Great article, it must have been a lot of work (I've been on the very same road), so I'd do the same with some affiliate links.
I ran away from Mailchimp more than 5 years ago when they started with their shenanigans and arrived at the same conclusion: Mailerlite is great. I used to have lots of respect for Mailchimp for being a bootstrapped business and never taking investor money but once they sold their soul, it was game over. One thing the article doesn't mention is the fact that Mailchimp has been moving from an email marketing SaaS to a marketing platform SaaS. From a quick glance at their services, they now offer a website builder, a CRM, ads retargeting, social media integrations---and as a customer, you end up paying for every single feature, regardless of if you want it or not.
With the manifest v3 debacle they have a golden opportunity in their hands. They can promoting the fact that they work for you rather than advertisers, they could explain what true privacy looks like, regardless of what device you're using.
Firefox on Android used to be a really good product--it supported basically every popular extension there was for desktop, then in 2018-2019 they appeared to start a new revamped project for some reason. I downloaded the beta for it--it was rough around the corners, it had a quite short whitelist of extensions, most of the functionalities were absent, but there were a few improvements here and there. And out of nowhere, a few weeks later they made it the default.
It's been way too long and the app still feels unfinished. It crashes way too much and I can't even move around the icons for the websites in the start page. They've enabled the list of extensions recently but it's a mess. I only use it since it's where I can have uBlock origin.
It feels that every couple of years they have a golden opportunity, but somehow they never seem to know what to do.
I'm pretty sure 95% of Chrome users don't know or care about Manifest v3 or what issues it brings.
Consider also that most web users don't use an ad blocker; by definition most web users won't care about the Mv3 change, as that's what it seems to affect most.
On top of that, it seems like ad blockers still work decently well under Mv3. That could change over time, certainly, but there's not really a compelling reason for most Chrome users to switch.
> [Firefox for Android] crashes way too much
Interesting; I've been using it for years and very rarely encounter a crash. Desktop Firefox (Linux) crashes more often than Firefox for Android, and there too it's incredibly rare.
Amen. The mobile app is honestly such a slap in the face. Synced tabs is a joke, the bookmark tags they push so hard on you on desktop don't appear on mobile so you have to move everything back to folders, extensions were removed for 6 years... features you don't need get pushed in your face with no way to hide them, e.g. password manager, "translate this page", collections, sync... rarely have I felt less in control of my own hardware.
I use Firefox because Chrome is worse, not because I feel respected, "in control", or heard.
Ankane's Onnx runtime for ruby is so easy to use that makes you wonder why the official repo for js is so difficult to understand. This guy's a hero, although I'm only scratching the surface for what he has done.
I have a quite big userscript that fixes all the little annoyances I've been finding on the sites I often visit. Is the click area too small? I fixed it. Is there a really big form that when I select a specific value some other elements need to be at a specific state? It's fixed now. Did we get a new business lead and we need to enter all their information to our CRM? I can now paste that info and the form will be automatically filled.
I find usescripts way more easy to update than an extension, so that's what I've been sticking with for quite a few years now.
IMO MutationObserver's API is a bit difficult to grasp. For simpler cases for getting a callback when an element is created, I use spect[1] or sentinel[2].
You can wimp out and just use MutationObserver as a way to get a callback whenever anything changes, ignoring all of the mutation records. Then in the callback, look up all of the elements you care about. The API is pretty simple then. It may be less efficient, but usually when you're mucking about with existing web pages, you're not all that performance sensitive. (And MO batches up updates reasonably well, so it's not like you're running the callback once per change.)
Occasionally it might even be faster, since you're not iterating through the mutation
records and testing for stuff you care about.
It's sillier if you imagine the query in SQL. How can the database fulfill both "all queries have at least one row" and also "your WHERE clauses are interpreted exactly?"
I'm on the fence. While I think some of these features should be absolutely not part of a browser's scope, I think there will always be legitimate use cases.
What I'm absolutely convinced of is for better controls. A little more than a year ago, our government required the banking industry to know their users' locations for some reason. So now the banks ask for my location, otherwise I can't login.
While on a mobile device it would be quite hard to give them a fake location without rooting/jailbreaking, in my browser I could find a reputable, open source extension [1] that helps me protect my privacy.
These kind of controls should be part of each of these features, without risking installing an extension with nefarious intent.
