It keeps amazing me how these Manifest V2 vs. V3 discussions, fail to address the elephant in the room: intercept and modify network requests.
Do you want your web browser — that you may be using to access your banking account, or your shopping account, or an internet, or any sort of private content you want to keep secure — to allow every extension you install, forever and ever, to “intercept and modify network requests”… even if it initially didn’t, but then over time the developer, or whoever the developer might sell it to (see AdBlock and uBlock), might decide to “intercept and modify network requests”, for any reason they want, without any warning?
What is so wrong with the browser ASKING THE USER before denying/granting that permission to random extensions?
And how about having the browser let the user decide whether an extension is allowed to do that, on a per-website basis? I know, you can tell uBlock Origin to ignore a website… and “trust me, bro”? How about the browser enforced that instead?
Is that what manifest v3 does though? Ask the user? I haven’t paid a lot of attention but thus far my overall impression has been that they are simply going to forbid a lot of useful things wholesale. Things that ad blockers need to function.
It keeps amazing me how these Manifest V2 vs. V3 discussions, fail to address the elephant in the room: intercept and modify network requests.
Do you want your web browser — that you may be using to access your banking account, or your shopping account, or an internet, or any sort of private content you want to keep secure — to allow every extension you install, forever and ever, to “intercept and modify network requests”… even if it initially didn’t, but then over time the developer, or whoever the developer might sell it to (see AdBlock and uBlock), might decide to “intercept and modify network requests”, for any reason they want, without any warning?
What is so wrong with the browser ASKING THE USER before denying/granting that permission to random extensions?
And how about having the browser let the user decide whether an extension is allowed to do that, on a per-website basis? I know, you can tell uBlock Origin to ignore a website… and “trust me, bro”? How about the browser enforced that instead?
What’s wrong with it is perfectly obvious: it doesn’t merely ask, it takes the decision away from you.
Edit: and what’s more, Firefox using v2 does ask. So like, what??
Is that what manifest v3 does though? Ask the user? I haven’t paid a lot of attention but thus far my overall impression has been that they are simply going to forbid a lot of useful things wholesale. Things that ad blockers need to function.
V3 blocks it
uBlock Origin is open source and can be freely audited by everyone. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
Does anyone check that updated versions pushed to the extension store, match the available source, and have no extra “features” included?
uBlock (not Origin) was also open source, then it got sold to AdBlock, which also had been sold, to a company that charges advertisers to bypass it.
uBO is in Firefox’ “recommended add-ons” list which are reviewed after every update.
You can check their criteria here:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-program
Yes, but other extensions are not and can access the same permissions. They can even steal the unlock origin source code to do so.
They could but only after you installed them and explicitly gave them the permission to do so. i don’t get your point.
Firefox does ask the user for this permission
Nice FUD you got there.