Comment by tschiller

The timeline of browser extensibility is quite fascinating. There's really not a single place that covers all of it, so I decided to research my own timeline/history:

  - Consumer web browsers (1993-)
  - Plug-ins (1995-2015ish)
  - User Style Sheets (1998-2019)
  - Bookmarklets (1998–)
  - Browser Extensions (1999–)
  - Mozilla XUL (1997–2017)
  - Alternative Browser Distributions (2004–)
  - Userscripts (2005–)
  - Converging on the WebExtensions API (2017–)
  - Manifest V3 (2021–)
  - No/Low-Code Browser Extension Builders (2021–)

Here's a link to the blog post with my research: https://medium.com/brick-by-brick/a-brief-history-of-browser...

Also, if you care about browser extensibility, join the w3 group (it's free) and watch the GitHub repo!