While Google’s Chrome browser is a pretty good browser by itself, however with the support for extensions, it has allowed users to customize their browser experience by installing ad blockers, password managers, privacy protection, and so on. However, it appears that a recent Chrome bug has resulted in extensions not working for users.As spotted by Techdows, Google recently tried an “experiment” with Chrome 72 where unfortunately the experiment kind of went “wrong” resulting in a bug that broke extensions for users. What this means for some users who are using ad blockers, it allows some web requests to slip past them. This means that if you’re using an ad blocker but are still seeing ads appear every now and then, you know why.
However, according to Google, they claim that if there are no major issues, they do not plan on rolling back this experiment as they cite the long-term importance of it. According to Google, “At this point, if this is the only breakage in the experiment we’re not rolling back. The reason is that as a relative percentage of users of Chrome, this is still small (e.g. less than 0.1%). When launching multi-year projects that impact a large part of the codebase, it’s impossible to avoid any regressions. We have to balance making forward progress and avoiding other regressions creeping in with breaking some edge cases. The best way for extension authors to avoid this is to use dev/beta channels.”
However, there is good news for users affected by this issue. All you need to do is go to chrome://flags and look for #network-service and disable it. You’ll have to relaunch Chrome for it to come into effect, but you should be good to go once that’s done.