this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
476 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
60123 readers
2676 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In this specific context we are talking about Manifest V3 artificially limiting the number of rules in an extension. That's it, it's artificial, there is no reason for it to exist other than Google purposely degrading the capability. What does Mozilla have to gain by also degrading themselves?
Compatibility. You want to have enough users to be considered for being paid off, but not too little that you can be ignored. It's similar to the linux gaming move: on linux you can't just add a windows compatible interface to the kernel, so you have to translate it. Game developers thus focus on windows and ignore linux since there build process is completely different. As a browser, you sure as hell can introduce a common interface --> extension devs write their extension once and it run on firefox too. Users who care enough can thus switch without much hassle.
It's a numbers game.
It will still be compatible, Firefox just doesn't need to add a limiter, meaning the same extension will run better on Firefox than Chrome in the end. That's how I see this all unfolding at least. (I'm a javascript developer, I audit all the extension code I run generally, my perspective is purely technical and not political on the matter.)