On: Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 Is Deceitful and ...

[ameshkov]

It's natural for Google in their public communication to quote positive stuff and not quote anything critical. Recently I tried to explain the current state of MV3 objectively: https://adguard.com/en/blog/chrome-manifest-v3-where-we-stan...

But yes, my opinion about MV3 did improve with time. Briefly: it is not ideal, DNR is not a full replacement for the blocking webRequest, but their work for the last several years made me hope that they can compensate for what we're losing by other platform improvements.

edit: grammar

[RedShift1 → ameshkov]

What if, and hear me out, all that effort went into MV2?

[ameshkov → RedShift1]

MV3 is basically MV2 with one tectonic change: replacing persistent background pages with ephemeral service workers. So a large part of this effort actually DID go into MV2.

There's a better question: what if instead of investing huge amount of times into DNR they put it somewhere else? For instance, into providing better tools for extensions to persist their state so that we didn't have to rewrite the extensions from scratch to make them work with the new service workers model? I think it would've been much much much better. Unfortunately, that's how hindsight works.

[davidmurdoch → ameshkov]

MV3 now brings "offscreen documents" and persistent service workers.

[ameshkov → davidmurdoch]

> MV3 now brings "offscreen documents"

Yeah, at first I thought of using offscreen documents as a replacement, but it appears that:

1. They're not persistent too.

2. They have a different purpose, they're supposed to be used as a temporary crutch that gives access to DOM features for the time until it's brought to service workers.

> persistent service workers

You're right to write it in cursive, there're ways to prolong the lifetime of a service worker, but they're not persistent anyways. All in all, the only reliable way to live with service worker is to rewrite extensions in a way that allows them to very quickly initialize after the service worker is brought back to life. For some extensions it's easy, for some it's quite a complicated task.

edit: formatting

[davidmurdoch → ameshkov]

I have it on good authority (Chrome Devrel) that the method described here https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/migrating/to-se... is no longer limited to only managed devices for enterprise or education.

[ameshkov → davidmurdoch]

Here’s what I heard: they are okay with such a workaround for now because they realize how hard it is to adapt to the new model, but in the future they’d prefer to see extensions adapt and be able to quickly reinit.