[erikrothoff]

As 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]

I 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]

I 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]

Isn'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]

At 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.

[tablespoon]

> I 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.

That's be true for some extensions, but it would be a big, big selling point for Mozilla to be able to say: our ad-blockers are better than yours.

There's also some incorrect binary thinking here. Why must Mozilla support only one extension standard? Mindless application of some software engineering principle? It would make total sense for them to support two: one with the features they want, and another for Chrome compatibility.