> Is it possible to fix the security issues of the existing webRequest API without deprecating it?
The WebRequest API is not being deprecated though, only the ability to block through it is. And I don't think blocking a request has very negative security implications. It's hard to not attribute malice to this move when the status quo was absolutely fine, and google is raising a strawman to try and justify their changes.
They have to raise a strawman though, their cash cow is advertising and often advertising to people who don't want advertising, ublock origin and others allows those people (including me) to block the advertising.
To put it in a simple form, I will not use a browser that can't run ublock origin, full stop, I don't care what other features it has, ublock origin is the single killer feature for me.
I'm sure they did the calculation of users lost vs advertising increase from users who still use them after they break adblockers.
Honestly though it makes me glad that I never stopped using FF as my primary browser, Chrome is used for dev/testing so this doesn't really affect me directly, I'll just make sure that Chrome can only access sites under dev/testing and carry on.
The WebRequest API is not being deprecated though, only the ability to block through it is. And I don't think blocking a request has very negative security implications. It's hard to not attribute malice to this move when the status quo was absolutely fine, and google is raising a strawman to try and justify their changes.