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> it seems like it's trying to solve a real problem People aren't mad that the Chromium team is trying to solve a real problem, they're mad that the Chromium t

> it seems like it's trying to solve a real problem People aren't mad that the Chromium team is trying to solve a real problem, they're mad that the Chromium team is utterly failing to solve that problem, and introducing new problems in the process. Under Manifest V3, requests can still be monitored, they just can't be modified. So this isn't really helping with spying. And even if the change did help with spying, adblockers help with spying. Firefox will solve this problem better than Chrome or Safari by hopefully balancing the relative privacy risks from extensions and from ads and not by making clumsy fixes that introduce additional problems. We all recognize that extension security is an issue. The question is how to make things more secure without introducing additional privacy risks by weakening adblockers. If adblockers legitimately need full access to the page in order to work effectively, we can't just stick our fingers in our ears and pretend that they don't need that access. We can't just pretend that declarative blocking is good enough just because it would be more convenient for us if it was good enough. I would welcome a security model that made adblockers safer without making them less effective. Does anyone have one to propose? Because I don't want a half-baked solution implemented in my browser just because "we have to do something" -- and that's what I think Manifest V3 is.

neolog 6y ago
Confiks comment above proposes > For example, they could have chosen a system where privacy-sensitive information like visited URLs are fed into a part of the extension which is a side-effect free function returning limited information. As they already have capability-based extension permissions, this would not be terribly hard to add if they would set their mind to it.
- danShumway 6y ago
  On one hand, no, I don't think this would work, because part of what advanced adblockers like Ublock Origin allow is script insertion into pages and source rewrites when you request HTML pages. There's not a good, simple way I'm aware of to prevent data exfiltration in that kind of environment. Once I have the ability to change a page's source code before the browser loads it, I suspect I can kind of do anything. On the other hand, that proposal would make it at least marginally harder for malicious scripts to go undetected, and it's at least as much (if not more) of an improvement to privacy than the system Manifest V3 is going with, given that V3 doesn't prevent request monitoring, network requests from extensions, or script injection into the page. And there are probably ways to implement what you're talking about without breaking a huge number of extensions. So I don't think that's a solution, but it's significantly better than what Manifest V3 is trying to do.

neolog 6y ago

Confiks comment above proposes > For example, they could have chosen a system where privacy-sensitive information like visited URLs are fed into a part of the extension which is a side-effect free function returning limited information. As they already have capability-based extension permissions, this would not be terribly hard to add if they would set their mind to it.

danShumway 6y ago
On one hand, no, I don't think this would work, because part of what advanced adblockers like Ublock Origin allow is script insertion into pages and source rewrites when you request HTML pages. There's not a good, simple way I'm aware of to prevent data exfiltration in that kind of environment. Once I have the ability to change a page's source code before the browser loads it, I suspect I can kind of do anything. On the other hand, that proposal would make it at least marginally harder for malicious scripts to go undetected, and it's at least as much (if not more) of an improvement to privacy than the system Manifest V3 is going with, given that V3 doesn't prevent request monitoring, network requests from extensions, or script injection into the page. And there are probably ways to implement what you're talking about without breaking a huge number of extensions. So I don't think that's a solution, but it's significantly better than what Manifest V3 is trying to do.