“The EFF poked holes in most of Google’s justifications for Manifest V3 changes, saying that malicious extensions are mostly interested in stealing data and that Manifest V3 only stops extensions from blocking data, not inspecting it, so Google isn’t doing much to stop bad actors. The report says performance also isn’t a valid excuse, citing a study showing that ad downloading and rendering degrades browser performance.
Whether it’s explicitly or implicitly, Google’s ad division seems to have an increasing influence on the design of Chrome. The company refuses to block tracking cookies until it can first build a tracking and advertising system directly into Chrome.
Several extension developers are working on solutions within the Manifest V3 sandbox. There’s no way of knowing the end-user impact until these solutions are developed and Google kills the existing extension platform, but loudly rolling out user-hostile changes seems like one of the few things that could hurt Chrome’s market share. Firefox is still out there, along with an endless number of Chromium forks.”
