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Previously extensions could be background pages, with access to DOM & Web Platform apis. MV3 currently reduces them to Service Workers, able to use far far far less capabilities. A Mozillaian proposed a less limited Limited Events Page but Google has snubbed it & not discussed. https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/134
Extensions are forced to use a small subset of JavaScript with no dynamic code execution. Eval() is banned. Function is banned. Embedding a scripting language inside JavaScript to circumvent this is banned. This is a ghost of JavaScript left. Google claims it's to make it easier for them to insure extensions are safe & protect users, but just as much, to me, this is to protect Google from capable & competent extensions allowing users to expand their agency: now extensions have to be narrow, fixed use, specific extensions. Tools like GreaseMonkey are all dead. The web becomes no where near the hackable medium it is, all for a little convenience for Google. https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72 https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/139
A lot has been said & discussed about MV3's declarativeNetRequest. I'm not a huge fan but it's also one of the more minor side-shows in this debate, to me. High impact on ad-blocking, but ultimately there's enough compromise & wiggle room here, enough possibility to make this not awful, and if things are bad, there will be enormous hell to pay & this will blow up. DeclarativeNetRequest feels like a side show to how much real ruin & savagery is being wreaked upon the most powerful & interesting & defining software humanity has, that we augment ourselves with as we do software: our user agent extensions.
I generally find Google to be quite a good steward for the web & am so happy they advance so many different initiatives & capabilities. But this is something that is extremely near & dear to me. The web is different & better than all other software, to me, because it is malleable, because the user-agent gives us power. MV3 is a radical curtailing of us the users. A radical shift towards a web that we have to simply accept, as is, that we cannot bend & shape as we want. Everything happening here feels abhorent & disgraceful.
If Google is having such a hard time hosting extensions as is, they need to stop. They need to close the Google Chrome Web Store for Extensions & stop trying to moderate it. They absolutely positively cannot be allowed to come along & standardize a much much much lower powered form of extension than what we've had, purely because they've had such a (sad fiddle) hard time running an extension store.
TIL that there is this whole Degoogle movement.
I luv muh privacy as much as the next guy. But the posters to the Reddit sub of that movement come off sounding "emotion-driven" at best. Conspiracy theory "extremists" at worst.
The impression I get from the Reddit discussion of the eff.org article is that the majority of posters there are not "Hackers". That can be a good thing in a way.
One not-so-good thing, on the other hand, is degoogle posters' apparent unfamiliarity with the nuances sometimes involved in software maintainability decisions.
That plus the confirmation bias that is inevitable in any subreddit.
I'm far from a Google fanboy. Trust me! But being somebody who does code reviews on the regular, I can understand why Google played the "Single purpose" policy constraint card as their rationale for pulling that AdNauseum extension. [0]
From a quick review of the AdNauseum code [1] I can see why Google would say that it does more than one thing.
Case in point: It could be argued that my word processor provides a "Single purpose". Namely: Process words.
But my word processor actually has several discreet functions that I use it for: Mail merges, PDF generation, script and manage macros, etc.
So in that sense, my word processor does not provide a "Single purpose". I could see how Google could apply that to AdNauseum.
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[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20211209223531/https://adnauseam...
[1] https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/
Firefox has already been forked multiple times because of decisions from Mozilla, see [Pale Moon](https://www.palemoon.org/) or [Waterfox](https://www.waterfox.net/). Few people use those forks, for the simple reason that what has been removed from Firefox is not game-changing enough to mandate an exodus. However I agree that removing support for uBlock Origin will surely be another story.
Take a look at http://nyxt.atlas.engineer/.
It's written to be extensible/introspectable, and the extension language is Common Lisp.
This page intended for developers of Edge extensions seem to support your statement:
https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/edge-developer/blob/main/mi...
To anyone saying "just use Firefox", I would think again. I think Firefox is (marginally) better than Chrome, but they are also pulling some of the same bullshit:
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20736
They didn't just broke them by necessity of rewriting the browser, though – they then actively blocked them on regular browser versions (non-Nightly/Developer Edition/etc.).
Case in point: With some limited maintenance and a compatibility shim for loading them, a number of old add-ons are still working on current Firefox versions: https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...