With the Manifest V3 storm being unleashed elsewhere, I’d like to stop and say thank you Mozilla for continuing to support the webRequest APIs! I appreciate it greatly - I would not be able to keep my addon running without the folks supporting it at all levels.
Thanks!
I don’t keep up on these things and just read about Manifest V3 after reading your post.
How confident are you that this will continue to be supported?
I read about Mozilla’s complaints concerning YouTube’s algorithm returning harmful content by design and a bit about them stating that Facebook was promoting hate speech. I only heard about these because of posts made here against Mozilla as preventing free speech.
Both sounded good to me and I was glad that someone appeared to want a safe and clean internet.
But the behavior of the so-called big tech surrounding the recent election and the fact that most people don’t appear to even care, doesn’t make me confident.
But I’m not in the know, so to speak, to get a sense of how people respond to this, and that is why I am asking. No sarcasm intended. The 31 responses to the Add-ons blog were nearly all doubtful of Mozilla continuing to provided support to block content in the longer term. Thanks.
Well - that’s not the response I was hoping for, but let’s get down to it for a second.
I was and am one of those voices: [Blog post] Mozilla's Manifest v3 FAQ I would still like to see a roadmap around it; I think that this type of API is absolutely critical as we see AI assistance in more tech as it will want to “look at” the same things we do to analyze them. I can appreciate your desire to be vigilant for features such as this.
But I also don’t think it’s contradictory to be both critical and thankful at the same time - and being thankful is what this post is about! Programming is also my day job; it’s a lot of work to maintain features and that also costs money and focus - especially something as deeply hooked and powerful as webRequest. So, I wanted to take some time to thank Mozilla and the hardworking team members for keeping it so far! It’s been a difficult year for almost everybody, so who couldn’t use a bit more thankfulness?
It can’t hurt for them to have a reminder that people appreciate them as well as their stewardship of the feature, right? 
I wasn’t disagreeing with you. Nor was I attempting to be critical of Mozilla or expressing an opinion, but was attempting to ask a question concerning the expected long-term support for this and similar APIs.
As I wrote, I liked what I read in the recent past about Mozilla’s interest in stopping the “bad” algorithm’s of YouTube and the tactics of Facebook. The point being that those few items I came across gave the impression that they would also be in support of the continuing need to block bad or undesired content.
However that was in contrast to those thirty plus negative responses to the add-ons blog, many of which also cited the deprecation of XUL runner as an example of varying support for developers. I didn’t come across a positive response there.
Mozilla is the only browser I use and I greatly appreciate MDN documents and Mozilla Discourse and use them both quite often. Unlike you, I’m not a programmer by training or trade and, therefore, primarily work in isolation; and I wasn’t involved in this prior to the change to web-extension APIs from XUL runner. I was interested in the perspective of someone who’s been in the field for awhile, not concerning the importance of these types of APIs but something concerning their long-term future.
I think I read also that work on developer tools has stopped or been significantly reduced to focus on web assembly. So, all of this together, got me to wondering about whether or not it’s prudent to put the work in on building an extension that may not be supported or portable to a new standard in the near future.
I should, perhaps, add that where I wrote that I’m not confident, I meant that the biggest players are extremely big and seem to get their way. How can anyone have the nerve to block the President, whether you like him or not; and if they have the nerve to do that, what do they care about you or me.
Thanks.
I believe Mozilla needs to add support for extensions that use the new declarativeNetRequest API, for compatibility reasons, but doesn’t need to delete blocking from the webRequest API. They are completely independent as far as I can tell.