Google seems much too sure of itself making this change. I hope their arrogance pays off just the same as Microsoft's did with IE.
I think it's part of a much bigger trend in tech in general but also in Google: Removing user control. When you look at the "security" things they are doing, many of them have a common philosophy underpinning them that the user (aka device owner) is a security threat and must be protected against. Web integrity, Manifest v3, various DoH/DoT, bootloader locking, device integrity which conveniently makes root difficult/impossible, and more.
To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in. The next generation won't have the wonderful and fertile computing environment that we enjoyed, and it's (partly) your fault.
However, it is important to also understand that the employee is not the only stakeholder. Government agencies answer to legislators, nonprofit management answer to donors, corporate management answer to investors, etc. There are layers of compliance that must be considered as well (internal policies, external regulations, different insurance costs, etc.). It is unsurprising that these fewer but generally deep-pocketed entities have an outsized influence on the market compared to more numerous but less moneyed end users. If you refuse to serve the former, you may quickly find yourself out of business.
That said, I don't like that the choice is being taken away. If you do want to tinker at that level with the technology you own, you should be given the choice. By all means make it not obvious how to get there - like, have people reboot their computers while playing Twister on their keyboards with interesting key combos, but give them the option.
Take, for example, hardware attestation on android. There's not really any serious issue with this feature, it can be used to ensure your device is not compromised. This is for example how GrapheneOS enables its use with the auditor application.
But, on the other hand, Google abuses the feature to ensure that you are running a google signed OS if you want to use Google Pay. Meanwhile you can use banking apps which also use hardware attestation (although, from their perspective, they don't use enough of it to ensure it isn't being spoofed, and even then...) without any problem on GOS. Moreover, before Google Pay completely killed all of its competition, it was possible to even find third party banks which would provide you with the ability to pay with your phone without using google pay.
Likewise, secure boot is a great concept if you want to be more sure about the integrity of your laptop throughout its lifetime. But some companies have abused it to force you to use Windows. If you want to set up your own signing keys for secure boot, you end up having to deal with poorly managed UEFI keys from third parties which weaken the security of your machine. The feature, as it's implemented, is rarely designed with helping end user's secure their machines. But the core of the design is fine.
I think limiting root on a phone is also a really good idea, the issue is that Google likes to give themselves and their "system apps" special privileges. If APIs were exposed to allow you to bless your own applications with the right permissions, you would probably not care so much about root restrictions.
So all in all, fundamentally, most of these features are fine. They're genuinely great for security. But the main problem is how they're abuse by the companies in control and how little effort is put into allowing power-users to use those features for their own benefit.
> It is not fair that Siri is the only one that can access these things now.
That would be true if it was, but it isn't.
When the OS is fundamentally in the user's control, they are limited in what they can do, but when the OS disregards it's owners preferences/desires and enforces it's creators desires.
Minor thing actually:
> If APIs were exposed to allow you to bless your own applications with the right permissions, you would probably not care so much about root restrictions.
I absolutely agree with this in theory, but in practice I'm not sure it would ever work because they just aren't going to put in the work to build and maintain APIs for things they don't care about, and there would be a very long tail of things to do (and sometimes those things are legitimately a lot of work). Call recording being a classic example.
But all in all, I very much agree. I love those features when they are in my control on my devices. Biggest issue is, they virtually never are and the number of occurences is trending down.
Anyway,
There's another problem with Chrome, which is that nobody is actually paying for it. So the big corps move features along there only in the sense that they won't adopt it or will drop it otherwise. I don't think the big corps are pushing for Mv3 but they also probably don't care that it arrives either. Conversely, I wager Google estimates nearly nobody will revolt and leave Chrome over the loss of Mv2. It hurts ad-blocker developers and it hurts the most conscious users, but Chrome is a marketing product targeted at mass adoption first and foremost. I personally hope their estimation is wrong and the current browser monopoly breaks, but this may not yet be the breaking point.
Even if that happens, Chrome eagerly adopting enterprise policy support may keep it on life support in that environment, though.
That was a world where the user base was much more limited and devices were less capable. Now we have children, grandparents, educated, and uneducated users with access to web connected devices. These devices now contain everything about you. Compromise of a device can destroy someone’s life.
Not only that, but compromise of a device can cause collateral damage to other devices on the same network.
We now have to cater to every user. Not just to the technologically adept. Look at what people believe on social media. The bar is so low to con people into compromising their device.
The browser is called a user agent, but this shift to absolute security no matter what, no say about it is a shift to native apps, is a shift to the developer is in control, is a shift to this being Google and the sites browser, not ours, and that being done unilaterally with nearly no opt outs is the sort of mega tectonic shift that ruins this magical special unique place in software where users had some say in what was happening. We cannot pander to imagined ever worsening users forever.
It feels like the things being done in the name of security are really building an immense prison. The work being done to allow verified age and identity checking ranks up there highly in the this corals humanity, area, not giving us agency.
Tampermonkey still works fine with MV3
> We cannot pander to imagined ever worsening users forever.
The most popular software/hardware will always pander to the most users. That’s why they’re the most popular.
You can’t complain about the most popular option pandering to the most users. Well, you can complain, but you might be in the minority of the users.
> It feels like the things being done in the name of security are really building an immense prison.
I get that, but we are running so much untrusted code on our machines now. Applications that use thousands of dependencies with the hope that someone spots a bad actor.
I recently quit my job, developing among others the means to "protect" media using DRM. While this was not a primary motivation, I'm glad to somewhat clean my hands.
The technology (dubbed Common Encryption) is a bunch of smoke and mirrors that a childishly easy to hack around. Yet clearly aimed against good faith consumers.
> To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in.
May I be blunt? I grew up in it, so yes. I am. I was there for the Windows virus wildfires. I was there for the malware distribution schemes. I was there for the first wave of enshittification. For the dotcom crash. For the spam wars. For the search engines that didn't work. For the JavaScript injection attacks. For the world where "nobody knew you were a dog" as long as you didn't talk like yourself. I couldn't trust most of my relatives to use a computer the way we had to use them in the late '90s / early aughts. That's not a problem now.
For all its flaws, the modern system is cleaner, simpler, faster, and better for end users and no longer requires them to be super-nerds (and meanwhile, open and malleable devices are still there for the super-nerds to play with and work with). This was the goal---to make computers something that benefit everyone, not just the technorati and the priest-class.
May the past become a foreign country, hard for the modern mind to comprehend. May it always be so.
Write insecure software and you'll get screwed by hackers. Write secure locked down software nobody can touch or modify, and you'll get doubly screwed by a large corporation that wants to pound every penny they can out of your bloody corpse, upto the point your device is compromised by the corporation who can do whatever they want, but you cannot tell.
There is no win situation here, there are only trade offs.
IMHO that's actually part of an even bigger societal trend. "You will own nothing and be happy."
The ones in power want to control everyone and turn them into mindless sheeple to be exploited and milked. It's not just tech. There's another comment around here that mentions features being requested by large corporations and governments.
The modern Web Browser is an advertisement terminal. If Google would manage to eliminate having to serve content, they would certainly do it.
I thought about this a bit and I think that at the end of the day, the entire OS is just a bunch of these APIs. And I do think there's even a market for these APIs, they just don't want to set that precedent, I don't think it has anything to do with it being a lot more work than anything else they expose. They already have some very privileged APIs you can bless some apps (e.g. think of MDM) except not for everything and in the case of the MDM APIs it's very difficult to use it as a normal end-power-user.
So in order to prevent a hypothetical hacker bogeyman from getting our data we gladly entrust it to corporations that actively squeeze every possible cent out of it by, among other things, giving access to it to other corporations and uncountable "partners" that will feed us content with the goal of psychologically manipulating us into buying things we don't need, or thinking things someone else wants us to think, destroying the very fabric of society in the process.
I somehow find all of that delusional, our acceptance and support of it nightmarish, and trust hackers to be less diabolical in their schemes.
Computers should serve us, not the other way around. The solution to these problems is tech education, not tech babysitters.
Kids these days have much worse computer skills BECAUSE of the locked up platforms they are exposed to from a young age. Meanwhile two decades ago my non-technical grandpa learned to use a real PC just fine in his old age. Don't underestimate regular users ability to deal with technology when there is a will.