| > 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. |