

I don't think that's the underlying cause. The Google product teams I've interacted with didn't seem like they cared they were a market leader. Aside from "In the making a good product" sense.

They literally just didn't understand what people not-them were doing and refused to consider it.

I remember I ditched Chrome ~2014 because I had an issue with the default download handling. Maybe auto-saving/non-standard location?

I dug around and found a bug report on it, that had been open for multiple years, with multiple Google engineers looking and commenting on it, and arguing that users would never need a config option to do... what multiple users for multiple years were asking for.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#98
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…

Why would you wait for this one single thing when you have had so many historical reasons to choose Firefox over Google already? Why wait for Google to piss you off for the thousandth time when 999 times is plenty?

This is probably the only actual thing I care about in a browser, at least between Firefox and Chrome. That and 1password.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#99

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.

Not just Google, all of Silicon Valley. Here on HN, I regularly see comments along the lines of: "Wait, do people actually still use Windows on servers!?" Yes, yes they do.

In the last 10 years I haven’t had a single contract dealing with a windows server. Im sure that someone somewhere does indeed use it. But it’s gotta be 90%+ now a days Linux.

Re: Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

#100
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also it would be healthy for the web ecosystem overall if users, especially power users, would use less Chrome. Any excuse to uninstall Chrome is a good excuse.

I have to use either edge or chrome for work, so keeping a consistent ecosystem for home too works well. I can’t recall why FF couldn’t be used. Windows Hello, maybe? Anyways, when I checked 3 or so years ago, it was a conscious decision on FF’s part to not support an absolutely critical feature. Not having Adblock would be enough reason for me to want to juggle two browsers, but FF is simply not a desirable option right now, as much as I would love for it to be.
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