Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3 • Hacker News Board

Re: Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

#61

Post by somat » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

Are proxy extensions just a hook to set the http_proxy?

I always have a hard time with chrome. because where firefox has a config area to set the proxy chrome wants to use an environment variable. so do these proxy extensions fill this missing config gap?

Re: Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

#62

Post by heavyset_go » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #24

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone warned years ago that proxy extensions would no longer be feasible on Chromium? I must have missed that message.

I'm more interested why it isn't possible to just fork the thing and maintain a version that's plugin enabled. Isn't Chromium completely open source? Especially for Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc.

The amount of work it would take to fork Chromium and maintain a working secure browser with MV2 hooks into the browser internals would be so large that you'd need a dedicated team whose job it is to constantly backport upstream Chromium changes and ensure they still work with the old MV2 subsystem. That would take a lot of time and money.

Re: Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

#63

Post by _aizw » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:28 PM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #55

_aizw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VPN providers won't be able to verify if a user paid for the service.

Not just VPN providers or other paid services. Open proxies on the internet are bad for everyone.

What are the other issues with open proxies?

Re: Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

#64

Post by cpeterso » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:30 PM UTC

imbnwa wrote: post #60

pkulak wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And every time there's a bunch of replies about how great Brave is, and everyone should just use that... Chromium wrapper.

Brave has publicly declared support for Manifest v2 in perpetuity, no? They even seem to be pondering how to distribute v2 extensions post-sunset in Google Chrome[0] [0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/15187

Maintaining out-of-tree patches for a project as large and quickly-changing as Chromium will be a lot of work. I know someone who worked on Amazon's Silk browser team and they had an engineer (rotation) working working full-time to keep their Chromium fork up to date within Google's upstream. Brave doesn't have nearly the resources that Amazon does.

Re: Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

#65

Post by djfobbz » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

yegor wrote: post #4

As a proxy extension developer, this is absolutely maddening. We're forced to choose between auth-less open proxies (bad), or baking in a wacky authentication scheme through a side channel (also bad). MV3 drops in 2.5 months, and will leave tens of millions of proxy extension users unable to use products they paid money for. This is all on top of the many other issues with MV3 that Google is pushing under the guise o…

I checked out both of your sites Windscribe.com and ControlD.com...I will be signing up as a paid customer! Thank you for you this.

Re: Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

#66

Post by perryizgr8 » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:37 PM UTC

Can someone ELI5 what are proxy extensions? What are they supposed to do?

Re: Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

#67

Post by easrng » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:40 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #57

ElCheapo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if the DRM wasn't a blob it would be open source. Andnif it were open source it wouldn't be DRM...

It's possible to have DRM that's open source using cryptography.

Secure DRM requires that your device have keys that are burned-in that you can't access. It's impossible to have an open implementation of a non-broken DRM system.

Re: Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

#68

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

_aizw wrote: post #63

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just VPN providers or other paid services. Open proxies on the internet are bad for everyone.

What are the other issues with open proxies?

They are usually hosted by malware installed on a vulnerable system. And if they are SOCKS proxies (vs http proxies), then they can send send spam using the IP address of the infected device.

Re: Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

#69

Post by dvngnt_ » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

croes wrote: post #54

vlunkr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the stupid prize is what? You might have to use a different browser? Doesn't seem that serious to me.

And then you realize all the web sites are optimized for chrome and you have problems using other browsers

google maps is the only site that just didn't work

Re: Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

#70

Post by easrng » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

altdataseller wrote: post #44

Does this impact VPN extensions like Hola VPN ?

Hola essentially puts you in a botnet (Luminati/Bright Data), you shouldn't use it.