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

(developer.chrome.com)
552 points freedomben | 1 comments | 11 Oct 24 14:20 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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sho ◴[11 Oct 24 14:49 UTC] No.41809962[source]▶
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.

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crazygringo ◴[11 Oct 24 15:22 UTC] No.41810304[source]▶
> 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.

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eikenberry ◴[11 Oct 24 15:56 UTC] No.41810636[source]▶
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.
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1. crazygringo ◴[11 Oct 24 23:43 UTC] No.41815045[source]▶
> 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.

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.
Does "block" not mean block? Can you provide a source? Or am I looking at the wrong docs? I'm searching online and can't find anything that says the request is still sent.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...