![]() ![]() Under the new specifications, extensions like these-like some privacy-protective tracker blockers-will have greatly reduced capabilities." A few months ago, the EFF called Manifest V3 "deceitful and threatening." The privacy advocacy group said Manifest V3 "will restrict the capabilities of web extensions-especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit. Advertisementįurther Reading Google delays death of tracking cookies again, wants more time for “testing”There's considerable concern that Google is using its position as the world's largest browser vendor to protect Google's business model by hamstringing ad blockers and privacy-protection extensions. Google says Manifest V3 is "one of the most significant shifts in the extensions platform since it launched a decade ago." The company claims that the more limited platform is meant to bring "enhancements in security, privacy, and performance." Privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) dispute this description and say that if Google really cared about the security of the extension store, it could just police the store more actively using actual humans instead of limiting the capabilities of all extensions. In January 2024, Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from the store entirely. Starting in January 2023 with Chrome version 112, Google "may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in Canary, Dev, and Beta channels." Starting in June 2023 and Chrome 115, Google "may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in all channels, including stable channel." Also starting in June, the Chrome Web Store will stop accepting Manifest V2 extensions, and they'll be hidden from view. Google's latest blog post details the new timeline for the transition to Manifest V3, which involves ending support for older extensions running on Manifest V2 and forcing everyone onto the new platform. The update is controversial because it makes ad blockers less effective under the guise of protecting privacy and security, and Google just so happens to be the world's largest advertising company. "Manifest V3" is the rather unintuitive name for the next version of Chrome's extension platform. Chrome will be similar to Apple’s Safari browser, which now supports “ content blockers” that operate in a speedy, standard way.Google's journey toward Chrome's "Manifest V3" has been happening for four years now, and if the company's new timeline holds up, we'll all be forced to switch to it in year 5. This change may speed up Chrome by limiting what all browser extensions can do-ad blocking extensions and other extensions. If this (quite limited) declarativeNetRequest API ends up being the only way content blockers can accomplish their duty, this essentially means that two content blockers I have maintained for years, uBlock Origin (“uBO”) and uMatrix, can no longer exist.īeside causing uBO and uMatrix to no longer be able to exist, it’s really concerning that the proposed declarativeNetRequest API will make it impossible to come up with new and novel filtering engine designs, as the declarativeNetRequest API is no more than the implementation of one specific filtering engine, and a rather limited one (the 30,000 limit is not sufficient to enforce the famous EasyList alone).Įven Hill notes that ad blockers aren’t going away if this goes through. Raymond Hill notes that, if this change goes through, ad blocker uBlock Origin and content filter uMatrix can’t do anything special: However, declarativeNetRequest uses an Adblock Plus-style filtering system. Chrome itself does the blocking without waiting for extensions to respond, and this should be faster. Chrome won’t have to wait for extensions to weigh in while loading a page.Īd blockers must use the “ declarativeNetRequest” API to tell Chrome what they want to block. Extensions can only watch these events, and that should speed up page load times. ![]() If the proposed change goes through, extensions won’t be able to block events with this API. ![]()
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