•  Kissaki   ( @Kissaki@beehaw.org ) 
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    10 months ago

    Firefox plans to support Manifest V3 because Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, and it wants extensions to be cross-browser compatible, but it has no plans to turn off support for Manifest V2.

    If Google decided to break V2 compatibility with V3, Mozilla should announce V4 (or V3 extended), which is V3 but with the missing stuff readded.

    That’d be a good practical and great product/tech marketing move. Just like most people won’t see how V3 is worse than V2, V4 will indicate it’s the evolved and improved V3.

    It would also simplify supporting V3 and V4 at the same time for extension authors. A great practical gain for extension authors, not having to read and understand two manifest schemes and APIs.

      •  Kissaki   ( @Kissaki@beehaw.org ) 
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        310 months ago

        When my company enabled Microsoft InTune this year, so that our administration could ensure software is updated on our PCs, it repeatedly downgraded my Firefox back to before a security update, on every login. lol

  • I’ll develop my own browser before using an ad-infested internet. Luckily I don’t have to do that, because there are alternatives and also because it would be a damn time consuming project to put it mildly 😅

    • Literally just gave up brave for Firefox two weeks ago just for that reason even though brave isn’t supposedly gonna be affected. I have no doubt Google might deliberately just break chromium one day once and for all.

    • I actually really like the AR glasses idea. That said, They need to be open source and de-spookified, and there needs to be some kind of regulation that they can’t store or transmit images without first displaying a recording indicator.

      It’s probably not going to happen like that, though, so I’m not mad existing ones have such bad battery lives.

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    Other groups don’t agree with Google’s description, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which called Manifest V3 “deceitful and threatening” back when it was first announced in 2019, saying the new system “will restrict the capabilities of web extensions—especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit.”

    Google, which makes about 77 percent of its revenue from advertising, has not published a serious explanation as to why Manifest V3 limits content filtering, and it’s not clear how that aligns with the goals of “improving the security, privacy, performance and trustworthiness.”

    Like Kewisch said, the primary goal of malicious extensions is to spy on users and slurp up data, which has nothing to do with content filtering.

    Google now says it’s possible for extensions to skip the reviews process for “safe” rule set changes, but even this is limited to “static” rulesets, not more powerful “dynamic” ones.

    In a comment to The Verge last year, the senior staff technologist at the EFF, Alexei Miagkov, summed up Google’s public negotiations with the extension community well, saying, "These are helpful changes, but they are tweaks to a limited-by-design system.

    For a short period, users will be able to turn them back on if they visit the extension page, but Google says that “over time, this toggle will go away as well.”


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