For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
Problem is this requires SSL intercept- the browser has to blindly trust the proxy otherwise SSL verification will fail on the browser level
Antiviruses have been doing this for years.
Oh I'm not saying it's an unsolved problem. It's absolutely been done, both by antivirus programs and commercial firewalls (although the merits of the ladder are open to some debate).
I am just saying it adds a potential complication.
Yes it does but we can’t just sit back and give up because it’s more convenient.
Why not? It's what the rest of the browser world is doing... :P
'Google's dumping MV3 support, guess we have to dump it also, too bad so sad guess there's nothing at all to be done here'.
Jokes aside- I agree giving up (in any regard, including proxy-side filtering) is the wrong answer. But the more I'm thinking about this, the more I'm convinced that the current essentially Internet-wide reliance on Chromium (with a small carve-out for WebKit) is a real problem that needs urgent attention.
Mozilla's the obvious choice but they seem determined to piss off their users with UI rewrites and blow all their cash on literally everything other than browser development.
Sad thing is there's a real opening here. I was a mainly Mozilla user years ago. I switched to Chrome because it was fast- there was a youtube ad (which actually aired on TV for a while) showing Chrome rendering a webpage in 100ms. Those days are of course long gone. Partly because Chrome is now bloated with a ton of Google shit, partly because with fast javascript rendering, web developers started treating javascript as 'free' so now a news article comes with 10+mb of tracking code that literally runs an auction client side for advertisers to bid on the opportunity to bother you and many of the most basic websites are rendered client-side because why not.
Point is though- come up with a FAST, standards compliant rendering engine that can compete with Chrome, with no bloat, and push it as 'we are what Chrome was- fast, effective, clean'.