I'm not really sure I agree with this - I've been doing extension development for about 12 years now, and I think communication used to be fine.
Simply posting questions usually got meaningful feedback, and while the team certainly wasn't "taking advice" from the community at large, the manifest v2 space felt cohesive and generally well thought out.
Things worked. Documentation was decent. Compatibility problems between Firefox/Chrome were small and documented. It was still possible to load extensions outside the stores. Extensions could do genuinely powerful things.
Manifest v3... has been a complete fucking disgrace (and I say that as someone who was really, really trying to give Google the benefit of the doubt here early on, and someone who has personally ported my organization's extensions to MV3).
It's poorly documented (all sorts of things in the docs are half-assed, scattered links to mv2 only pages, dead/broken links in the pages, docs that contradict other docs, completely undocumented features and capabilities, bad examples, examples that no longer build, etc).
Basic features are literally not functional. We STILL to this day have repeated complaints from customers about the extension "dying" or "it stopped working" which I can fucking promise is this issue: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=127115...
Which has been closed and opened several times (currently closed and is absolutely still happening). I still see this at least once a week in development. The service worker simply fucks off and stops doing anything at all (sitting there with "inactive" despite sending messages to it, or clicking the browser action).
Permissions are still a freaking disgrace - trying to play nice with the permissions APIs gets your extension relegated way down the list. Extensions which just request "all_urls" get put right at the top of the extensions list when a user clicks the extensions menu, while those that properly ask for the active_tab permission get shoved way down and have a "access requested" tag in bold that actually seems scarier to users than the extensions that just fucking declare all_urls.
Optional permissions, meanwhile, don't actually go away when you release them in chrome (why even have the fucking function call?) so you can't meaningfully display permissions status to users without tracking state yourself. And you sure as hell can't count on the state of a permission to indicate user preference on whether a feature should be active. Again - have to do all the tracking manually.
Basically - The chromium team is fucking up HARD here, in my opinion. It's really starting to feel like the decent developers are gone (and I know a lot of them are) and the result is now the same as IE used to be - the browser is just a political tool to control competition. There's little cohesion, features & flows are broken at random and with no documentation. Issues are triaged superficially and then closed instead of resolved. Developers are ridiculed by the team for posting questions (jesus some of the responses around questions for declarativeNetRequest are fucking bad - especially given the shoddy state of the docs), or simply ignored.
I'm pretty torn - I actually think the Edge port of chromium is better than chromium at this point - and if you'd told me 10 years ago that I would end up saying MS has a better browser, I would have laughed in your face.
Meanwhile FF is just limping along, and Safari is absolutely neglected because apple makes all their money in the app store, so it's in their interests to have a shoddy browser from a feature perspective (they still do good work on performance and battery usage, at least).
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Long rant aside - I'm very disappointed in MV3. I tried hard to play along, and it's shite.
> Safari is absolutely neglected because apple makes all their money in the app store, so it's in their interests to have a shoddy browser from a feature perspective
This is a strange take as far as extensions are concerned, because last year iOS Safari introduced extension support, something that Android Chrome still doesn't have. And Apple does sell Safari extensions in the App Store, so extension development is in their interests.
It was just last year that Safari introduced extension support at all (at least on the shared webext api set)
Chrome first released them in 2009, version 4 (happened to still be on webkit then, too - so same rendering engine as safari). The space is 13 years old.
And even then... the supported api set is fairly minimal.
Combo that with the xcode lock in and... Apple still gets a solid failing grade from me.
> It was just last year that Safari introduced extension support at all (at least on the shared webext api set)
This is totally false. Safari Mac has had extension support since 2010.
Safari has gone through a few different extension formats: safariextz, app extensions, web extensions. But Chrome and Firefox have also gone through a few different extension formats.
