Mozilla says Google’s content-filter API doesn’t meet developer needs, others agree
Firefox maker Mozilla on Thursday said it plans to mostly adopt Manifest v3, a controversial revision of the Chrome browser extension framework that Google undertook to address the glaring security problems in the browser. Mozilla, which relies on Google for the majority of its royalty revenue, found much that’s worthwhile in Manifest v3. But it plans to retain the blocking webRequest API that’s among the most consequential casualties of the technical transition in Firefox, at least until there’s a replacement more suitable to the web community than Google’s alternative, declarativeNetRequest (DNR). „We will support blocking webRequest until there’s a better solution which covers all use cases we consider important, since DNR as currently implemented by Chrome does not yet meet the needs of extension developers,“ said Rob Wu, senior software engineer at Mozilla, in a blog post. This is a more definitive position statement than Mozilla made in September,2019, when the company said it would wait and see how the spec evolved – a process that’s still ongoing. The issue web developers have with Manifest v3 is that Google’s efforts to limit harm from misbehaving extensions also threaten collateral damage to capabilities used by legitimate content blocking and privacy extensions, among others. The blocking webRequest API (which will be retained in Chrome for enterprise users) can be abused for injecting malicious code but it’s more commonly employed to alter network requests and content headers on the fly as a means of thwarting intrusive ad tech.
