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.
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.
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.
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.