And after they specifically said:

>Sorry no updates yet. Please star the bug if you wish to see this fixed sooner.

Okay Google, we've starred the bug. Please fix now.

I think this is the real story here. Google pretends to be listening to real-world use-cases and user feedback and developing Chromium in the open, but at the end of the day, some manager has decided the millions of people using these extensions aren’t worth supporting, and that’s the end of the conversation.

opensource coming from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI or even recent garbage coming from RedHat is just a nice facade. It's broken, it's locked to a platform, often no compiling instructions or out of date by 3 years with multiple bug reports. It's just a marketing move that came from Google early 00s' and then was widely adopted by MS: "Microsoft <3 OpenSouce - Contribute Here (for us for free, we can't be bothered to fix this TOP 10 bug or update documentation)".

It's not really any different for Firefox though is it? In fact it's not really any different for any big open source project. Someone ultimately has the power to decide what features to develop and nothing forces them to listen to their users.

Look at things like Firefox's Pocket integration, or like all of Gnome.

It's not about support, it's a money issue. Adblocking doesn't generate money, so out it goes.

But we are talking about proxy extensions, not ad block extensions.

">Sorry no updates yet. Please star the bug if you wish to see this fixed sooner."

Translation: my manager is blocking this; please star this so have a better chance of changing his mind.

Chromium team replied as of 10 minutes ago to that thread (thanks to HN exposure):

"I'm temporarily restricting comments to keep comments from turning into +1s while this is trending on Hacker News. If you have additional thoughts that you'd like to share with the Chromium team regarding this issue, please return in a few days to leave a comment (and apologies for the inconvenience)."

"As a Chromium contributor that shares information about our progress on extensions issues, I sincerely apologize to extensions developers affected by this issue and the broader community for not sharing an update until now. I'm currently working on a "known issues" document for Manifest V3 that touches on several outstanding issues (including this one), but given the attention on this issue now, I'll quickly share our current thinking on this issue."

"We have always intended to provide support for this functionality in Manifest V3 (for both user-installed and force-installed extensions), and have been iterating on different possible approaches. Our tentative plan (which is not yet finalized) is that the Manifest V3 version of this capability will require extensions to request a new permission scoped to intercepting authentication requests, but will otherwise allow extensions to handle these requests in a similar manner to how they do in Manifest V2."

"The permission string and end user facing warning string have not been finalized yet. Also, we have not yet finalized how this new permission will interact with other permission grants, but extensions that currently have the webRequest permission and broad host permissions will likely not require an additional grant for this permission."

"Finally, I want to note that before we can pursue this capability, we first need to resolve issue 1024211 (now formally marked as a blocker). We are actively working on 1024211 and aim to resolve both that issue and this one before January 2023."

Ohh that's nice. So we're gonna get a fix last week of December, and will have to dev around a new API in a few days, test everything, and release it to millions of users hoping for the best.

Man, Google sucks.

So, they should also delay blocking of MV 2 if they aren't gonna give time to other developers. But nah, chromium team just wanted to block the comments so they don't get bad PR. Google is such a shame these days.

It's cases such as these invalidate the "they're not acting with malice". Thousands of google employees see this stuff, and are clearly being told they can't talk about it.

You haven't applied Hanlon's Razor properly. They're just coordinating incompetence that they find beneficial, not being malicious.

If you are coordinating the incompetence then you are malicious even if the incompetent are not.

Someone in authority said or inferred some version of "don't talk about this, don't get involved". That's malicious.

I think it's more likely that no one wanted to take ownership of it, so no one did.

Sufficiently weaponized incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

The act of weaponizing incompetence is itself malicious.