[WhatIsDukkha]

The tone of this post concerns me.

What comes across is that Google is not collaborating with Mozilla over the Manifest v3 changes.

Instead of using and appreciating the engaged Firefox developer ecosystem we have PM conference rooms in Google mandating huge changes based on... well they've been shady so far about their choices on Manifest v3.

The other thing that keeps bugging me about this is -

We need a tiered App store for browsers. Part of the lockdown Google wants to do isn't wrong but its driven by having WAY too many bad actors and shoddy developers in their Chrome store.

If you have an opensource web extension, a reasonable community and with reproducible builds? You can use more powerful API versions.

If you are jrando bizplan #2000283 you get the kinda trusted tier.

Frankly if Debian had a web browser extension "store" with 20 things in it, I'd use that exclusively and turn off both the Chrome and the Firefox store 100%.

[beacker]

> Frankly if Debian had a web browser extension "store" with 20 things in it, I'd use that exclusively and turn off both the Chrome and the Firefox store 100%.

There are a handful of extensions for Firefox and Chrome in the Debian repositories: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=webext-&searchon...

[WhatIsDukkha]

WOW that's awesome!

It's actually pretty close... no Vimium but ublock origin/matrix, tree style tab, privacy badger, browserpass

<3

Here is what's in Sid -

https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=sid&searchon=names&...

[derefr]

> a tiered App store

We kinda have one; the tiers are "the public app store" and "your enterprise's private collection of apps, whitelisted by GSuite policy on your GSuite users."

Things are in equilibrium because no big player is complaining; and no big players are complaining because they have all their needs met by just 1. getting custom extension builds from vendors, 2. signing them with their enterprise cert, 3. pushing them to some object store, and 4. telling GSuite to allow them (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pT0ZSbGdrbGvuCsVD2jjxrw-...).

[xvector]

> we have PM conference rooms in Google mandating huge changes based on... well they've been shady so far about their choices on Manifest v3.

I'd like one of the PMs at Google working on this feature to engage in actual community discussion around this issue.

Google is not a monolithic corporation. Individual people are responsible for these decisions. These people are obligated to discuss why they are making these changes, else they deserve to be called out if they refuse to do so.

Is it too much to ask for these PMs to take some personal responsibility and engage in discussion for the far-reaching changes they are forcing upon society?

[aledalgrande]

I don't think Google would have published a public note about their plans if there hadn't been a previous discussion.

[unixhero]

> Frankly if Debian had a web browser extension "store" with 20 things in it, I'd use that exclusively and turn off both the Chrome and the Firefox store 100%.

Yeah like the F-Droid [0] appstore ecosystem for Android.

[0] - https://f-droid.org/

[masklinn]

> What comes across is that Google is not collaborating with Mozilla over the Manifest v3 changes.

Well… duh? Google will do whatever it wants with no regards to anyone else unless they're forced to do otherwise, and "the market" will not force them to do otherwise unless their very large browser majority falls. From the moment mozilla decided (/ was forced) to adopt chrome extensions they were bound to follow google's whims.

[mikekchar]

Having done a fairly long stint in the telephony world, I can say that the general purpose of standards committees is to rush through a whole bunch of hacky changes on your platform and then strong arm everyone else to implement what you did -- the more work they have to do the better; the worse it fits into their original ecosystem the better. Your goal is to make your competition perpetually play catch up and to have a slightly wonkier version of your system.

People in large organisations take this stuff very seriously and it can be difficult for other people to concentrate on making a good spec that will work well for everybody. The idea is that the market is pretty much the same size whether you have a fantastic application or a hacked together application. What matters for the company is what percentage of the market share you have. It's worth a considerable amount of fit-for-purpose in order to lock in eternal advantage over your competition.