Google seems much too sure of itself making this change. I hope their arrogance pays off just the same as Microsoft's did with IE.
I thought I knew that.
Then I switched from uBlock Origin to uBlock Origin Lite in Chrome, which is compatible with Manifest v3. I was prepared for the horrible onslaught of ads, expecting at least a quarter would start getting through, ready to switch to Firefox...
...and didn't notice a single change. Not a single ad gets through.
And at the same time, loading pages feels a little faster, though I haven't measured it.
Which has now got me wondering -- what if Manifest v3 really was about security and performance all along?
Because if Google was using it to kill adblockers, they've made approximately 0% progress towards that goal as far as I can tell. If they really wanted to kill adblockers, they'd just, you know, kill adblockers. But they didn't at all.
When I tried UBO Lite recently it couldn't block YouTube ads, not sure if that's impossible with Manifest V3, or if UBO Lite just isn't updated regularly like UBO to defeat the YouTube anti-ad-blocking updates.
Update: looks like it's fixed now, not bad :)
Adblockers do multiple things:
1. Visibly block ads from the user
2. Block the user tracking that's attached to those ads
3. Protect the user from malware
4. Save bandwidth and cpu cycles by not loading all that junk
5. Allow control to users over how a webpage is displayed to them
Arguably uBlock Origin Lite can only accomplish some of #1 and a sprinkle of #2 now. And even those abilities are compromised by artificially low limits imposed by chrome in v3 that will eventually allow ad networks to overwhelm those limits and get ads through to users.
Google is 100% boiling the frog here and you/the average user is left in the pot unaware.
MV3 doesn’t allow extensions to know what requests are being made, so extensions can’t use your data maliciously.
Requests to ads that are blocked are blocked.
I think you’re thinking of Privacy-preserving ad measurement which is an option in Firefox and Safari. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
Manifest v3 blocks user tracking -- if the request is blocked, any tracking attached to it is blocked. I'm sure it's not 100% perfect, but it's certainly working well enough in practice.
And what malware are you talking about? If a request is blocked, it's blocked. It doesn't matter if it's an ad or malware.
Manifest v3 is better at #4, because the junk isn't loaded, and the blocking is more efficient in terms of CPU.
And then #5 I don't know what you're talking about. I use Stylus and Tampermonkey to customize webpages and they continue to work great.
So I just don't see the evidence that "Google is 100% boiling the frog here". That's what everyone was saying, but now that Manifest v3 has come out, I just see adblocking that continues to work and uses less CPU to do it.
I see a lot of fearmongering around Google, but now that the results are in with Manifest v3... they just don't seem true. You're making all these claims, but I just don't see the evidence now that we're seeing how it works in practice.
Now, if an ad blocker has webRequest permissions it’s a red flag.
For example https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/concept... uses webRequest to send telemetry back to some remote server.
With Manifest v3, let's say I'm an ad blocker and I want to get access to metrics not to violate privacy, but just to report them to the user (X domains blocked, Y out of Z requests blocked, etc). How would I get access to those metrics?
Otherwise, you can’t really without more invasive permissions.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74813523/chrome-extensio...
Which is something we know for a fact uBlock Origin doesn't do. It's open source, you can check the code yourself. MV3, on the other hand, doesn't do much to assure me that an addon isn't phoning home. Why not just give the user to ability to block network requests on a per-addon basis? Too difficult a task for the trillion dollar company? Or could it be that forcing users to switch to MV3 addons isn't about safety at all?
These limits are easy targets for ad networks to overwhelm or outmaneuver.
That's what everyone was saying
No one was saying that adblockers would literally stop working, so it's beyond disingenuous to dismiss people's issues with these changes by just saying 'works for me'.
What evidence would you actually accept anyway? Do you need a leaked internal document from Google saying literally 'devs, go neuter adblockers' before you believe Google might have bad intentions surrounding people's ability to block ads and tracking?
If security and performance were the actual driving forces of DeclarativeNetRequest, then they would have simply added it in addition to the existing webRequest block functionality. uBlock Origin and most extensions would have happily moved the majority of their rules to the static list if it meant better performance and privacy while keeping around the webRequest blocks for the things that actually need it.
Google has gone from having only one nuclear-level option for influencing adblockers (aka delisting) to now having its boot softly pressed against their necks and plenty of levers to pull. And you want me to look at that and go, 'There's no direct evidence of malicious intention there... so perfectly normal and/or acceptable behavior by the world's biggest ad company'?
And if we are being honest about those limits, they have already been exceeded. Ublock origin is going from 100,000 to 500,000 dynamic rules to just 30k rules(only 5k of those can be dynamic) in the lite version.
Adblockers have absolutely been neutered in v3.
I don't know and I don't have to. All I know is uBlock Origin Lite is still blocking everything. So it seems like 30K rules is plenty? Like it's not a meaningful difference for end users if it's blocking 99.99% vs 99.9999% of ads?
> No one was saying that adblockers would literally stop working
That's sure what it sounded like. That it would literally be so bad you'd have to switch browsers because of how degraded the experience would be.
> What evidence would you actually accept anyway?
The fact that the adblocking experience was significantly degraded for the average user -- e.g. that now 10% or 25% of ads were getting through.
> And you want me to look at that and go, 'There's no direct evidence of malicious intention there... so perfectly normal and/or acceptable behavior...
Yeah, pretty much. As far as I can tell, security and performance seem to justify the Manifest v3 changes. Occam's Razor says you don't need anything else. If you think there's malicious intention, then the onus of proof is on you.
I was told, time and time again, than Manifest v3 would result in an adblocking experience so bad that people would start switching browsers because of it, that Google was cracking down on adblockers to neuter them. Now that it's here and my adblocking works just as well, maybe even better (if it's sped up page loading times) -- then sorry, as far as I can tell the malicious intention was made-up.
That's not what the docs say [1]:
A single rule does one of the following:
- Block a network request.
- Upgrade the schema (http to https).
- Prevent a request from getting blocked by negating any matching blocked rules.
- Redirect a network request.
- Modify request or response headers.
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...
> I was told, time and time again, than Manifest v3 would result in an adblocking experience so bad that people would start switching browsers because of it
Once enough ads catch up with the new limitations. Right or wrong, we're still too early for that.
I will take this one.
First, your limits are out of date. The static minimum is 30k, but can now escalate to an order of magnitude higher depending on how many extensions are installed. The dynamic limit is now 30k, of which at most 5k can be "unsafe". Source: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...
Second, even if the limits were correct: consider the possibility that 99% of those rules are irrelevant, out of date garbage that blocks nothing anymore but haven't been removed because there is neither process nor incentive on the extension dev's part to do so.
Ad uses pattern. UBO adds matching pattern. Ad switches to new pattern. Cat and mouse.
This happens widely, rapidly, and on an ongoing basis. The result is that the rule set is large and grows rapidly, but very little of it is actually useful day to day. From the user's perspective, the only cost is that the browser very slowly gets continually less performant, which they will not attribute to the extension.
This isn't hypothetical. I'm on the Chrome team. We analyzed the rule set contents. This is why we proposed the initial limits we did: they were plenty large enough to allow all the extensions we analyzed to do everything they actually wanted to do, if only you stripped the cruft.
The rule size increases since then primarily come out of a dialog process with ad blocking devs about their process and needs and what they see in the wild coupled with what we think we can manage to keep performant. There are compromises. I'm not on that team so I can't speak to details. But it's part of an honest attempt to have a dialog.
There are usually simple explanations for things, if people were truly willing to consider them without bias.
That's of course an oversimplification. But people who believe they're technically knowledgeable and adept are just as likely as other folks to fall for bullshit and be convinced to do things contrary to their own self interests. It's just a different type of bullshit.
No one wants to hear that, because we all want to tell ourselves that maybe everyone else is gullible, but WE'RE smart and rational. To a close approximation, though, none of us are.