There's so many bad awful downgrades to life in MV3. The amount of issues & unsolved cases grows significantly month after month, but the only commits to the webextensions spec are meeting notes, where problems & horrors are abundant & vicious. Nothing is improving, nothing is getting better, no visible progress to heal or help is apparent visible or coming. This is a deathmarch project and it will never ever emerge from this valley of death, will never restore a fraction of what it in it's total ignorance took away.

This isn't an evil move, it's just a dumb one. The kerfuffle over adblockers is obvious & huge, but ultimately MV3 will definitely do something to make adblocking acceptable. Google is not going to make themselves look like a monster; this is perhaps the only "good" (one giant neutral nothingburger on both sides) news.

But my god, the other people being hit with various degredations are in such a hell-grade nightmare pickle. Userscript extensions are still fully hosed (ed: recent movement in issues spotted[1]!). Running dynamic code via Function (a common speed optimization for performance critical JS systems) or eval is still outlawed. Extensions lifecycle is far less clear & persistent than it used to be, and there's thousands of people who simply don't have an extension runtime to hold state for them anymore. Extensions used to be able to use a wide variety of "page" style APIs which are all now suddenly missing and "limited event pages"[2] and "offscreen pages"[3] arent making visible progress.

Meanwhile there's seemingly no visible advantages to users here. This 24th hour rewrite of what a webextension is (right before it's specified (rather than a tacit slowly evolved semi-agreement)) seems to serve a primarily abstract/rarely-experienced security concerns, while reducing extension power enormously. There's been no one to negotiate this trade-off. Extension developers have gotten nothing, users have gotten nothing, and extension capabilities have shrunk enormously. Personally I'd like to see the proprietary closed extension-store maintainers do a more active job of weeding out, helping us see good from bad, or giving us tools to peer-moderate, rather than simply shutting the door on the most critical user-agency boosting system, at the most critical 24th hour.

There's endless web spec discussions that go on, but this is the most enormous & massive re-negotiation of power the web has ever seen. So far, it's going poorly for everyone except the extensions-store operators, who seem chiefly to be concerned about making their jobs easier in the future, by making extensions far less capable. I can feel real & good intent underneath that: this isn't being done because of bad will. But the visible effects, the impact, is cruel: how could short lifecycle service workers with far less api & far less capability[4] be seen as anything less than a boldfaced theft of user-agency? To be honest: it's unclear how such a deeply impotent position as this was ever proposed or considered. Change is super hard, change management is hard, but this was not a good footing to start on.

Adblocking will be ok. This isn't evil. But this is for sure a much deeper, far more complicated fiasco of the highest & most critical importance to the web.

[1] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/279

[2] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/134

[3] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/170

[4] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72