Comment by HellsMaddy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HellsMaddy | Hacker News Reader

Manifest V2 deprecation is likely going to break extensions that inject userscripts, like Tampermonkey [0] and SurfingKeys [1]. The Chrome team has been rather unhelpful. They've promised to add support for power-user tools like these in MV3:

dotproto from the Chrome team commented on May 27 [2]:

> @mon-jai, the short answer is no, I don't have any updates to share. That said, I'll reaffirm that we plan to support userscript managers in Maniest V3 before the Manifest V2 deprecation.

But the deprecation is approaching and the Chrome team hasn't released any more information about this AFAIK. These extensions are going to require large refactors to support MV3 and they can't meaningfully start until the Chrome team elucidates how script injection will work. With MV2 deprecation coming so soon, I worry there won't be enough time.

[0]: Manifest V3: examine the effects · Issue #644 · Tampermonkey/tampermonkey: https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644

[1]: Migrate to Manifest V3 · Issue #1821 · brookhong/Surfingkeys - https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys/issues/1821

[2]: https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644#issu...

Hey, I'm that Simeon/dotproto guy!

We discussed Chromium's current plan to support user scripts managers in Manifest V3 during our WebExtensions Community Group (WECG) session at TPAC[1] last week. The notes for that meeting haven't been merged yet, but there's an open PR[2] and when they are they will live here[3].

In short, the current plan in Chromium is to require end users and extension authors to opt into execution of arbitrary scripts via a Chromium UI setting and new permission, respectively. During the meeting Firefox folks raised some questions/concerns about this plan and it's probably best to try to align with them on next steps if possible.

And typing this out is making me realize we don't have a great tracking issue for this in the WECG repo. Just threw together a placeholder issue[4] to track discussion in this area.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/7bbba4a3-8305-45cd-a998-6...

[2]: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/pull/277

[3]: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/main/_minutes/2022...

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

I appreciate you sharing these resources. I would also like to apologize if my original comment was unfairly critical of the Chrome/Chromium Team. I understand MV2->MV3 is a complex and challenging endeavor. I just hope nobody gets left behind!

If chunks of functionality are missing from MV3 with no available alternative, if the replacement is really at such an early stage of development like this, it would be silly not to delay mandatory adoption by another year or two. (Including requiring new extensions to be MV3 - from what I'm reading here, it sounds like you're really not ready for that and should undo it.) Please don't be another https://goomics.net/50/. It's so much worse when it happens externally in an ecosystem.

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