<story><title>Browser Extensions Standard</title><url>https://browserext.github.io/browserext/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>avaer</author><text>Hm, if web extensions become a standard, are they really even extensions? Isn&amp;#x27;t that just new web APIs with tweaked security parameters?&lt;p&gt;This is great for security and all, but browser extensions were borne out of the idea that you wanted your browser to do things that the browser vendor didn&amp;#x27;t want, or didn&amp;#x27;t even conceive of.&lt;p&gt;Having it be a standard adds security but strictly limits extensions to things the browser vendors explicitly did conceive of, and stamped their approval on -- sometimes literally, if you&amp;#x27;re going through a curated store. Is that a net win? I&amp;#x27;m not sure.</text></comment>
<story><title>Browser Extensions Standard</title><url>https://browserext.github.io/browserext/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pimterry</author><text>Finally! WebExtensions (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-US&amp;#x2F;Add-ons&amp;#x2F;WebExtensions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-US&amp;#x2F;Add-ons&amp;#x2F;WebExtensions&lt;/a&gt;) have slowly been becoming an adhoc standard for a little while now, but with a few tricky small differences here and there between browsers (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-US&amp;#x2F;Add-ons&amp;#x2F;WebExtensions&amp;#x2F;Chrome_incompatibilities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-US&amp;#x2F;Add-ons&amp;#x2F;WebExtensions&amp;#x2F;Ch...&lt;/a&gt;). So far it&amp;#x27;s just been Firefox and Edge slowly building a close approximation of Chrome&amp;#x27;s existing API, but a proper standard for this would be great, and make it much clearer what extension developers can _depend_ on, and what&amp;#x27;s optional.&lt;p&gt;Right now you basically write your extension once (probably for Chrome), and then port it to the others, often with various small manual changes or workarounds for incompatibilities. It&amp;#x27;s much better than it used to be, but still pretty inconvenient and error prone.&lt;p&gt;I can see at least a couple of differences with current implementations though, like using the `browserext:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;` protocol instead of `moz-extension:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;` and `chrome-extension:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;`. Does anybody more involved with this have a summary of the differences between this spec and Firefox, Edge and Chrome&amp;#x27;s implementations?</text></comment>