Mozilla’s Manifest v3 FAQ

The tone of this post concerns me.<p>What comes across is that Google is not collaborating with Mozilla over the Manifest v3 changes.<p>Instead of using and appreciating the engaged Firefox developer ecosystem we have PM conference rooms in Google mandating huge changes based on... well they&#x27;ve been shady so far about their choices on Manifest v3.<p>The other thing that keeps bugging me about this is -<p>We need a tiered App store for browsers. Part of the lockdown Google wants to do isn&#x27;t wrong but its driven by having WAY too many bad actors and shoddy developers in their Chrome store.<p>If you have an opensource web extension, a reasonable community and with reproducible builds? You can use more powerful API versions.<p>If you are jrando bizplan #2000283 you get the kinda trusted tier.<p>Frankly if Debian had a web browser extension &quot;store&quot; with 20 things in it, I&#x27;d use that exclusively and turn off both the Chrome and the Firefox store 100%.

&gt; In the absence of a true standard for browser extensions, maintaining compatibility with Chrome is important for Firefox developers and users.<p>About as close as Mozilla can come to outright saying, &quot;Chrome is big enough and we&#x27;re small enough that what they do _is_ the standard.&quot;<p>Still, it&#x27;s encouraging to see that they&#x27;re not removing the blocking API for now. I kind of hope this does push a few adblocker extensions to abandon Chrome.

&gt; We have no immediate plans to remove blocking webRequest<p>&gt; <i>immediate</i><p>We know exactly what this kind of talk means. Don&#x27;t blow smoke up our ass, Mozilla, just give it to use straight: We&#x27;ll have `blocking webRequest` for as long as Google allows it.

This points to the disturbing truth of how incredibly complete Google&#x27;s monopoly is: Even browsers not based on Chrome are strongly pushed to implement Chrome&#x27;s platform changes anyways.

Chrome&#x27;s June 2019 statement about Manifest v3 in which they tell us all how much they really care about users and this totes isn&#x27;t to weaken ad blocking(which directly affects their revenue - that&#x27;s just a coincidence - pinky promise!):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.chromium.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;web-request-and-declarative-net-request.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.chromium.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;web-request-and-declarativ...</a>

I hope the ad blockers completely abandon Chrome when this change gets pushed through, rather than attempting to work around it.<p>Google is using a slow-frog-boil approach to re-desensitize their users to ads, and it&#x27;s working. The only thing that will work here is a big splash of cold water to the face.<p>Maybe Chrome losing all of its ad-blockers overnight will finally start making a dent.

In the absence of a true standard for browser extensions, perhaps Mozilla should consider trying to form one by leading with a strong example instead of weakly implying that they will eventually probably cave to the monopolist.<p>It&#x27;s also quite disappointing how there is seemingly no one from Mozilla here, engaging with us on this topic. Instead, the only communication we get is one-sided corporate speak, with no real ability to respond.<p>If anyone from Mozilla is reading, who do you think will spread Firefox among non-technical users if not the type of crowd that frequents HN?

This is disappointing. Mozilla can&#x27;t seem to make up their mind if they want to offer a different product from google or just &quot;Chrome, but for nerds&quot;

&gt; Cross-origin communication: In Manifest v3, content scripts will have the same permissions as the page they are injected in. We are planning to implement this change.<p>What will this mean for GM.xmlHttpRequest in userscripts? Adding content from several different sites with userscripts can be very powerful.

Mozilla really needs to get that if they compete with Google on Google’s terms, they’re rapidly heading toward extinction.<p>Mozilla ought to be the browser for a private and usable web, but it seems they have occasional sneezes where you question what they’re doing (this, pocket in recent memory).

perhaps a more optimistic take on &quot;no immediate plans&quot;: there could eventually be an alternate standard for webrequest that addresses Chrome Devs&#x27; (perhaps legitimate) privacy concerns around most extensions being able to sniff, modify, and log all of your traffic on the entire web with a single, unobtrusive modal click. There is room to make the web platform more secure without stripping power from the user-agent, surely, or giving bad actors a trivial foothold. Frankly, my concerns around the webrequest API are numerous, the only reason IMO that Chrome isn&#x27;t deprecating webrequest in Enterprise builds is for corporate spyware.<p>At the very least a new webrequest spec that is more ergonomic and more safe than the webrequest API (without neuturing adblock) could show whether the emperor has no clothes, vis a vis &quot;Google Adtech is directly influencing Chrome and web platform development&quot; plots

&quot;no <i>immediate</i> plans to remove blocking webRequest&quot; ... yikes

Really interesting what the new Edge is going to do in this regard...

I dont like the idea of extensions being able to inject data in either direction.<p>On top of that, I&#x27;m not in favor of extensions doing anything to improve security - I want that in the base browser.

It seems I&#x27;m in a minority here, but I was never comfortable installing any adblock extension because the existing request blocking API means that the extension would see all web traffic generated by me (including private URLs that are otherwise not known to anybody but me).<p>I personally feel that now with manifest 3, I can actually install adblockers since the newer APIs do not share all my web traffic with the extensions.<p>Can somebody explain why removing blocking API was overall a bad decision by Chrome?

A humble proposal: A build of firefox that initially differs from Mozillas in that<p>- it has a different default search engine selection that can be sold in the same way that Mozilla sells this same feature to google presently<p>- no ads on new tab page<p>- bundled with ublock origin<p>The goal being to increase the value of selling the search engine selection while decreasing the value of mozillas in effect siphoning off some of the value of mozillas primary revenue stream.<p>Such funds could be donated back to Mozilla or used to maintain a fork that doesn&#x27;t ruin adblocking. Their choice.