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Some absolutely cavalier bombastic bullshit that Google is going to finally send a messenger to the WebExtensions working group like a week or two before they shut off capable MV2[1], having never ever replied to any of the massive massive outpourings of dismay, sadness, & hatred. Just dogshit apocalypically bad mishandling, complete & utter trashfire stewardship. This is the most trust-breaking saddening enraging thing I can think of that has happened to the web. I want to curse these people out so bad. It's incomprenehsible to me, just indecent at every level.
None of this seems at all in any way good for the web. It's 100% self serving horseshit, that reduces the power of the extension, that makes extensions less of a threat to Google. None of it is good for extensions. It's a radical radical radical reduction in capability. 100% every argument is that we need to de-empower extensions or else, that we must fear extensions, reduce them, contain any uncertainty about what users might do. I've never seen a company sell such bitterness & sadness so actively before, ever. I see zero reason to believe a single word. There's not a single ray of hope cast anywhere here, no hope that extensions will ever reclaim any of their capabilities.
As well as the numerous complains about the declarative request api, to me, the real biggest change is that previously extensions used to act like pages. Pages have tons and tons of capabilities. They have dom. They can access all kinds of great nifty APIs. the new MV3 version? Extensions are just service workers. They have extremely fantastically limited capabilities. There's no idea of how they might ever support things like WebSockets. Most of the great web apis are cut off. This is a shrivelled pathetic husk of what extensions were. And Google has deferred deferred deferred response. They've said nothing, always kicked the can, but they're still going to cut us all off next month. My honest view is that we're getting punked by a bunch of immoral indecent @#$@#$@#$!@#$!'s. This is sick. This is depraved. How dare you force this upon us? You've failed to show your face at every critical juncture. Uncouth. Unacceptable. Indecent.
Mozilla tried to pitch a slightly less vulgar option, where there would still be something like Pages, something that had some of the web api's accessible. We saw one content free ultra-negative post from Google in reply to this Mozilla idea, on Limited Event Pages[2]. "No, doesn't work", mic drop, peace out. This looks like such sick sabotage. Not even raising a real point to discuss. Just murdering what extensions are, and exiting the building.
I'm someone who generally sees a lot of upside to the things Google is doing for the web. But this is a cavalcade of schlock. Not a single thing happening here is being done decently. It's all a pathetic shit show. There's zero responsibility, zero adults on Google's side. They post a couple random blog posts defending themselves, but this continues to look like a broadscale massive assault on users, a massive attack on the capabilities of the web. If this happens, it will be the single most colossal restriction of capabilities the web will ever have experienced. It will radically draw down what is possible for user-agents. There are no plans, no hopes, no vision of how we can get better: this is a vast strictly regressive loss of capabilities.
[1] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/pull/135/files#diff-ee4...
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I appreciate what Brave are doing, but this will affect them whether they support MV2 or not. Extensions on all Chromium forks are installed through Google's Chrome Web Store, so when Google drops support browsers who do not agree will need an alternative distribution platform, which may or may not be actually possible.
More generally, Brave's attitude towards Chromium changes has been "disable first, ask questions later", even when it hurts forward-looking developers and useful feature adoption [1]. In the case of the file system API, there's also a possible conflict of interest, given how they're pushing IPFS and the rest of the crypto web bullshit. My biggest gripe with them is that most of their development efforts go into developing the crypto features and they end up neglecting general browser usability and innovation.
[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/11407#issuecom...
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ExtPay
The JavaScript library for ExtensionPay.com — payments for your browser extensions, no server needed.
Yeah this is a very awkward release, and not just because MV3 cripples the most important extensions (adblockers).
Firefox also hasn't released MV3 support yet so extensions that are cross-browser can't be MV3, which will be really annoying when Chrome no longer accepts MV2 extensions.
I ran into this just yesterday when I tried to release an extension that removes those stupid fixed banners that take up vertical screen space when you're trying to read an article (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-floati...). I tried to convert it to MV3 only to test on Firefox and find out it doesn't work.
I also run https://extensionpay.com which lets developers easily take payments in their extensions without writing their own backend or paying for server costs. A lot of the developers using ExtensionPay in their extensions default to using MV3 since that's what Google says they should do, despite its limitations. It's a really sad state of affairs.
