[charcircuit]

>That's not what we mean by static either.

What is a static filter list other than a list of filters that does not change?

>When you replied to gkbrk saying that dynamic filters were supported you were not correcting misinformation

I was saying that the filter list was dynamic and not static.

>"Just inject scripts into the webpage" is a wild take

I was pointing out the upper bounds of what was possible and not giving recommendation on how it should be done.

>So it's not supported.

That is right.

>you want me to pretend that developer concerns have been addressed

No, I want people interested in this feature to track the bug or contribute the fix themselves since it is an open source project.

>it is reasonable to conclude that either Google does not see addon support as a priority worth investing sufficient developer resources into

That is correct in my understanding. This means that the open source community needs to dedicate their own resources if they want to accelerate progress here.

>the inability of an extension to load before the browser starts sending requests is a non-issue to you

Assuming no events are dropped then I don't see it as an issue.

>doesn't make the wild decision to start loading pages before the user's addons have initialized.

It doesn't sound that wild if it speeds up launch time by not blocking on third party extensions having to load.

>it's also about when it happens and the fact that (as mentioned above) uBO Lite can't guarantee that it will be running when a request is made

This is not an issue as the extension does not need to be running for the browser to apply the rules. The extension is only needed to update the rules.

>Well, it's a good thing that Google is waiting for MV3 to become mature and it's a good thing that MV2 won't stop working in June, right? /s

Considering that the deadline keeps being pushed back, I think they recognize that it has low maturity.

[gkbrk]

> What is a static filter list other than a list of filters that does not change?

A request is being made. At the time of the request, you go through a list of rules and decide if you're going to block or allow it.

Once the request reaches the filter, you are working with a static list because you cannot make decisions using the content or circumstances of that particular request. You cannot add or remove anything to your list after looking at the request.

A dynamic filter on the other hand could

- Resolve hostnames with DNS to do CNAME uncloaking

- Decode encoded requests so the website cannot send both real data and analytics/tracking data through a single URL. Being able to make dynamic decisions allows the ad blocker to inspect request headers and request bodies.

- Modify responses. The web page could be getting ads from a JSON endpoint with the rest of the page. You can use filterResponseData and change the response dynamically to strip the ads return an empty JSON list for example.

[danShumway]

Exactly. Or in other words:

> It also reduces ad blockers to static filter lists instead of powerful dynamic filters. MV3 makes it impossible for ad-blockers to inspect requests with code and then allow/deny dynamically.

I'm assuming the best here, but it is extremely clear what you meant by a "static filter" in your comment. You meant a filter where it is "impossible for ad-blockers to inspect requests with code and then allow/deny dynamically."

It's a little frustrating to have to pretend that any of this is ambiguous.

[danShumway]

> No, I want people interested in this feature to track the bug or contribute the fix themselves since it is an open source project.

> That is correct in my understanding. This means that the open source community needs to dedicate their own resources if they want to accelerate progress here.

OR... hear me out: we could recognize that Chrome, a browser owned by one of if not the most powerful tech companies in the entire world, does not need charity, and that it's not a community owned project (if it was, MV2 would not be getting deprecated), and that the community has no say in how the project gets updated or maintained and is fact very regularly treated with hostility by the project, and that instead of trying to fix an issue that Google probably isn't even interested in getting help with, we could instead go use and contribute to Open Source browsers that aren't transparently trying to kill adblockers.

This is wild. You went from "MV3 is fine, there's just a lot of misinformation" to "MV3 is trying, but the devs are overworked" to "nobody is allowed to complain about this unless they're giving hecking Google free labor."

Google made a decision to deprecate a working API, developers correctly pointed out that the API hobbles adblockers, Google has not fixed the API but is launching it anyway, and your answer is that the open source community needs to dedicate their own resources. This problem is not our fault, we didn't make it.

How about Google not completely rewrite an API out of the blue if they don't have the internal resources necessary to do so? Is there some hiring freeze on developers, has Google lost the ability to hire and pay people? Google creates a problem, and you're blaming the Open Source community for not fixing Google's problem for them, a problem that exists entirely of Google's own free will, because Google ignored the Open Source community that was desperately trying to stop Google from making the problem.

The Open Source community has a solution to this; don't deprecate blockingWebRequest. Like most community feedback, Google isn't interested in hearing that.

I would suggest that if Open Source developers need to contribute somewhere, they could try contributing to Firefox, a browser that has none of these problems because somehow a company that is so small its entire corporate profits would barely register in Google's spreadsheets is still better at building extension APIs than Google is.

----

> Assuming no events are dropped then I don't see it as an issue.

It's an issue because extensions sometimes like to respond to events when they happen. If the browser stopped allowing synchronous responses to click events and I said, "well as long as they eventually trigger there's no issue" I would be rightly laughed out of the room.

The issue is that a user can update filters and they have no guarantee that the filters will be updated before the requests that they mean to block are fired off. If an adblocking extension does decide to update filter rules on launch, they have no guarantee that the update will take effect before the page loads.

> It doesn't sound that wild if it speeds up launch time by not blocking on third party extensions having to load.

Not loading the extension at all would speed up launch time even more, Google should just get rid of extensions entirely /s

People use extensions as a way to increase security and to build reliable features into the browser. There are many use-cases from tab-control to feature toggles where having tabs and pages load before extensions breaks functionality. It is wild to suggest that breaking functionality in userspace is preferable to adding an extra second to a browser launch.

For many people, adblocking is a security issue. To suggest that the browser should occasionally just send requests anyway before an extension has time to update and apply rules is like suggesting that a desktop should start loading and displaying user settings before it checks the user's login password.

> This is not an issue as the extension does not need to be running for the browser to apply the rules.

See above.

----

> Considering that the deadline keeps being pushed back, I think they recognize that it has low maturity.

This is once again a pretty big shift from "MV3 doesn't stop adblockers" to "MV3 isn't ready yet and they should keep pushing it back." It's also optimistic given that Google has given no indication yet that they're going to push back the June deadline.

But most importantly, it also doesn't change anything about my point -- we are seeing that Google does not have the resources to keep pace with adblocking innovations. That's not going to change. This is not a question of MV3 becoming ready and then everything becoming fine: "ready" is a moving target, and Google is not moving fast enough to keep pace with it.

What these issues demonstrate is that the declarativeNetRequest API is poorly designed -- it is poorly designed because it greatly increases the support requirements from Google to a level where the company is unable to meet them. And when Google is unable to meet those support requirements, user security and privacy suffers as a result.

This is an intrinsic problem that is baked into the design of declarativeNetRequests, and it's not going away even if Google does manage to close a couple of bugs. Because more of these issues are coming every time that adblockers need to innovate. If an API increases support burdens to the point where the dominant browser owned by the most powerful tech company has to come crawling to the Open Source community for help triaging 3-year-old issues, then it's a bad API.

And underlying all of the criticism of MV3 is that idea -- that it is not tenable for extension developers to have to request support for every individual feature that adblockers need. A better API would be a more flexible API that allows extension developers to innovate without asking permission. blockingWebRequest is an imperfect API and it has issues, but it allows extension developers to innovate without filing support tickets for every new feature and then waiting 3 years for a response because the API is flexible enough that extension developers can use it in creative ways that the authors may not have fully anticipated or known about.