Revised proposals attempt to address worries over Manifest v3 API changes
Google has proposed changes to its Chrome Extension renovation plan that answer some but not all of the concerns its Manifest v3 technical specification.
The initial changes, announced in October last year, set off alarm bells last month when a critical mass of Chrome plugin developers finally realized what Google intended.
The Manifest v3 changes represent an attempt to address real issues for users of the Chrome browser, specifically the security and performance implications of third-party code that has access to sensitive data.
But the fixes Google initially suggested have broad implications. The Manifest v3 specification would break content and ad blockers, privacy extensions, and a host of other browser add-on code that relies on the ability to intercept requested web content before it gets rendered in the browser.
Much of the angst arises from planned changes to the webRequest API, through which Chrome extensions handle incoming web content; Google wants to limit the API and replace it with a neutered version, the declarativeNetRequest API.
The trouble is that as initially outlined, declarativeNetRequest is far too limited to accommodate current use cases.
