[Sidnicious]

Extensions should act on behalf of users but, like websites, some don't. A questionable or poorly-maintained extension can do more damage than any single website, and browsers can support user agency by replacing APIs with better ones: an effective declarative API for content blocking would majorly speed up extensions like uBlock Origin and make it harder for other extensions to follow users around the web.

That said, we should all fight for changes that let extensions like uBlock maintain feature parity.

Disclaimer: I'm both a Chromium developer and a uBlock Origin user and speak only for myself.

[chacham15]

If you create a superior api (esp w/regards to speed) people will naturally move to extensions which use that api. Then once usage of the old api has dropped significantly, you can deprecate the old api.

[rkangel]

It has been proven time and time again, that that's at best only partially true. There are two factors:

If they have something working with one API, they have to have a good reason to re-implement it with a new API. It may be 'fast enough' and reliable, so why go through all that pain?

Or, it's just the long tail of API consumers (e.g. site on the web). Some things aren't maintained and updated, but they don't go away.

[fapjacks]

I would gladly live in the universe which is a smoking bomb crater of questionable and poorly-maintained browser extensions, than be a wealthy rock star in any universe of amazingly performant extensions, but which are using a browser API which has denied my right to self-determination on my own computer, effectively taking away my ability to say "no" to actions which are then forced upon me. This is like a kind of information rape. And here the suggested "alternative" of static, declarative, JSON-only filters means no programmatic ability to veto requests before they happen. It is effectively forcing users to leap before they look. And this completely arbitrary limit on the number of filters -- and it is completely arbitrary -- is the same kind of neutering mechanism, forcing me to "prioritize" a small number of request vetoes. In other words, it's forcing me choose the manner in which the rape happens.