Google Chrome Has A Nasty Surprise By Gordon Kelly Jan 23, 2019, 09:30pm https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/01/23/google-chrome-ad-blocker-ads-upgrade-problem-speed-slow-update
With almost 70% market share, Chrome has well and truly won the web browser war. A crucial factor behind this is Google’s commitment to seamless updates and improvements, but now the company has admitted Chrome’s next major upgrade has an unavoidable nasty surprise… In a new public document called Manifest V3, Google has announced it will change how extensions work in Chrome and the big casualty is it will break ad blockers - arguably the most popular extension any web browser has. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3NzzhHzc-qnk4w4PX-0XMw8/edit This has already led to a backlash, and the developer of uBlock Origin (which has over 10M users) has been one of the first to speak out condemning Google’s planned changes to Chrome and confirming its ad blocker will no longer work. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897&desc=2#c23 So why has Google done this? The short answer is security. Google is cracking down on the ability of extensions to load code from remote servers. In theory, this is a good thing as it stops malicious extensions from appearing harmless in the Chrome Web Store then becoming dangerous once installed. The problem is Google’s approach is something of a blunt instrument. Many ad blockers rely on remote code to continually update their Chrome extensions with data to pre-emptively block ads. Pre-loading the extensions with data won’t work either since Google is restricting filters to 30,000 items and, as Ars Technica points out, uBlock Origin requires 90,000 filters by default and runs with up to 500,000 to be most effective. The good news is some ad blockers may escape unscathed. Most notable is AdBlock Plus (also over 10M users), where developers believe it may be possible to adapt. For many, however, the process of completely rewriting how their ad blockers work will prove a step too far. Needless to say, conspiracy theories are already building. Google’s core business is ads and ad blockers present a sizeable problem. In its defence, Google has already taken steps to improve the quality of ads online via the Coalition for Better Ads and Chrome now blocks the most invasive ads automatically. That said, a complete block on all ads, as offered by Ad Blockers, is not good for business. Would users desert Chrome if their favourite ad blockers no longer work? It’s impossible to say, but running ads means more data consumption and more processor intensive websites at a time when Chrome is already consuming additional memory. So users with older hardware could be tempted to jump ship. Either way, Google - despite its broadly good intentions - has opened a crack in Chrome’s armour just as the browser was looking unstoppable… _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
