Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft Team Up to Improve Browser Extensions →

Stephen Shankland, reporting for CNET:

The teams behind the Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers have banded together to improve extensions, the add-ons you can download to customize the software. That should mean your extensions will work better and come with a better security foundation to protect you from malware.

On Friday, the teams unveiled a discussion and development forum at the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, dedicated to developing standards for extensions. The forum, the WebExtensions Community Group, gives engineers a place to build a unified and more secure core foundation for extensions.

At WWDC 2020, Apple introduced the WebExtension API for Safari on macOS Big Sur — an effort to enable cross-platform browser extensions. However, I’m yet to see a change in the Safari extensions ecosystem because of that. Here’s hoping this new WebExtensions Community Group brings about a change.