[HN Gopher] Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes
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Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes
Author : tech234a
Score : 143 points
Date : 2023-04-01 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (groups.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (groups.google.com)
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| 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 renewed push fighting ad
| blockers then.
| colordrops wrote:
| Their goal is probably to slowly ween a tiny group of power
| users onto other browsers that allow ad blocking while
| acclimating everyone else to the full ad experience.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Or working on pressuring Firefox to implement MV3.
| johnny22 wrote:
| firefox already implements mv3 as much as they can, but
| without removing what mv2 offered don't they?
| cpeterso wrote:
| That's correct. Starting in version 109 earlier this year,
| Firefox supports many MV3 APIs without removing or
| deprecating MV2 APIs. To ease the transition to MV3 for
| extension developers, Firefox extensions can use both MV2
| and MV3 APIs.
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-sign
| i...
| lapcat wrote:
| Google is not even close to finishing MV3: "On the userScripts
| API, the proposal has been merged into the WECG but the
| engineering work has not started yet."
| https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/f8f430f1904c2a6fa8...
|
| MV2 is sticking around until at least 2024.
| shmde wrote:
| I love it when advertisment companies who make money handcrafting
| the perfect ad for you, analysing your search history, talk about
| Privacy. Yes, this V3 manifest will break adblockers but think
| about your pRiVaCy gUys!!!
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't disagree with you (always follow the money), but on the
| other hand, who better to understand the privacy concerns than
| the people who work around them for a living? I would
| definitely want to listen to them. That doesn't mean we just
| take what they say uncritically, but their perspective is very
| important.
| tyingq wrote:
| onBeforeRequest(), though, is just one of several ways to run
| arbitrary JS on a 3rd party page within an extension. There's
| a reason it's "first to be hobbled", and that reason isn't
| privacy. Nobody can prove intent, of course, but I'm
| predicting the pace of "privacy improvements" slows
| considerably after the smart heuristic-based ad blockers are
| out of the way.
| skullone wrote:
| Is Google sure of what they're doing at all anymore?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Ultimately the biggest risk here I think is adblockers. It's the
| universal extension
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| So the phase-out won't begin until 2024 at the earliest? Did I
| read that right? What was it previously, June 2023?
|
| > We will provide sufficient migration time for developers - at
| least 6 months of heads-up - before beginning any experiments to
| turn off MV2 in the browser next year
|
| So "next year" is 2023 or 2024?
| ollien wrote:
| Given this was posted 3 days ago, I'd say 2024 :)
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Yeah, "in the next year" vs "over the next year". English has
| many nuances.
| illiarian wrote:
| 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.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| or they install higher-order ad-blockers, like pihole /
| diversion
| ziml77 wrote:
| 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.
| John23832 wrote:
| 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 a
| bunch of "I read it on a forum somewhere" work arounds).
|
| The ONLY reason they're pushing this is to shore up their ads
| business by breaking add blockers.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| A few months back a HN user suggested it may be wise to
| continually delay an unpopular change, im no PR expert but I
| thought that was an interesting perspective.
| tssva wrote:
| 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.
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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.
| tssva wrote:
| The December pause announcement stated it was until at
| least January 2024. This update still mentions a timeline
| of next year for v3. I find it hard to read as anything
| beyond the update of progress which was promised for March
| when the pause was announced in December.
| lewisjoe wrote:
| 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 developers essentially refuse to understand the
| problem -
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=118522...
| lozenge wrote:
| Just raised to 10 MB?
| whstl wrote:
| 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.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| This, 1000 times. There is only one thing a monopoly holder
| is afraid of - losing the monopoly.
| tracyhenry wrote:
| Are you talking about local storage? If so the limit is 5 MB:
| https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/stora...
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| 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.
| summerlight wrote:
| 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.
| djbusby wrote:
| The customer is always right - except when I think I'm
| smarter than their stated needs.
| kivle wrote:
| The customer, eg. the advertising industry.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, but it's a problem in engineering society-wide, not
| just Google. The more I think of it actually, it's just a
| human problem. Even kids default to this. I wish Socratic
| Ignorance were taught widely and often in school.
| Kye wrote:
| 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 able to back them up somewhere (3-2-1 strategy).
| I wanted to be able to do automated analysis across all my
| writing. In short, I wanted to own my files.
|
| They simply could not conceive of a use case that was offline
| or didn't trust Google to be reliable. I honestly don't think
| they ever used a real desktop office suite. They had no model
| in their head to understand it.
| malermeister wrote:
| _It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary depends on his not understanding it._
| ikiris wrote:
| Collaboration is the killer feature of the docs ecosystem.
| You will never convince them to break it for X reason.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >has a 1MB storage limit
|
| They changed this a couple days ago to be 10 MB with Chrome
| 112.
| blibble wrote:
| > 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
| nonbirithm wrote:
| And similarly, FLoC was invented for the sole purpose of
| making targeted advertising look legitimate.
| pornel wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| From what I've seen the main purpose is to increase secruity
| and privacy 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.
| akomtu wrote:
| 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.
| politician wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if this is related to ChatGPT or LLM.
| Google is aware of the impact LLMs are having and that Manifest
| V3 is facing widespread disapproval. Previously, Google's
| strategy was "take it or leave it", so their decision to
| reconsider could indicate apprehension about the potential
| acceleration of the ad-based search business's decline.
| m_a_g wrote:
| Anything that breaks uBlock Origin is a deal breaker. With the
| chrome team making so many alterations to their plans, I guess
| we'll have to wait and see.
| poolopolopolo wrote:
| Pretty much, there will never be a "smooth" transition from V2
| to V3 when you are purposely trying to kill the most used
| plugins.
| Operative0198 wrote:
| Mv3 broke uBlock Lite for me (used uBlock to control js
| mostly).
|
| But that wasn't a deal breaker because I got to discover
| NoScript (still stuck on mv2 but I like the approach vastly
| better than original uBlock's implementation).
|
| Just waiting to see how this functionality will be handled in
| mv2 sunset since Noscript has no plans to migrate atm and
| uBlock lite should be "guttered" for the foreseeable future.
| [deleted]
| pkulak wrote:
| Why wait? Move to Firefox now.
| ithrow wrote:
| Feels slow in old computers with 4GB and Chrome has a better
| built-in for freeing up memory from inactive tabs.
| voytec wrote:
| But will likely be plagued with performance degrading ads.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| And it's still fast in spite of that, which speaks to how
| far behind Mozilla is.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Part of the difference is that the modern web is built
| for Chrome. Even checking ones site or service with
| Firefox for functionality is a bridge too far, much less
| performance.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Not sure about that, works for me just fine on many (even
| old) computers. But even if it was true, I prefer keeping
| the number of open tabs below 100 if that means not running
| browser made by an advertising agency. Talk about conflict
| of interests...
| kivle wrote:
| Using 2-3x as much battery as all other browsers on my
| Macbook is the dealbreaker for me.. I want to use the same
| browser on all systems when I move..
| kgwxd wrote:
| You should get off mac for the same reasons to get off
| chrome.
| jug wrote:
| Would Brave maybe work better? But I personally feel a bit
| awkward about the crypto stuff in it even if it can be
| disabled. I don't think a browser should deal with these
| things. However, it might be personal preference... It does
| offer built-in ad blocking and more.
| kivle wrote:
| I also feel weird about all the crypto stuff in Brave. I
| chose Vivaldi (also a Chromium based browser with built-
| in adblocker). It's developers include a lot of former
| Opera devs.
| loxias wrote:
| IME Firefox (esp with the right extensions, like
| autosuspend tabs) is very light on system resources. A bit
| more so than chrome. I run only Linux though.
|
| All the "websites that should be a program" (Netflix, Hulu,
| Slack, Amazon Video) now run great in FF, without my
| computer overheating. (though some of them might be on the
| chopping block if they don't quit blocking me from seeing
| HD content)
|
| I hear Apple does some special magic in MacOS so that on
| that platform Safari actually works (compared to the ~real~
| non-Apple world, where Safari is slow as heck and why would
| anyone ever touch that with a 10ft pole.)
| kivle wrote:
| Honestly I do not think Apple does some special magic on
| Mac OS for Safari. I settled on Vivaldi (a chromium based
| browser with built-in ad blocking developed by former
| Opera devs). It gives battery life not much worse than
| Safari to be honest. Safari is very nice and snappy on a
| mac, but the extension support is extremely limited.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Doesn't appear to open up MV2 for new extensions, so if your
| favorite extension gets sold / goes rogue then alternatives may
| be crippled by MV3 as it exists today.
| preinheimer wrote:
| People who want to release a new, cross browser, extension are
| left in a crappy position.
|
| Chrome won't accept a new manifest v2 extension. MV3 extensions
| have lots of problems in chrome, and are even worse supported
| everywhere else.
|
| Google needs to reopen mv2 to new submissions until they've got
| things figured out, and the other browsers are on board.
| [deleted]
| bobse wrote:
| Microsoft Teams is still broken on Firefox? Linux app was also
| killed by Microsoft liars.
| 20after4 wrote:
| That's a feature not a bug.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Mozilla had been working with Microsoft to resolve Teams
| compatibility issues.
|
| Teams users using _teams.microsoft.com_ (primarily Business and
| Enterprise customers on a paid plan, but also some free
| /personal legacy accounts) should be able to use Teams without
| issues now.
|
| However, there is a second Microsoft Teams instance running on
| _teams.live.com_. Most Personal /Consumer/Free users of Teams
| are on that version, and there, Teams is currently showing a
| "browser unsupported" banner.
|
| https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/25070#issuecomm...
| i386 wrote:
| "Comments are locked" is always a slap in the face
| qwertox wrote:
| > 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?
| kej wrote:
| You can just do this anyway, you know. Firefox is pretty great
| these days.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Especially on macs
| darreninthenet wrote:
| I found it's lack of support for native functionality in
| MacOS too irritating (eg doesn't support system wide
| autocomplete - so my @@ shortcut that puts my email address
| in doesn't work in FF - I know I could put it in again in
| FF but it's annoying it just doesn't work) so I went back
| to Chrome in the end.
|
| I was using Edge for a while but the absolute car crash
| their UI has become - and can't be configured - sent me
| running screaming for the hills.
|
| Edit - and don't get me started on the massive slowdowns
| once I have more than a handful of tabs open.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| My biggest complaint with Firefox on macOS is the lack of
| support for native picture-in-picture. They implement
| their own version that doesn't stay visible when you swap
| between the virtual desktops; won't overlay on top of
| full screen applications; and can't be moved across
| monitors (iirc) either.
| miohtama wrote:
| 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.
| sgtfrankieboy wrote:
| 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.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Huh. I'm rather surprised you're comparing the out of the
| box firefox json formatting (rather good compared to
| chrome's non-existent formatter) to an extension. Are there
| no JSON formatting extensions for firefox?
| 20after4 wrote:
| I used an extension a while ago, however, it became
| unnecessary once the built in json view was implemented.
| Not sure if it's still around or whether it offers any
| advantage over the built in feature.
| xchkr1337 wrote:
| 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 browser on Linux distros.
|
| Right now I'm using Chromium but I'd be eager to switch if
| there was anything better which could provide me with a fast
| and stable browsing experience.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| I have been main driving Firefox on Linux for the past six
| years, on Lubuntu, without any kind of problems. None
| whatsoever. It's fast and it's rock solid stable.
|
| Edit: some people mentioned it's Firefox snap that has
| problems. I'm using the apt-get package one.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I can't report any of those issues, my biggest gripe is
| Ubuntu forcing a snap package on to me
| 20after4 wrote:
| I'm using Firefox on Linux1 and I have experienced none of
| those problems. Although I'm not particularly happy with
| the direction that Mozilla has been headed, Firefox is
| certainly a vast improvement over Chrome or even Chromium.
|
| 1. Latest version of Firefox (not ESR), Latest Debian, both
| Intel & AMD graphics. I can't speak for NVIDIA graphics on
| Linux as I gave up on NVIDIA a few years ago.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Admittedly there were a few issues in the past, just
| nothing in the last couple of years that I can think of.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I was on Linux for about 10 years without a single issues
| with Firefox until it was turned into a snap package.
| Slow as hell startup times and other oddities. Removed
| that and installed from apt and it was back to perfectly
| stable. Font rendering was always different but I
| wouldn't say worse. In fact, now that I'm fully back on
| Windows, the font rendering on Linux is the only thing I
| really miss. Windows seems a bit blurry in comparison.
| i_love_cookies wrote:
| [dead]
| bitcharmer wrote:
| > I always keep running into unfixable problems like bad
| font rendering, slow webgl performance, ui glitches
|
| Been using Firefox on Linux as my daily driver and haven't
| seen any of that. Can you provide any examples?
| davidgerard wrote:
| > bad font rendering
|
| would I be correct in guessing that you're using the snap?
| It's pretty, uh, garbage. The Chromium snap keeps having
| font problems too.
| tigrezno wrote:
| this is fun because the snap works perfectly on my
| machine, and it's fast as the native version. I think the
| snap version is far better than running it natively (more
| secure). A web browser is a hacker's dream.
| jraph wrote:
| uBlock Origin already has less control in Chrome than in
| Firefox.
|
| https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Same..
| noman-land wrote:
| 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?
| Diggsey wrote:
| 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 suspension/resumption.
| Make some tweaks to how permissions as a whole are handled.
|
| Instead we have this abomination which is worse for everyone
| involved. It doesn't improve performance because it forces
| extension authors to hack around the broken API, and in doing so
| waste CPU and memory.
|
| Firefox FTW
| kgwxd wrote:
| The primary idea is terrible, the good ideas are only there to
| cover up the primary purpose, kill tracker blocking. Terrible
| idea, terrible execution.
| joisig wrote:
| MV2 background pages were already by default in a mode where
| they are suspended when not in use. MV3 doesn't improve on that
| except to make it impossible to have persistent background
| pages.
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(page generated 2023-04-01 23:00 UTC)