Manifest v3 didn't kill ah blockers. It just got rid of the webRequestBlocking API and replaced it with declarativeNetRequest. This mean you don't have to give ad blockers permission to see all of the requests you are making. Ad blockers can still dynamically create rules for what requests they want to block.
Manifest V3 breaks ad blocking without doing anything about extensions spying on the user. It provides read-only access to everything that previously was available and merely removes the ability to modify or block requests.
Even when it's stripped out entirely, it will be easy to add back in. The changes (that adblockers care about) are just a few if statements changing the conditions under which synchronous inspection of web requests are allowed. Manifest V3 still allows them. But only in limited circumstances which are unsuitable for ad blocking.
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.
Only the blocking capabilities of the webRequest API are deprecated, observing traffic remains intact in Manifest V3.
Extensions will continue to enjoy access to your data, while ad blockers will have a harder time to react to the countermeasures introduced by ad networks.
So, manifest v3 is out there, and does allow some form of adblocking. are there any adblockers actually implemented with it, so i can see for myself what the adblocking performance is like?
If Manifest v3 is really this bad then it's probably still possible to build adblockers by DLL hooking the browser. It should also not affect browsers with built-in adblocking like Brave and Vivaldi.
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.
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?).
Manifest v3 is killing current WebRequest API so you won't be able to filter requests on the fly (sort of playing man in the middle).
This means uBlock won't be as effective because once web request is done\page\script is loaded - it is impossible to stop it from loading other scripts.
Also it limits how many or what urls can be filtered at all if I'm not mistaken.
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.
You're being disingenuous. With Manifest v3, it is not possible any more to block requests dynamically which has huge implications for the efficacy of ad blocking (example: forget blocking youtube ads). Additionally, you're limited in how many static rules you can have.
Therefore, it's not just about changing the mechanism, the end result is clearly a lot worse. One can say, they crippled ad-blocking which this change. Hopefully, once the millions of people using ublock origin start noticing what's happening, they will move away from Chrome. I already did, ublock origin is worth more to me than any feature Google puts in Chrome.
reply