Brendan Eich and Brave Software have only mentioned continuing to support uBlock Origin, uMatrix and NoScript after Google bans MV2 in Chromium-based browsers in June.
What about Violentmonkey, the most popular open-source userscript manager extension for Chromium-based browsers? Much of the web is unusable for power users without various userscripts that you can get from greasyfork and sleazyfork. I don’t want to have to switch back to Firefox for this.
On that extension’s github project, confirm/index.js is 15 lines of javascript. In the packaged version, it’s 14kb of obfuscated code, which contravenes the Chrome Web Store policy and ought to scare the bejeesus out of anyone who’s ever used that extension.
Manifest v3 allows user scripts if you enable Developer Mode for extensions, so the extension will be able to continue. However, if you understand the scrips you’re downloading, and are able to validate that the build process generates the obfuscated code, then it’s a small step to creating your own extension which can incorporate those scripts without providing strangers access to everything you do online.
Userscript managers work with MV3.
Tampermonkey has proven that, their MV3 version works good, it is a little slower at first run, but it works if you enable extension dev mode.
If Violentmonkey dev hasn’t created yet an MV3 version it is not because he can’t do it.
In my opinion Brave should do something for better user experience.
Brave should have extension dev mode always and forcibly enabled by default.
My ideal solution would be something else though.
Apart from the native adblocker Brave has, to also include its own native userscript manager.
Minification is standard operating procedure for countless common build pipelines built on Javascript. Out of curiosity, I looked into your concern by comparing the 15 lines of code from confirm/index.js to my local installation of this extension located:
The simple explanation for why the minified file is 14kb in size appears to be because the source file is importing code from several other parts of the code base. You can confirm this by seeing content from those imported files present throughout the minified output.
Source file:
import '@/common/browser';
import { i18n } from '@/common';
import '@/common/handlers';
import options from '@/common/options';
import { render } from '@/common/ui';
import '@/common/ui/favicon';
import '@/common/ui/style';
import App from './views/app';
import './style.css';
document.title = `${i18n('labelInstall')} - ${i18n('extName')}`;
options.ready.then(() => {
render(App);
});