Google Chrome Might Deal Deathblow To Ad Blocker Extensions

There are quite a few ad blocker extensions available for Google Chrome. They allow you to block all sorts of ads on the sites that you visit. It appears that Google is planning to switch things up a bit for its popular Chrome browser which might render many of these ad blocker extensions useless.

uBlock Origin and uMatrix developer Raymond Hill raised this possibility, highlighting that recent changes to some Chrome APIs would effectively mean that his extensions “no longer exist.” They’re based on the proposals in Google’s Manifest V3 document which mentions changes that are planned for the Chrome Extensions platform.

He focuses in on a particular proposal to restrict ad blocking with the webRequest API and limit blocking capabilities to a new DeclarativeNetRequest API. This change wouldn’t impact the likes of Adblock Plus and some might link it to reports that Google and other companies pay Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads.

Hill mentions that these new restrictions would negatively impact other third-party ad blockers if Google decides to restrict them to only the DeclarativeNetRequest API. “Extensions act on behalf of users, they add capabilities to a ‘user agent’, and deprecating the blocking ability of the webRequest API will essentially decrease the level of user agency in Chromium, to the benefit of websites, which obviously would be happy to have the last word in what resources their pages can fetch/execute/render,” he explains.

Whether or not Google adopts the Manifest V3 remains to be seen.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Google, google chrome