Hacker News Reader

Comment by est | Hacker News Reader

If MS continues to support ManifestV2 in edge, I think the usage would increase.

Sadly they chose not.

Microsoft don't really invest the right kind of resources into Edge to make that happen. There are sound technical reasons (aside from the obvious financial reason) why Google wants to make this change, I suspect this'll unblock the Chromium team making a very substantial refactor of the networking layer which Microsoft can't feasibly maintain a fork of.

I wish all Chromium forks would band together to maintain a base that supports Manifest V2, it shouldn't be that difficult to each chip in some funding.

> I suspect this'll unblock the Chromium team making a very substantial refactor of the networking layer

I'm curious as to why you suspect this. Have they stated so?

The webRequestBlocking API exposes fairly low level hooks into the networking stack to the javascript layer which would be a significant limitation to performance optimisation in how requests are processed.

That said I've now read that the API is still available to policy based extensions (essentially OS installed extensions) in manifest v3, so that doesn't hold water since it's literally the same API.

They could do something really funny and just fork Chromium like Google forked WebKit.

The reality is that no business likes ad-blockers so why go through that trouble only to get less money?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com