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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that Microsoft has joined the webRequest API deprecation club, though it's not too surprising, after all they are also in the advertising business, and it makes no sense to maintain a Chromium patch that could actually be detrimental to their revenue.

Innovation around ad blockers will now be largely constrained by browser vendors evolving the declarativeNetRequest API.

Mediocre ad blockers like Adblock Plus will happily adapt to the new limited API to fill in any void created by uBlock Origin, and most users will not immediately notice the damage that has been done.

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So much for the browser being a user agent.

We'll have to run our own fork of Chromium, just to run uBO. And that makes sense: it's strange to call a browser supplied by an ad company a "user agent".

Except that that's what a browser is supposed to be, according to all the web specs and security models -- an agent who acts for the user and on the user's authority.

Troy citizens also believed that if something is called a horse and looks like a horse, then it's obviously a horse and can't be anything else, especially when it's given for free.

I think we’re arguing the same thing... my point though is that when a browser ceases to act on users’ behalf then users should withdraw trust from it.

Forking Chromium is likely an unsustainable proposition unless backed by a large corp (or VC/philanthropy money) and a value proposition non-tech people can understand.

What about Brave? Any idea what their stance is on this?

Brave's business model is also about ads.

I'd be happy if Firefox were a modified version of Chromium for developers/power-users/hackers that prioritized every feature in the user's interest (at their own risk).

Has Firefox's position on this changed? Do they still plan to keep the blocking webRequest API supported, at least for now?

Mozilla has not yet taken a clear and supportive position on the issue of blocking with the webRequest API, though they are planning to implement Manifest V3 in some form.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/09/03/mozillas-manifest...

I'm aware of the blog post, but "no immediate plans" is not as reassuring as it needs to be for users to switch browsers, and for extension developers to invest in the platform.

> We have no immediate plans to remove blocking webRequest and are working with add-on developers to gain a better understanding of how they use the APIs in question to help determine how to best support them.

I think stronger language is needed to reassure people that continuing to offer powerful extension APIs is truly important for Mozilla.

Mozilla is almost entirely funded by Google.

Are there good uBlock replacements using new API?

It's disheartening to see this misinformation expressed so strongly - Chromium's privacy mandate led them to implement Safari's version of ad blocking - the status quo of allowing extensions to see _all your web traffic_ was a _massive_ platform risk for privacy.

Only the blocking capabilities of the webRequest API are deprecated, observing traffic remains intact in Manifest V3.

Extensions will continue to enjoy access to your data, while ad blockers will have a harder time to react to the countermeasures introduced by ad networks.

Right, because it's only about conflict between browser vendors and 3rd party extension vendors. Somehow the user, a dumb machine browsing web, is only meant to be protected my browser vendor. There's no way for relantionship between user and extension vendor anymore.

You make me sick.

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