Looks like Chrome is “improving the user experience again. theregister.co.uk/2019/01/22/goo
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I don’t just mind that Google does user-unfriendly crap with their monopoly browser. What I really hate is the Orwellian doublespeak about how this is really all to make things better for their users.
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The alternative is that any extension can steal all your cookies and manipulate any content on every page you visit. Unfortunately that's how any API with the capability of the webRequest API must work, because that's how manipulating the HTTP stack works.
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What about the iOS approach? Blocker hands over what has to be blocked: Safari executes it. No information leakage towards plugins.
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That's exactly the proposal for the declarative API. It currently isn't good enough but it's only a proposal that's still some way away from shipping in even the experimental channels. It needs to support using far more rules along with a lot more flexibility to be a replacement.
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They want to move to a model where the content filtering engine is provided by the browser and extensions provide the filters, as a step towards removing the API exposing all web content to extensions. They're clear that the old API is staying around for the near future though.
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As long as they implement a good content filtering engine, it can become a viable way to implement nearly all the ad-blocking extensions. It will be faster and more reliable too, since there's no failure case where the extension times out or crashes and the content isn't removed.
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It's a request for comments about it and they've received a bunch of feedback on what needs to be better. I don't think ad-blocking extensions are going to be in trouble. The point of requesting feedback was determining in what ways it's going to be too limited for common uses.
On the other hand, extensions like uMatrix may be in trouble unless they keep around the old API forever. They could take an approach like making it much harder to upload an extension using it. This API is something that has been abused a huge amount for malware extensions, etc.