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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

I have a couple of popular extensions on the line, and I no longer see a way to stop Google without immediate government intervention. I am confident that they are not acting entirely in good faith, regardless of the much needed and useful parts of Manifest V3. They will get away with anything, be fined again in a couple of years for the growing list of illegalities they commit, and now they'll also harm the browser extension ecosystem.

Some of the extensions I maintain will no longer work, or have reduced functionality for no acceptable reason, and some of the projects that I have been preparing to release have now been abandoned, because they rely on having proper control over requests in the browser.

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> I have a couple of popular extensions on the line, and I no longer see a way to stop Google without immediate government intervention

As the developer of extensions that are impacted by Google's anti-competitive actions, you can report how this impacts both you, and the market as a whole, to the competition and antitrust divisions of the government. I've posted links to forms and sites that you can use to report to the relevant state-level and federal-level regulators on HN here[1].

If you aren't in the US, the US also has antitrust legislation that applies to US companies operating in foreign countries, as well as a myriad of antitrust treaties and agreements with other nations. It might be worth it to also report it to the government of the country you reside in, as well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28176193

Make them first class Firefox extensions.

I mean you can, but firefox doesn't treat you any better. We waited 2+ months to get a minor update through review, and getting it through that quickly took emailing several folks (including one from HN). During that whole process they also removed the display of your queue position, making it even more opaque.

At some point they disliked something in our extension that had been live for months, and disabled every release in the past year. At another point they found something wanting in a 2 year old release (not a recent one) and threatened to remove it from the store, our attempts to continue that conversation or just allow it to be pulled to save everyone some time met with crickets.

At this point I am seriously wondering if Mozilla is paid to drive Firefox into the ground.

This does feel like it is the case doesn't it?

I really want to like firefox but I hate it more with every release.

It is still the best browser for me even when I don't consider my dislike for Google.

It is just - for me at least - not lovable anymore.

That may explain the inverse correlation between salary and market share. You'd have to pay a lot to convince a leader to do this deliberately.

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