Manifest v3

[erosman]

Chrome has introduced manifest v3 which will come into force by Jan 2023. Firefox will be doing the same at a later date with some minor differences.

The future development of FoxyProxy extensions will be subject to MV3.

Chrome

Similar to the current FoxyProxy extension

• Implementation: via proxy.PacScript (as PAC string)
• Authentication: Handled by the browser Not possible by the extension due to the removal of 'blocking' in webRequest.onAuthRequired
• User Interface: no UI for user/pass

Firefox

Option 1

Similar code-base as the Chrome extension

• Implementation: via proxy.settings (as PAC string)
• Authentication: Handled by the browser
• User Interface: no UI for user/pass

Option 2

• Implementation: via proxy.settings (as PAC string)
• Authentication: via webRequest.onAuthRequired for HTTP/HTTPS (not possible for SOCKS)
• User Interface: UI for user/pass

Note: Due to MV3 service worker limitations, option 2 will entail an async storage call on every onAuthRequired which will be fairly resource intensive.

Option 3

Similar to the current FoxyProxy extension

• Implementation: via proxy.onRequest
• Authentication: via proxy.onRequest
• User Interface: UI for user/pass

Note: Due to MV3 service worker limitations, option 3 will entail an async storage call on every network connection which will be considerably resource intensive.

[ericjung]

Thanks for this excellent summary. Do any of the Firefox options allow for authentication with SOCKS?

[erosman]

Do any of the Firefox options allow for authentication with SOCKS?

Option 3 is the only way to handle SOCKS authentication ATM.

Due to Bug 122752 (from 21 years ago) SOCKS authentication is not available directly in Firefox. Chrome does not have the option. (Issue 256785: SOCKS5 authentication support) Other browsers also do not appear to have SOCKS authentication feature.

[erosman]

Option 3 in MV3 would be like

browser.proxy.onRequest.addListener(onRequest, {urls: ['<all_urls>']});

function onRequest(requestInfo) {
  /*   
    process
    ------------------
    1. get user preferences asynchronously e.g.
    await browser.storage.local.get();

    2. loop through all proxies
    3. convert all patterns to RegEx
    4. check if they match the criteria
    5. prepare a response with/without user/pass
    6. repeat the same for each network connection that can be 100s per tab
  */
}