The main dev on the WebRequest API sits right behind me, and is making steady progress. It's the first synchronous extension API that interacts with the network stack, and it's a nontrivial effort to get it running. I can assure you, however, that making life hard for privacy extensions is the exact opposite of what we're being paid to do.

Look at the progress on privacy-related APIs over the last year: WebRequest is coming along nicely, WebNavigation and ContentSettings are feature complete and in the final stages of polish, and Proxy went out to stable in Chrome 13. Privacy and Clear just landed in experimental, and we're iterating on them rapidly.

(Details on the state of each are available at http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/experimental....)