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AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

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Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#121

Post by cycomanic »

ameshkov wrote: post #81
gorhill wrote: post #71

One of the stated goal of MV3 by Google[1] was to avoid extensions with broad permissions: > our new declarativeNetRequest API is designed to be a privacy-preserving method for extensions to block network requests without needing access to sensitive data This MV3-based AdGuard extension still requires a broad permission to "read or modify host data" on all sites[2]: "host_permissions": [ " " ], So what you have now i…

All true, and we (content blockers devs) were saying this all for years, since MV3 was first announced. MV3 brings very little (if any) privacy and security enhancements, this is for the future MV4 when extensions will be dumbed down to sets of declarative rules. We'll now need to rely on Chrome team for implementing what we need. But they do it painfully slow or not do at all. Also, where will we get the new ideas i…

How about simply not supporting chrome. I believe some responsibility for this lies with us developers. It was developers who made extensions for chrome. We as technologists recommended chrome to our friends and families. Without us chrome would likely not be in the position it is today and google could not dictate the terms like they do. Maybe it is time that extension authors abandon ship, and we recommend alternative browsers?

To those who argue that chrome is faster and therefore you prefer using it. You should ask yourself, what is more important to you, to see a website a few ms faster or preventing Google to to dictate how the Internet of the future works (apart from the fact that in my experience browser's are so close in performance, that I don't think anyone can consistently pick which browser their on).

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#122

Post by judge2020 »

monkeynotes wrote: post #108
bambax wrote: post #7

> 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 franti…

Being that Brave and numerous other browsers are built on Chrome, does that mean they will also have this limitation?

Brave has their own built-in adblocker so I don't see them putting any effort into keeping Mv3 around after it's actually removed from Chromium.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#123

Post by the_gipsy »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #106
webmobdev wrote: post #34

I don't know if it is cartelisation (both Apple and Google have an ad division and it is in their interest to work together on some aspects of this business) or Google bribed Apple (through its ios search engine deal), but Safari webkit also has limitations in ad blocking through the content blocking API which Apple created for Safari. (See Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin (and other blockers) for Safari #15…

Is it possible that Apple’s implementation uses less power and hence conserve battery life? Also, is it possible Apple’s implementation requires less trust in extension and is more private because no browsing information can exit? It is also possible for the above, and collusion to all simultaneously happen, and or Apple advancing their own ad business.

It won't be lower battery if ads slip through (they do).

It won't be more private if ads slip through, or if the whole web experience is degraded and users prefer native apps.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#124

Post by TrickyRick »

webmobdev wrote: post #34

I don't know if it is cartelisation (both Apple and Google have an ad division and it is in their interest to work together on some aspects of this business) or Google bribed Apple (through its ios search engine deal), but Safari webkit also has limitations in ad blocking through the content blocking API which Apple created for Safari. (See Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin (and other blockers) for Safari #15…

Ad Guard works great in Safari, I have yet to see ads it doesn't block

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#125

Post by aaaddaaaaa1112 »

mastazi wrote: post #94
wooque wrote: post #72

Just install Brave, its adblocker is natively implemented and not affected by Manifest V3 fiasco.

that's what Brave staff keep repeating but in the meantime all other extensions that need v2 are a pain to install, for example this one https://libredirect.github.io/ requires you to enable dev mode, load the extension and then apply any updates manually. They announced a Brave Extensions Store years ago and there are no news as of today. I'm actually thinking to go back to Firefox because of this.

No post body was provided.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#126

Post by Tijdreiziger »

avhception wrote: post #109
ameshkov wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, and we (content blockers devs) were saying this all for years, since MV3 was first announced. MV3 brings very little (if any) privacy and security enhancements, this is for the future MV4 when extensions will be dumbed down to sets of declarative rules. We'll now need to rely on Chrome team for implementing what we need. But they do it painfully slow or not do at all. Also, where will we get the new ideas i…

I just wanted to say that you (content blocker devs) have been heard, maybe not by the majority of browser users but at least people like me are championing Firefox over webkit-based browsers precisely because to do otherwise would be to loose control of the web to FAANG, especially Google. I've been telling everyone who would listen about how Google leverages Chrom(e/ium) against user interests and have deployed Fir…

I also recommend people I know to use Firefox, but a lot of people either don't understand the problem or just don't care.

A lot of people even conflate Google Chrome, Google Search and other Google services (understandable, as Chrome's home page is a big Google logo with a search box), so they think that they cannot use Google anymore if they install Firefox.

The stats [1] speak for themselves: only 3.3% of users use Firefox. Even Edge has more users.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#127

Post by spiffytech »

monkeynotes wrote: post #108
bambax wrote: post #7

> 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 franti…

Being that Brave and numerous other browsers are built on Chrome, does that mean they will also have this limitation?

Brave's CEO has said they'll add back any functionality that ad blocker extensions need to keep working under Manifest v3.

https://twitter.com/joshmanders/status/1134139586836344832

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#128

Post by dylan604 »

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #87
gorhill wrote: post #71

One of the stated goal of MV3 by Google[1] was to avoid extensions with broad permissions: > our new declarativeNetRequest API is designed to be a privacy-preserving method for extensions to block network requests without needing access to sensitive data This MV3-based AdGuard extension still requires a broad permission to "read or modify host data" on all sites[2]: "host_permissions": [ " " ], So what you have now i…

For context, gorhill is the veteran author of original uBlock, and current uBlock Origin. He knows what he's talking about as author, maintainer and one of the community leader/voice of probably the single best and only conflict-of-interest-free ad-blocker currently in existence. His past post[0] was reposted and generated quite a discussion on HN [1]. For further details on why uBO is conflict free, this is the READ…

thank you gorhill for making the internet a useable space.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#129

Post by therealmarv »

ryannevius wrote: post #61
therealmarv wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switch to Brave, you will still maintain 99% of the bell and whistles of Chrome (because it's a Chrome fork) and you will have an Adblock engine directly in the browser core written in Rust. How cool is that... Especially on mobile Brave is a game changer. https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

Does Brave have the memory / slowdown issues attributed to Chrome on Apple silicone MacBooks?

It's not reengineered for most parts. Core is Chromium with all its upsides and downsides.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#130

Post by kevingadd »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #106
webmobdev wrote: post #34

I don't know if it is cartelisation (both Apple and Google have an ad division and it is in their interest to work together on some aspects of this business) or Google bribed Apple (through its ios search engine deal), but Safari webkit also has limitations in ad blocking through the content blocking API which Apple created for Safari. (See Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin (and other blockers) for Safari #15…

Is it possible that Apple’s implementation uses less power and hence conserve battery life? Also, is it possible Apple’s implementation requires less trust in extension and is more private because no browsing information can exit? It is also possible for the above, and collusion to all simultaneously happen, and or Apple advancing their own ad business.

Think about it from a mathematical perspective: How much CPU time is actually spent evaluating ad blocker rules? It's going to be proportional to the number of HTTP requests you issue. On a good website the number of requests is in the dozens or a hundred tops per page load, on a bad website maybe it's in the low thousands. But that's it. Let's say you have 300000 rules (I think the actual number tends to be much lower than this), worst case even if you brute forced that, you're evaluating 300000 regexes maybe a thousand times. That'll take some time, but not that much time, because modern CPUs are really fast. It's simply implausible that an ad blocker could have a significant negative impact on battery life unless you wrote it in some sort of forth interpreter that was checking strings one byte at a time - compared to the rule evaluations happening once per request, you're rasterizing frames ~60 times a second and handling input events and timers and all of that stuff constantly.

If you optimize the rules engine - which you can definitely do - you can skip evaluating most of those regexes, you can evaluate them in parallel, etc. You could start preparing the request and only gate the actual tcp packets on approval from the ad blocker. You could cache the approve/deny state for each URL so that the ad blocker overhead is only paid on first visit to a site. There are lots of ways to make this stuff super fast without breaking it, but Google and Apple don't want to do the work.

People like the uBlock Origin author have already demonstrated in the past that their ad blockers are fast despite the severe limitations of current browser extension APIs. If browser vendors actually supported extension developers ad blockers could probably become faster. Instead they're attacking them and forcing people to move over to intentionally sabotaged APIs with limited feature sets and arguing that now things will be "faster" even though you're going to be wasting resources downloading a bunch of ads.

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