Manifest v3 in Firefox: Recap and Next Steps

• webextensions

  36 557 8.1 Bikeshed

  Charter and administrivia for the WebExtensions Community Group (WECG)

  

There's a range of different ways to author & uses for dynamic code.

In terms of use cases, downloaded on the fly code is definitely one example. Userscript engines like Greasemo key, VioletMonkey, & TamperMonkey are all alao on the chopping block, which also allow user-edited code as well as downloaded code.

There's also a huge range of uses for dynamic code in general. Data stores & engines will optimize performance by using the Function constructor[1]. Cant do that anymorev basic, sensible, multi-decade long optimizations are now off the table. Being able to use eval() to dynamically generate a complex expression- no longer allowed.

It's bitterly ironic that Apple's prohibition against interpretters has held their platform back from allowing interesting tbings to run on iOS. Chrome's real rendering & js engines are blocked there. Because Apple says it's too unsafe to trust programs to do anything not statically defined, that only code that can all be fully read & understand is ok. Now here's Google & the Mozilla, bringing the exact same prohibitions against dynamic code to the web. It's so ugly, so menacing & massive a threat to possibility, to extensions that can grow & develop.

Long hope, but a deep one: I very much hope one day (far away) a semantic-web like world wide web might emerge, but if this sick knee-capping happens the browser will never be a viable place for user agency, never be tenable as a place where user agency can grow & flourish. Extensions are amazing, but if they're restricted to single-purpose little timmicks, unflexible static predefined capabilities, Google will have insured that the only thriving systems the world will get will be inside the data center. These restrictions mortally cripple user-agency, that which is most special & most dear about the web & what set it apart from conventional software applications.

My open github issue[2] on this.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[2] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/139

• uBlock

  2,991 42,883 9.9 JavaScript

  uBlock Origin - An efficient blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean.

I have a slight hope that gorhill will just remove the chrome extension. It's useless with Manifest v3 and has been quite constricted for a while now when being used in Chrome.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io sponsored

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• graphql-jit

  10 1,024 6.7 TypeScript

  GraphQL execution using a JIT compiler

  

JS has always been special & excellent because it allows multiphase programming. That one coild just add more code has been unique versus the world of statuc languages, where maybe youcd have some tool to generate stubs for Thrift or gRPC, then compule that in to your program. Which works ok, if and only if you know ahead of time what schemas you might need. Im these cases, you have to give up on stub code & start using more interprtted systems.

The advantages in js have been colossal, often an easy order of magnitude win to compile selectors & queries & other fast inner loop bits into jit compiled code versus having userland interpretters. Some of thd rete engines enjoy this. Just today there's graphql-jit. https://github.com/zalando-incubator/graphql-jit/blob/main/s...

Everything you say is full of doubt & scorn & skepticism. I just cant imagine living im such a world where each system had to know fully well ahead of time each type of data it might want to interact with, might have to have that precompiled & baked in. Thatcs a shitty miserable world that looks like the hell JS plucked us out of, by being a flexible, dynamic language that could load in routines & change it's behavior over time. Screw that dark hell world.

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