I think people should be able to do whatever they want on their own machine. If the setting is there, then let me use it for whatever extension I see fit. Sure, make it harder to do so, but don't treat users like children. I can't even screenshot banking apps on my own damn Android phone now.
It's not about you being able to do whatever you want on your machine. It's extension authors being able to. Malicious Chrome extensions are a huge problem.
On the off chance that Google is truly benevolent and was just worried about users' security, then they could have easily hidden the required network-reading functionality behind a flag or "developer mode", or only allowed it for a small set of manually-audited extensions like uBlock Origin.
The fact that they provided absolutely none of these alternatives isn't a coincidence. Google is a for-profit company with 300+ billion of annual revenue, a giant chunk of which comes from their advertisement services. It's a blatant conflict of interest and there's no good reason to believe that they're acting in good faith here.
Don't they have a vetting process for extensions? Even if they don't, you, the (power)user should be able to manually turn on whatever you want, should you so desire. What's stunning is that we're moving away from this, for our "security." And by then "use Firefox/something else" won't be helpful when entire websites will refuse to work on anything else but Chrome.
Absolutely. I have no idea if their store requires signing, but in any case, I think you should be able to sideload your own extensions after being lectured on how it might be dangerous. I'm not saying it should be easy, though.
To put it in the flatest way, it's not a given that users trust the platform owner more than some extension providers.
In theory that shouldn't be the case, and not trusting a platform that runs natively and has potential acccess to everything we do sounds crazy. But in practice there's only so many platforms, and depending on one's work or environement, not using Chrome isn't even an option.
In that context, extensions are the most direct tools the users have to get back some control.
I think people should be able to do whatever they want on their own machine. If the setting is there, then let me use it for whatever extension I see fit. Sure, make it harder to do so, but don't treat users like children. I can't even screenshot banking apps on my own damn Android phone now.
It's not about you being able to do whatever you want on your machine. It's extension authors being able to. Malicious Chrome extensions are a huge problem.
On the off chance that Google is truly benevolent and was just worried about users' security, then they could have easily hidden the required network-reading functionality behind a flag or "developer mode", or only allowed it for a small set of manually-audited extensions like uBlock Origin.
The fact that they provided absolutely none of these alternatives isn't a coincidence. Google is a for-profit company with 300+ billion of annual revenue, a giant chunk of which comes from their advertisement services. It's a blatant conflict of interest and there's no good reason to believe that they're acting in good faith here.
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Don't they have a vetting process for extensions? Even if they don't, you, the (power)user should be able to manually turn on whatever you want, should you so desire. What's stunning is that we're moving away from this, for our "security." And by then "use Firefox/something else" won't be helpful when entire websites will refuse to work on anything else but Chrome.
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Do you think Firefox should let me install an unsigned extension?
Absolutely. I have no idea if their store requires signing, but in any case, I think you should be able to sideload your own extensions after being lectured on how it might be dangerous. I'm not saying it should be easy, though.
This is becoming more and more complex I think.
To put it in the flatest way, it's not a given that users trust the platform owner more than some extension providers.
In theory that shouldn't be the case, and not trusting a platform that runs natively and has potential acccess to everything we do sounds crazy. But in practice there's only so many platforms, and depending on one's work or environement, not using Chrome isn't even an option.
In that context, extensions are the most direct tools the users have to get back some control.
You can choose the permissions on v2 as well.
The change in v3 is that uBlock cannot even ask for more permissions any more
How about giving unlimited permissions to Google on the web and your computer?