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Comment by fnordsensei | Hacker News Reader

What's a "proper" extension? The only things in the release notes seem to be about broadening the API somewhat.

They did not just broaden the API. Previously, extensions were written in Javascript, roughly following open web standards[0]. This let you write your extension (nearly) once and have it work in all web browsers.

Now, all of those Javascript extensions are deprecated (users can no longer install them). If you want your extension to work, you now have to rewrite the majority of it from scratch in Swift[1]

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...

Thanks for this information. How do the capabilities of the new API differ from the old one? If a developer is willing to put in the effort to do what Apple says, what extra capabilities do users get, and what existing capabilities are taken away?

I'm not asking about ad- / content-blockers, because that issue has been discussed many times and there's no value in rehashing that discussion. I'm asking about OTHER TYPES of extensions.

There were legacy extensions delivered outside the app store. Those are deprecated and with Safari 13 were removed.

There are other extensions delivered through the App Store you can install. For example, there is a uBlock extension there.

The "uBlock" app extension in the store has nothing to do with uBlock Origin. Do not install it.

What could be driving that, I wonder? Are they concerned with malware?

Regardless, it seems like a big thing to omit from the notes.

If I were to guess, probably performance and battery life. They emphasized efficiency when they introduced their own compiled blacklist API for content blockers.

At a guess: Engineering overhead of two separate extension models, the "real extension" model can't do the kind of cross process communication a lot of extensions really need (password managers, etc).

Then performance problems of extensions injecting and running a pile of JS into all pages.

But yeah, I am not looking forward to losing ublock. I (Safari fanboy) will probably delay updating as long as possible.

> Removed support for Legacy Safari Extensions.

It was in the notes. That's the line.

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