Google Chrome will place limits on ad blockers starting June 2024

Chrome’s new ad selector extension plan is still in effect. The company halted the release of the new “Manifest V3” format a year ago, after protests over how it affected some of the most popular Chrome extensions. A year later, Google is restarting the staging program, and although it has changed a few things, Chrome will eventually host lower-quality filtering extensions.

Google’s blog post notes that the plan to remove Manifest V2, the current format for Chrome extensions, is back starting in June 2024. On that date (by then we’ll be in “Chrome 127”), Google will disable Manifest V2 for pre-stable versions of Chrome: These are Beta Channels, Development Channels, and Canary Channels. Google says: “Manifest V2 extensions [serán] It is automatically disabled in your browser and you will no longer be able to install Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store.

The schedule around the stable launch of the channel is formulated somewhat strangely. “We expect it will take at least a month to monitor and stabilize the changes in the pre-stable channel before expanding the release to the stable Chrome channel, where it will also be rolled out gradually over time,” the company says. “The exact timing may vary depending on the data collected, and during this time, we will keep you updated.” Know the progress we are making.” It’s not clear what “data” Google is interested in. It’s not the end of the world if the extension fails; It turns off and stops working until the user restarts the extension. The company may be concerned about how many people will Google “Firefox” once the ad blocker stops working.

Enterprise users with the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy enabled will receive an additional year of Manifest V2 support.

Now Chrome will become more exposed

Google’s selling point for Manifest V3 is that by limiting extensions, the browser can have fewer resources and Google can protect your privacy from extension developers. but, With more limited tools, you will be more vulnerable to the rest of the InternetA large part of the network that violates privacy is Google. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called Google’s characterization of the V3 statement “misleading and threatening” and said it was “doubtful that Mv3 would do much for security.”

Firefox’s add-on operations manager also disagreed with any claims about privacy benefits, saying that although malicious add-ons are “primarily interested in capturing bad data, they are still able to do so using the existing webRequest API.” In a subsequent article, the EFF also pointed out that Google’s “fewer resources” argument was baseless. Anyone can open the Chrome Task Manager and see that a single website can take up a lot of memory, often in the 200+ MB range. For me, at the moment, Slack takes up 500MB, while a single Google Chat tab, created by this very performance-conscious company, has a memory usage of 1.5GB. Something like uBlock Origin, in all its tabs, is in the 80MB range.

Ad blockers are losing out

The only part of Manifest V3 that everyone can agree on is this An ad blocker will hurt. Google adds a completely arbitrary limit to the number of “rules” that content filtering plugins can have, which are essential for keeping up with the nearly endless ad serving sites (Ars Technica subscriptions, by the way, give you an ad-free reading experience and make a great holiday gift!). Google originally went with a completely crippling limit of 5,000 “dynamic” rules, and after widespread outrage during its first attempt to push Manifest V3, the company updated the filtering to a “more generous” limit of 30,000 rules. uBlock Origin comes with over 300,000 filtering rules that you can enable, and you can also import additional blocklists and increase this number significantly.

As far as we know, there is no justification for arbitrarily limiting the list of filtering rules. Manifest V2 has no limits and works very well. Firefox also implements Manifest V3 (it basically has to because Chrome is more popular), but it does so without restrictions on filtering and other capabilities. Mozilla’s post on the subject promises: “Firefox for Manifest V3 ensures users have access to the most powerful privacy tools available, like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions.” .

Once statement V3 appears, Chrome users will be limited to “uBlock Origin Lite”, while they will need to switch to Firefox or any other unlimited browser to get the full extension. The project FAQ explains how many feature regressions there will be; In addition to the strict restrictions on rule set filtering, there are now several other restrictions on filtering. Items cannot be filtered based on response headers or based on the URL in the address bar. Developers are more limited in the regular expressions they can use, along with a number of other technical limitations.

The article was originally published in Ars Technica. Adapted by Maurizio Serfati Godoy.