Google Chrome will shut down its older, more capable extension system, Manifest V2, in favor of exclusively using the more limited Manifest V3. The highly controversial Manifest V3 system was announced in 2019 and the complete change was delayed a million times, but Google now says it’s really going to make the transition: as previously announced, the phasing out of old Chrome extensions begins next week. .
Google Chrome has been working on a plan for a new, more limited extension system for some time now. Google says it created the “Manifest V3” extensions with the goal of “improving the security, privacy, performance, and reliability of the extensions ecosystem.”
Other groups disagree with Google’s description, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which called Manifest V3 “misleading and threatening” when it was first announced in 2019, saying the new system “will restrict the capabilities of web extensions”. especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute in parallel the conversation your browser is having with the websites you visit. It has a full article detailing how Manifest V3 won’t help with security.
Comments from the Firefox team also questioned Google’s justification for Manifest V3. During a presentation on the implications of Manifest V3, Philipp Kewisch, head of Firefox add-ons operations, said: “For malicious add-ons, we believe that for Firefox it has been at a manageable level, and as Add-ons are primarily interested in retrieving data, they can still do that with the current Web Query API (in Manifest V3).” Firefox plans to support Manifest V3 because Chrome is the most popular browser in the world and wants extensions to be compatible with all browsers, but it has no plans to disable support for Manifest V2.
A big source of skepticism around Manifest V3 concerns limitations related to “content filtering,” that is, the APIs that ad blockers and anti-tracking extensions use to combat ad companies. like Google. Google, which makes about 77% of its revenue from advertising, hasn’t released a serious explanation of why Manifest V3 limits content filtering, and it’s unclear how well this fits with the objectives of “improving security, confidentiality, performance and reliability”. “As Kewisch said, the main goal of malicious extensions is to spy on users and scrape data, which has nothing to do with content filtering. All this is happening while Google is building a advertising system directly in Chrome and that Google properties like YouTube are taking aggressive action against ad blockers.
The initial release of Manifest V3 was detailed in 2019, and since then Google has gone back and forth with the extensions community and made some concessions. Google says it has increased the number of filtering rule sets allowed by Manifest V3, which should help ad blockers. One drastic change is that filtering extensions will no longer be able to update their rulesets themselves, and any filtering updates will require a new version submitted to the Chrome extension store, which includes a security review that could last weeks. In the cat-and-mouse game of ad blockers, you can imagine how this could allow YouTube to instantly change the ad system, while counterattacks from ad blockers could be delayed for weeks. Google now says it’s possible for extensions to skip the review process for “safe” ruleset changes, but even that is limited to “static” rulesets, not “dynamic” rulesets. ” more powerful.
In a comment to The Verge last year, EFF principal technologist Alexei Miagkov summed up Google’s public negotiations with the extensions community well, saying: “These are useful changes, but they are adjustments to a system limited by design. The big problem remains the same: if extensions can’t innovate, users lose and trackers win… We now all depend on Google to continue evolving the API to keep pace with advertisers and trackers.
Google says, “More than 85% of actively maintained extensions in the Chrome Web Store run Manifest V3, and the top content filtering extensions all have Manifest V3 versions available.” The company does not mention that the Manifest V3 version of the most popular ad blocker is “uBlock Origin Lite”, with the “Lite” indicating that it is inferior to the Manifest V2 version.
As for how this phaseout will play out, Google says that next week, Chrome betas will start seeing warning banners on the extensions page for any Manifest V2 extensions they have installed. V2 extensions will also lose their “featured” status in the Chrome extension store. Google says extensions will start being disabled in “the coming months.” For a short time, users will be able to re-enable them if they visit the extension’s page, but Google says that “over time, this toggle will also disappear.” At this point, you can either search the Chrome Store for alternatives or switch to Firefox.
News Source : arstechnica.com
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