Manifest V3 was always a massive advertiser land grab. Their intent is to kill effective ad blockers and replace them with ad blockers on the payroll ("acceptable" ads) or nothing at all.
Gorhill told the Chrome team that this would effectively kill ad blocking. He was ignored (are you surprised?).
As far as I know, the popular ad blockers aren't reducing their permissions. They are retaining the ability, for example, to inject JS for things like "right click to block".
Manifest V3 is solely about reducing harm to Google's ad business. Full stop. Their stated reasons are very disingenuous. They knew full well how this would play out.
No. Manifest v3's main role was to cripple ad blockers... hence you're now seeing YouTube experiment with "anti-ad-blocker" popups warning users they wouldn't able to see the site.
They know they got people by the balls after they rolled out v3 earlier this year.
Why is gorhill entertaining Manifest V3 when it's explicitly meant to kill ad-blocking?
We need an opinionated browser that isn't bought-and-paid-for opposition like Mozilla is to Google, and standards committees who aren't beholden to corporate profits. The Web is supposed to be for everyone, not just Google.
Speaking of Manifest v3, I really hope all these adblock extensions secretly work together and on the day Manifest v3 is released, they all display a gigantic red-backgrounded warning on startup telling the user Google Chrome has turned evil and suggesting them switching to Firefox or some other browser.
Noone seeing the obvious connection to Manifest v3?
"Oh, it appears with the new Chrome extension API it is impossible to write an adblocker that bypasses this. How could that have happened? Google told us they only have our best interests in mind, so this must've been by accident."
I wouldn't expect Manifest V3 to have any effect until Manifest V2 is actually disabled and ad blockers stop working. Approximately 0% of Chrome users are following technical browser announcements, they won't care until their stuff actually breaks.
I imagine you didn't take the time to understand Manifest v3 criticism.
Nobody claims they won't work at all, they'll just be crappier than they are now, which boils down to two reasons: Manifest v3 introduces limits to filter list size + pattern matching isn't as flexible.
And Firefox has stated multiple times so far that they're going to keep current content blocking APIs, meaning that once Manifest v3 rolls out, adblockers will work better than they will on Chromium-based browsers.
I rely mostly on the discussion around the implications for ublock origin when looking at manifest v3, because gorhill seems to be engaging with it in good faith.
Browsing the issue about it (https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338), it seems that manifest v3 blocks quite a lot of stuff out of the box. The fundamental issue seems to be that by mv3 prevents you from running arbitrary code to do filtering. This is concerning because it means that if sites / ad networks start coming up with ways to serve ads which can't be blocked by DeclarativeNetRequest (the issue lists a few), then ublock origin won't be able to block those ads. The way it's framed in the issue is "DNR is an obstacle to innovation."
There is currently a workaround in "ublock origin lite" (the mv3-compliant version) which lets you opt into regular ublock-origin-style filtering on a per-site basis. Even if this workaround isn't removed, it still means ... opting in to full filtering on a per-site basis, and acknowledging a browser warning each time.
MV3 clearly puts control of how ad-blocking works back into the hands of the company who supplies the browser and makes its money by serving ads.
1. Chrome had to support adblockers to outcompete firefox.
2. Adblockers were really powerful pieces of arbitrary logic making blocking them infeasible, so manifest v3 had to first be introduced to weaken them.
3. With lean times upon us, everyone is understanding of their move to block ads.
All of these steps were necessary, and had to happen with some time inbetween. Sort of an embrace-extend-extinguish play.
Edit: Well it seems manifest v2 is being phased out very very gradually and it's not done yet. No new extensions are allowed but uBlock might still be around for a few more months.
It makes the adblockers fight with one hand behind their back, tilting the balance in the cat and mouse game towards the attackers.
Google is an empire built on advertising: scams and malware, so their evil has always been present. But right now we have an easy way to protect ourselves. Manifest v3 is exposing that evil to technologically-minded people.
I will have to switch my parents over to Firefox or Brave to keep them safe online.
How many people use adblockers? Is there any chance manifest v3 will lead to enough users abandoning Googles Chrome to build a community around an open alternative, like we did when we abandoned IE for Firefox all those years ago?
> Google’s Manifest V3 — Chrome’s new extension-building platform — severely limits the functionality of ad blockers. Though, ad blockers won't capitulate without a fight — that is as much as we can promise you. In a world’s first, AdGuard has recently published an ad-blocking extension built on Manifest 3.
That's... awful? Building an ad blocker on top of Mv3 is exactly what Google is hoping for. If nobody built an ad blocker for it, how much market share do you think Chrome would keep?
> By releasing an extension built with Manifest V3 today — first among developers of ad blockers – we can say that we've met the challenge that Google posed to us.
They shouldn't do this IMHO.
Manifest V3 is a horrible attempt to kill adblocking (under the banner of "security", as always). But, the web is completely unusable without adblocking.
If there are no more (effective) adblockers for Chrome, users will frantically begin to search for an alternative; there are many: Firefox and Brave to mention just two.
Giving a boost to alternative browsers can only be a good thing; and it may also, eventually, make Google rethink this policy.
Gorhill told the Chrome team that this would effectively kill ad blocking. He was ignored (are you surprised?).
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