Manifest V3 — The hidden agenda
Chrome extensions are the most used and most loved feature of the Chrome browser. They appeared in 2012 and since then, developers have found multiple ways to ease people’s lives by resolving each individual’s problems. If you are reading this, you most probably tried at least once an extension.
Now, in 2022, Google has officially released the third version of their API and it brings some significant changes. Let’s take a look at them!
Compatibility
First of all, for a lot of people, V2 extensions will not be permitted on the Chrome Web Store starting January 2023. They will simply stop functioning. It is good though that Google gave us a whole year to update our extensions.
APIs
There are some welcoming changes, such as the introduction of promises in certain functions. What I find odd is the fact that they decided to not update all their APIs with promises, only some. For instance, one of the most used API, storage , still works with callbacks.
Most of the changes are good, if you want to see a more comprehensive list you can take a look at all of them here.
Some are not that good. A very important change is the deprecation of webRequestBlocking . This API is used for, as you guessed it, blocking certain web requests. This is used mostly by ad blockers, so there is a motive for Google to want to change this, since the whole business relies on ads for making money.
A replacement came in the form of declarativeNetRequest which is supposed to be a more “privacy-preserving and performant way”, but it lacks the ability to programatically block requests. You need to input a list of known websites or paths. This has already created issues with some in the ad-blocking community. Only time will tell what will happen!
What about other browsers?
Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Torch, Samsung Internet are just a few of the browsers that implement the Chromium project. This means that they are tied to whatever choices Google makes with the project, and in this case, they do not really have a say.
Brave does have a built-in ad-blocker, which is very nice and for now I’d advise on using it or switching to it, but for other browsers you’ll have to find another solution, if the developers are not going to find a way to bypass this.
Safari and Firefox use different engines, but combined they have 24% of the marketshare (~20% Safari, ~4% Firefox). Competition is good, but it pales in comparison with Google’ s 76%.
Something interesting coming from Firefox, is that they are going to support BOTH webRequestBlocking and declarativeNetRequest with their version of MV3. I believe this is an attractive move for power-users, and I like Firefox’s vision, but it just doesn’t have the performance of the Chromium engine and I’ve seen this problem even more on ThreeJS-type sites.
Conclusion
Google is not the company it was 15 years ago and if you care about your privacy and you hate ads, switch to Brave or to Firefox. Personally I’d suggest Brave, but they had a problem in the past with injecting their own promo codes in some cryptocurrency websites.
Are you going to switch browsers? What browser are you going to switch to? Feel free to tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
