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Mozilla blog: Begin your MV3 migration by implementing new features today
- classified 4y agoMozilla continues the war against Firefox users in an effort to make it ever more Chrome-like.
- gerash 4y agoI'm getting tired of this manifest v3 drama on HN. Why don't people who oppose it band together and fork Chromium and maintain that fork. The software is open source at the end of the day.
- dmortin 4y agoBecause it's not an easy job and people would have to devote significant free time to it.
- gerash 4y agoExactly. So get behind the wheel and do something (eg. fork Chromium without MV3 or something like that). But if you're not willing to spend your own time and energy then what's the point of constantly complaining about conspiracies surrounding MV3 on HN. It's tiring to read.
- gingerlime 4y agoI’m no expert, but I think the main moat that Chrome has here is its web store where users find extensions and developers submit their extensions. There’s a review process which whilst far from perfect is labor intensive and still helps catch rogue extensions. Hard to open-source this part of Chrome.
- cglong 4y agoThere's an OSS fork of Chromium for Android called Kiwi that enables installing extensions from the Chrome Web Store.
- ToruiDev 4y agoWhich still relies on the Chrome Web store. Which will stop accepting MV2 Extensions after the move to MV3 Therefore leaving you without a store again
- marwis 4y agoYou also can't use Google services with unofficial build. That includes Sync, Translate and bunch of other stuff.
- zarzavat 4y agoThat’s a feature for me. I don’t want to have to sign into my browser or have it phoning home constantly. It’s a privacy risk.
- foepys 4y agoBecause it's not really about MV3 but about the largest ad and tracking network on the planet changing the most popular web browser to cripple ad blocking under the disguise of security.
- Guthur 4y agoI wonder if this is the prelude to unblockable government propaganda. Already get it on all the social media after all. Calling it now, let's see in a couple of years how deep the state really is.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoMaybe, but let's not allow the government boogeyman to blind us to the direct and immediate threat, which is adtech and surveillance economy.
- Semaphor 4y agoBut that’s not what’s happening here, how is anything Firefox does with their switch crippling adblocking?
- TeMPOraL 4y agoWhat's happening is step 1 - Firefox buying into MV3, even if with its own tweaks, and mentioning that DNR is a thing that will happen eventually. Step 2 - once people get used to it and drama dies down - the implementation will likely become very close to Chrome, under the guise of not fragmenting the dev experience and similar nonsense excuses. These moves keep happening in tech all the time. Slippery slope fallacy doesn't work here - if you see something that looks like slippery slope in a tech business, it almost definitely is one.
- Semaphor 4y agoBut they never mention removing WebRequest, only having DNR in addition where it makes sense for performance reasons (and for compatibility with chrome), not having it would be stupid. I’m all for slippery slope arguments, if they are well-founded, not if it sounds like wild conspiracy theories.
- Drakim 4y agoChrome is not fully open source, so any fork would be somewhat reduced.
- josefx 4y ago> The software is open source at the end of the day. Then you can point to the source of widevine? Something that chrome developers called a core component when they where caught side loading it on dedicated open source distros a few years ago and initially refused to supply an option to disable it?
- Semaphor 4y agoNo, they don’t. But they also don’t listen to people who’d have FF still be the slow-as-molasses version with XUL it used to be.
- xdfgh1112 4y agoI remember when Firefox first came out and it was so much faster than Mozilla at the time. Not sure what happened.
- Semaphor 4y agoThan Mozilla? You mean than Netscape?
- xdfgh1112 4y agoThe original Mozilla browser that came out of Netscape. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite It had a reputation for being slow and bloated at the time which prompted the creation of a slimmed down browser, Phoenix which eventually became Firefox
- Semaphor 4y agoOh wow, I’m not even sure if I ever used that. I do remember Phoenix, but this barely rings a bell. And towards your question: Different times. Both hardware and browser capabilities were vastly different back then, so some technological choices made in the early days might have made more sense. For me personally, I know that back in the day I was a lot more forgiving of delays than I am now.
- yoavm 4y agoWhat? Mozilla is building the best open-source browser on the planet. Sure they sometimes make mistakes (who doesn't? and who can please all users?), but a "war against Firefox users"?!
- TeMPOraL 4y agoA "war against Firefox users" is maybe a bit much, though MV3 is definitely a slap in the face, and is a battle in the ongoing war on general-purpose computing[0]. But then, "they sometimes make mistakes" isn't also an accurate description of the mess Mozilla is these days. In the last years, they've been routinely wasting money and alienating the userbase by doing lots of weird side projects nobody asked for, instead of focusing on improving the software people actually use. ---- [0] - https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
- yoavm 4y agoWell, as a Firefox user, I would say that Firefox has become way better over the last few years. It's super fast. It actually blocks ads. It syncs beautifully with Firefox on Android. Some side projects felt useless. Some feel quite relevant to the goal (e.g. Mozilla VPN), some grew to become huge (Rust). Some were maybe an amazing idea at the wrong time (Firefox OS?). I wouldn't want Mozilla to stop doing any side projects. What's so bad about MV3? Would love to hear your take. Mozilla made it clear it will not adopt changes that prevent extensions like uBlock Origin from working. Many other changes seem to be focused at user security (which is good), and other seem to just follow the "standard", which one can argue is quite important from the perspective of users too, because the fact that extensions can be easily built for Chrome and Firefox together is effectively _the reason_ some of the extensions I use are even available on Firefox.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago> What's so bad about MV3? Would love to hear your take. It's a trust issue. Mozilla burned a lot of it in recent years. > Mozilla made it clear it will not adopt changes that prevent extensions like uBlock Origin from working. That's the thing: I don't trust they'll keep good on that promise for more than a year or two. I may be misremembering things, but I'm pretty sure they initially weren't going to adopt MV3 at all, then they weren't going to add DNR, now they're adding DNR but "not removing request blocking, pinky swear". Once DNR lands, I worry they'll start thinking about removing request blocking, under the guise of "security".
- rasz 4y ago
- madmax108 4y ago> DNR is not yet available in Firefox. Firefox retains WebRequest blocking in MV3, which can be used in place of DNR. When DNR is available, simple request modifications can be moved over to DNR. I know a lot has been said about DNR for Chrome, and while retaining WebRequest is a good step, I wonder how much Firefox's DNR implementation will differ from that of Chrome. As an extension developer, I really like the idea of write-once extensions that run everywhere, and unfortunately today, a lot of that simply means building for Chrome-* browsers and managing Firefox as a "special case" :/
- erikrothoff 4y agoAs someone working on a massive migration from MV2 to MV3 (where the benefit to the user will be minimal) it does feel like browser makers are waging war against us extension developers. Mozilla's plan is to release a slightly compatible API, but not at all compatible, and yet highly limit what can be done? Do they really think this will increase the effort invested in their ecosystem?
- joecool1029 4y agoI think ultimately the biggest question people need to ask is: Is it more important for Mozilla to fall in line behind Chromium and track compatibility with their ecosystem or is it better for them to support their own extension ecosystem and not make busy work for extension developers? Can they maintain MV2 while supporting MV3 their own way for easier porting of Chromium extensions? Or is MV2 support getting dropped and all MV2 extensions have a EOL coming up next year?
- Daedren 4y agoI don't think Mozilla has a choice here. Chrome just has the sheer market power at the moment. If Mozilla went down a different path, extension developers would likely just favor Chrome (and MV3) as that's where unfortunately most users are. Even if they provided an easier path to MV3, developers would likely have hurried up anyway because Chrome won't do so.
- jasonjayr 4y agoIsn't MV3 seemingly universally hated by extension developers? What good things does it bring for them? Couldn't FF support MV2 and MV3 at the same time?
- sfink 4y agoAt a high level, I believe that's the plan. At a more detailed level, well... I'm not that familiar with the area, but it seems like it's a bit of a tangled mess. The big item of disabling non-declarative content blocking seems safe. Firefox appears to have no reason to turn that part of MV2 off. The various security tightening measures are another story. My guess is that with Chrome removing higher-risk APIs like dynamic code evaluation, Firefox is using it as an excuse to do the same in order to not have to deal with the issues that arise from them. Which isn't great from the point of view of extension capability. Personally I'd prefer to err on the side of scary permissions notifications for that sort of functionality. Or at least some of it—I'm not convinced that allowing an extension to execute arbitrary code loaded over an insecure HTTP connection is ever a good idea, except for some temporary development mode thing. (Sure, that's exactly what happens with a random web page containing JS that's served over HTTP. But there's no need to support that case for extensions that are active across all of your browsing activity.) But it sounds like the removals go well beyond that.
- Timja 4y agoInstead of taking away power from users, Firefox should rather inform users. Let them modify the browser in any way they want. Let them write plugins that can do anything. But inform users who install a third party plugin what that plugin can do. Like "This plugin wants the right to read all data on all websites you visit. In theory it could capture your bank login and transfer it to some other server". Another bad decision by Firefox to limit users ability to do what they want is that they don't support the File Access API: https://web.dev/file-system-access/ https://web.dev/file-system-access/ This gives Chrome users the ability to build simple web pages that can be used like native applications. An empty html page with a textarea, load and save buttons and you have a text editor! I hope Firefox will notice that they lose market share because of restricting users freedom. And turn the ship around.
- mnadkvlb 4y ago
- pixxel 4y agoSimilar to charity executives who are paid handsomely to not solve homelessness or whatever the cause is. It’s a grift.
- the_other 4y agoIt's hard to tell from your comment whether you've met any charity CEOs, or worked with them, or tried to solve the problems they've solved and have learned enough from the space to pass such damning judgement so widely.
- fazfq 4y agoFriendly reminder than under MV3 it is impossible to implement something like Greasemonkey - Firefox is complicit in this.
- xhkkffbf 4y agoReally? That's pretty sad. Greasemonkey is one of those extensions that opened my eyes to the power of browser extensions. To lose its abilities would be sad.
- WhyNotHugo 4y agoDidn't Mozilla announce they'd keep some extra APIs that Chrome is dropping?
- davidy123 4y agoI have been waiting for Mozilla to finish this, -include mobile-, for a long time. Getting more invested in Chrome by the day.