As an extension developer, I see a catastrophe coming for extensions in Chromium browsers. I don't think users are going to be prepared for the slaughter. You're going to lose a ton of extensions, and many others will be hobbled by manifest v3.

Firefox and Safari should be ok at least in the immediate future. I doubt Apple is going to announce next month at WWDC that v2 extensions will be dead in September 2022, even before Chrome kills them in 2023.

v3 is not even ready yet. There are still major bugs and missing features, which Mozilla's blog post alludes to. I'm postponing the migration myself as long as possible.

Firefox went through this before with the migration to WebExtensions in 2015. (That's when I stopped maintaining an extension that I no longer cared about.) I guess it's Chrome's turn now?

I expect, though, that users won't mind as much? I run very few extensions these days, due to the security risk, not wanting to vet extension authors, and not wanting to pay attention to the security implications of updates due to things like author changes.

Do you think there's a chance that Chrome will delay their timetable? My company's extensions are affected by this, and it's a total nightmare. I can't believe Chrome is forcing us off v2 before v3 is ready for primetime.

What's really frustrating is that users don't realize how much work goes into just keeping your head above water in the Chrome Webstore. They think that they shouldn't have to pay (or pay much) for an extension because it seems so simple. But they don't understand that complying with Google's ever-shifting rules means you can't ever get that comfortable.

> Do you think there's a chance that Chrome will delay their timetable?

Possibly. Google has delayed their timetable in the past for a number of Chrome changes.

> What's really frustrating is that users don't realize how much work goes into just keeping your head above water in the Chrome Webstore.

Agreed. Also, removing Chrome Web Store payments was a huge blow to extensions.

What's the uBlock Origin equivalent for Safari? Every time I think about switching to 'the better browser on my Mac' I find there is no such replacement.

There's no equivalent for Safari. There are a number of Safari content blockers, but the API is strictly limited. It's somewhat similar to declarativeNetRequest in Chrome manifest v3.

I know this is probably driven by Apple's opposition to anything that looks like dynamic code execution in extensions, but it seems weird for a company that's not completely dependent on ads the way Google is.

I think their angle is users not one-click installing ad-ware, ruining their browsing experience, and having them think "Safari sucks"

> I know this is probably driven by Apple's opposition to anything that looks like dynamic code execution in extensions

No, that's not it. It's mainly just one API, blocking webRequest: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

I find 1Blocker is sufficient, even if it’s not as flexible as ublock origin. I like that Safari’s content blockers are designed to make it easier to trust them (e.g. you don’t have to trust that they don’t send your browsing history to a server, because they cannot make network requests)

I use 1Blocker which is good enough for most browsing. I've tried one-man side projects like Wipr but I suppose they can't compete with an organization.

That said, uBlock Origin is definitely more exhaustive since it has a lot of contributors that will write custom rules for even obscure spammy websites, so shady websites are the main reason I do reach for uBlock Origin.

I think AdGuard runs well on Safari.

This is the day I move off of Microsoft Edge, uBlock Origin is a Required Extension imho

Also an Edge user, and I quite like it. If it loses uBlock Origin though, and if you still want a Chromium-based browser as I do/will because I tired of Firefox never being quite as fast as Chrome, that would leave Brave as the best option.

Fully open source like FF, built-in adblocking that's dependent on Manifest-nothing.