Slashdot Mirror
Chrome API Update Will Kill a Bunch of Other Extensions, Not Just Ad Blockers (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A planned update to one of the Google Chrome extensions APIs would kill much more than a few ad blockers, ZDNet has learned, including browser extensions for antivirus products, parental control enforcement, phishing detection, and various privacy-enhancing services. Developers for extensions published by F-Secure, NoScript, Amnesty International, and Ermes Cyber Security, among others, made their concerns public today after news broke this week that Google was considering the API change. Furthermore, efforts to port NoScript from Firefox to Chrome are also impacted, according to the plugin's author, who says the new API update all but cripples the NoScript for Chrome port.
Anyone who used the internet around 2003 knew it was almost all IE at 95%. We are getting close to that again with Chrome and chrome derivatives. Once we cross the threshold again developers wll stop supporting Firefox based browsers and HTML will be CML (chrome mark up language. We can stop Chrome but only if we act now.
That was super useful. Almost makes you think it could be placed in the story summary ... but, nah, that might lead to useful discussion.
Yes, Google is listening with one ear, but the overall tone (so far as I scanned) ran the gamut from hostile to cynical to mind boggled.
Interestingly, it remained civilized as these things go, and there were few posts in the hallowed mushroom-cloud apocalypse tradition of the fight/fulminate/flight triangle of charred human remains, whose mortal moral fuses went outright Code Magnesium. While it's orbiting around that general quadrant, it's not yet an ad-blocker black hole of no return.
Nice that Google still dips their big toe into evil before jumping straight in, nigh irrevocably.
And yet, somewhere deep down, you know they want to.