I knew this was coming. Google said that they're committed to allowing userscripts in MV3, but they haven't even started the implementation. They're still in the proposal phase.
https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/279
In Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changesw3c
webextensions
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w3c / webextensions
webextensions
Charter and administrivia for the WebExtensions Community Group (WECG)
27Distinct people
45Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
723GitHub stars
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What it is
Charter and administrivia for the WebExtensions Community Group (WECG)
GitHub
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Brian Kardell's recent post "Webrise"[1] has similar exploration of what humanity might be able to do to become responsible stewards of one it's most important common means.…
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This week on Hacker News
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No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
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HN mentions by year45 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-06-05 10:49:12 UTC to 2026-07-31 14:57:28 UTC.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
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| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 1 | 12 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 16 | 0 | 16 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
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Read the project’s introduction
W3C WebExtensions Groups
This repository is the home for the W3C WebExtensions Community Group (WECG) and Working Group (WEWG).
Quick Links
📜 Draft Specification
📝 Meeting Minutes
Contributing & Issue Tracking
🤝 Contributing Guidelines
🌐 Browser-specific issue tracking
🐛 W3C Issue Tracker
WebExtension Community Group (WECG)
Focuses on gathering community feedback and early API design incubation.
🌐 W3C page
🏅 Charter
📅 Calendar
WebExtension Working Group (WECG)
Focuses on specification work and producing formal W3C Recommendations.
🌐 W3C Page
🏅 Charter
📅 Calendar
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
13 sourcesNice to see more than just ad-blocking covered.
The switching from capable, interesting Background Pages to ServiceWorkers is an issue so big you could drive a supertanker through it, it's so huge. There's a world of APIs that pages have, but ServiceWorkers don't, and the list of use cases not being served is epic[1] without even trying, still just barely a surface read. It's a vast reduction, a huge constraint, and it just doesn't seem like there's recognition of how nonsense this downgrade is.
There's some movement on supporting userscripts, but it's really hard to understand what the proposals really are, to me at least. One commented in the new set of proposals pointed out that the Google proposal wouldn't allow interacting with DOM elements[2], which just seems like a: hello, where are you? What are you doing? Earth to Google, what p
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lanet are you on?
[1] Use cases not served by service workers https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72
[2] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/279#issuecomment...
There's so many bad awful downgrades to life in MV3. The amount of issues & unsolved cases grows significantly month after month, but the only commits to the webextensions spec are meeting notes, where problems & horrors are abundant & vicious. Nothing is improving, nothing is getting better, no visible progress to heal or help is apparent visible or coming. This is a deathmarch project and it will never ever emerge from this valley of death, will never restore a fraction of what it in it's total ignorance took away.
This isn't an evil move, it's just a dumb one. The kerfuffle over adblockers is obvious & huge, but ultimately MV3 will definitely do something to make adblocking acceptable. Google is not going to make themselves look like a monster; this is perhaps the only "good" (one giant neutral nothingburger on both sides) news.
But my
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god, the other people being hit with various degredations are in such a hell-grade nightmare pickle. Userscript extensions are still fully hosed (ed: recent movement in issues spotted[1]!). Running dynamic code via Function (a common speed optimization for performance critical JS systems) or eval is still outlawed. Extensions lifecycle is far less clear & persistent than it used to be, and there's thousands of people who simply don't have an extension runtime to hold state for them anymore. Extensions used to be able to use a wide variety of "page" style APIs which are all now suddenly missing and "limited event pages"[2] and "offscreen pages"[3] arent making visible progress.
Meanwhile there's seemingly no visible advantages to users here. This 24th hour rewrite of what a webextension is (right before it's specified (rather than a tacit slowly evolved semi-agreement)) seems to serve a primarily abstract/rarely-experienced security concerns, while reducing extension power enormously. There's been no one to negotiate this trade-off. Extension developers have gotten nothing, users have gotten nothing, and extension capabilities have shrunk enormously. Personally I'd like to see the proprietary closed extension-store maintainers do a more active job of weeding out, helping us see good from bad, or giving us tools to peer-moderate, rather than simply shutting the door on the most critical user-agency boosting system, at the most critical 24th hour.
There's endless web spec discussions that go on, but this is the most enormous & massive re-negotiation of power the web has ever seen. So far, it's going poorly for everyone except the extensions-store operators, who seem chiefly to be concerned about making their jobs easier in the future, by making extensions far less capable. I can feel real & good intent underneath that: this isn't being done because of bad will. But the visible effects, the impact, is cruel: how could short lifecycle service workers with far less api & far less capability[4] be seen as anything less than a boldfaced theft of user-agency? To be honest: it's unclear how such a deeply impotent position as this was ever proposed or considered. Change is super hard, change management is hard, but this was not a good footing to start on.
Adblocking will be ok. This isn't evil. But this is for sure a much deeper, far more complicated fiasco of the highest & most critical importance to the web.
[1] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/279
[2] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/134
[3] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/170
[4] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72
It looks like it's being worked on, see <https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/279>.
In Manifest V3, webRequest, and ad blockersYou are right about requiring more case studies. In the same context, MV3 extensions are being moved away from persistent background pages to ephemeral service workers. There's a thread and several very popular crbugs for how the web-based service workers don't work well for extensions (https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72). Given all this, the Chrome team continues with the change citing increased performance when using service workers. However, even when extension developers continue to come out with claims of decreasing performance, the Chrome team - as in the malware case - has not provided any case studies on how it is so sure about the increased performance (or efficiency, memory use, etc.) of SWs.
In uBlock Origin Lite: DescriptionHey, I'm that Simeon/dotproto guy!
We discussed Chromium's current plan to support user scripts managers in Manifest V3 during our WebExtensions Community Group (WECG) session at TPAC[1] last week. The notes for that meeting haven't been merged yet, but there's an open PR[2] and when they are they will live here[3].
In short, the current plan in Chromium is to require end users and extension authors to opt into execution of arbitrary scripts via a Chromium UI setting and new permission, respectively. During the meeting Firefox folks raised some questions/concerns about this plan and it's probably best to try to align with them on next steps if possible.
And typing this out is making me realize we don't have a great tracking issue for this in the WECG repo. Just threw together a placeholder issue[4] to track discussion in this area.
[1]: h
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Regarding MV4: the WebExtensions working group has started to mention the term at some of their recent meetings, although details are scarce it seems MV4 will still retain JS code execution [1] [2].
[1]: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/main/_minutes/2022... (CTRL-F for "mv4")
[2]: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/main/_minutes/2022... (CTRL-F for "mv4")
In AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3The Charter of the WebExtensions Community Group (WECG)
1 points · Open discussionIt's a superset of Chrome's functionality. E.g. https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/134. The Web Extension API in Firefox is generally a lot bigger than Chrome's, so there's plenty of differentiation and I wouldn't call it a clone.
In Manifest v3 in Firefox: Recap and Next StepsThere's a range of different ways to author & uses for dynamic code.
In terms of use cases, downloaded on the fly code is definitely one example. Userscript engines like Greasemonkey, VioletMonkey, & TamperMonkey are all alao on the chopping block, which also allow user-edited code as well as downloaded code.
There's also a huge range of uses for dynamic code in general. Data stores & engines will optimize performance by using the Function constructor[1]. Cant do that anymore: basic, sensible, multi-decade long optimizations are now off the table. Being able to use eval() to dynamically generate a complex expression- no longer allowed.
It's bitterly ironic that Apple's prohibition against interpretters (a type of dynamic code) has held their platform back from allowing interesting things to run on iOS. Chrome's real rendering & js engines
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are blocked there. Because Apple says it's too unsafe to trust programs to do anything not statically defined, that only code that can all be fully read & understand is ok. Now here's Google & then Mozilla, bringing the exact same prohibitions against dynamic code to the web. At it's deepest heart. It's so ugly, so hypocritical, & so menacing & massive a threat to possibility, to extensions that can grow & develop.
Long hope, but a deep one: I very much hope one day (far away) a semantic-web like world wide web might emerge, but if this sick knee-capping happens the browser will never be a viable place for user agency- which must be a dynamic & growable organic thingh never be tenable as a place where user agency can grow & flourish. Extensions are amazing, but if they're restricted to single-purpose little timmicks, unflexible static predefined capabilities, Google will have insured that the only thriving systems the world will get will be inside the data center. These restrictions mortally cripple user-agency, that which is most special & most dear about the web & what set it apart from conventional software applications.
My open github issue[2] on this.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
[2] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/139
AFAIK, for the moment Mozilla is aware of the regressions that Manifest V3 causes and shows a good will to try to reduce them as much as possible. You can find some information about this here https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/tree/main/_minutes
In SingleFile: Save a complete web page into a single HTML fileMany thanks for the post. My apologies for getting this wrong! It does make more sense that bookmarklets would not have the privilege necessary. It'd be nice to give them an escape hatch, a way to escalate: `javascript+user:alert(1+1);` But this ultimately feels a lot less pernicious & more understandable (as an oversight) than I'd made things out to be.
I think you've got the eye on the ball here, on where the really important issues are shaking down. Diving back into smaller-grained topics, I find it interesting how much focus the web request interception has gotten versus so many other topics of the Web Extensions clamp-down happening. I couldn't find any discussion of the removal of eval/dynamic code, for example (daggers of irony: the same rule Apple uses to forbid v8 on iOS), & opened what I believe is the first issue against that.
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https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/139 . The background tasks discussion is another important one: extensions no longer having most of the web platform accessible to them would be extremely limiting. Discussion here is active (if not totally hope inspiring), with proposals such as "Limited Event Pages" https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/134 trying to move things into the right direction.