"Begin disabling installed extensions still using Manifest V2 in Chrome stable"

Hopefully this is the inflection point for Chrome. Despite all their made-up "security" reasons, everyone knows this is solely about making adblock less effective. For many users, adblock is what makes chrome bearable - and if they make it unbearable, then those users will leave. Slowly but surely.

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.

> everyone knows this is solely about making adblock less effective

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.

If I remember right then the difference is more about ad-tracking/privacy than blocking. V2 allowed UBO to find and intercept the calls to the ad servers before the calls were made. Where V3+UBL still makes the calls it just doesn't display the results. So while you might not see the ads, the ads see you.

On the contrary, MV2 used onBeforeRequest which let extensions see what requests you were making. They could then take that data and use it for malicious purposes.

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...

Doesn't onBeforeRequest still exist in Manifest v3? The thing that's been removed is the ability to block on it, not the ability to register handlers for requests.

It still exists, but now “ad blockers” can’t use the blocking API to record and forward metrics on hits. Ad blockers don’t even need the webRequest and webRequestBlocking permissions anymore.

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.

Thanks, I see how that can help.

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?