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Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

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Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#261

Post by pritambaral »

treden wrote: post #166
BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #112

The biggest advertising company in history tries to kill blocking advertisements in their browser? How am I not surprised. I bet this move is also to kill the workings of extensions like DecentralEyes and others that try to protect users from being tracked. The whole changing of the API into a "sure we'll block that URL for ya, sometimes maybe" model reeks of increasing user tracking. They'll work out the kinks to le…

This of course. Why is anyone in the least surprised that Google doesn't want the ads that fund Chrome (and everything else they do) to be blocked by the users of Chrome. Shall Google fund our nice things (like Firefox, Chrome, gmail, google maps, etc etc) with hopes and dreams in place of cold hard cash? The audacity. Clearly an unpopular opinion here, but anyway: I'm happy to let a few ads slip through (which I wil…

> I'm happy to let a few ads slip through ...

But should that mean letting the fox guard the henhouse though? The problem here is that the largest ad provider also controls the largest ad display platform (i.e., Chrome), and is using the latter to benefit the former.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#262

Post by Endy »

cletus wrote: post #180
malvosenior wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So rather than be alarmist and use this to feed into the tired narrative that "Google is killing ad blockers because it's an advertising company" That’s not alarmist, it’s the obvious truth. As a user I should have complete control over what runs on my machine. I don’t need Google “protecting” me (by breaking ad blockers). Google is the single most destructive force in the tech industry today. Very much like Micros…

> As a user I should have complete control over what runs on my machine. You do. By running Firefox. This level of control might be useful to you but it's not to most users. As much as power users chafe against things like the App Store, for example, this is clearly a win for most users. Limiting what a malicious extension could do is very much the same because I can guarantee you there are scams to get users to inst…

Beacon.enabled default is true, and the password manager defaults to sending passwords to a remote server. MozCo is not user friendly. Their main focus is on keeping the Google money flowing.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#263

Post by mcv »

pfdietz wrote: post #246
mcv wrote: post #170

I'm in the process of switching as much as possible to Firefox. I now use Firefox Mobile on my smartphone, and my new laptop doesn't even get Chrome. And in many ways, it's been a breath of fresh air. Firefox gives my much more control over my privacy, and even recommends some extensions to improve it further. A couple of websites are sadly broken on my Firefox setup, but I can live without them. I want to get back t…

> I want to get back to the content-driven web rather than this ad-driven web we have now. Are you prepared to pay for it?

As much as I did back when we had it.

Many people love sharing stuff. The move to this ad-driven web happened because companies saw they could make money here. I'm totally fine with companies not making money and the web being driven by scientists and hobbyists.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#264

Post by pritambaral »

vbezhenar wrote: post #196
BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #112

The biggest advertising company in history tries to kill blocking advertisements in their browser? How am I not surprised. I bet this move is also to kill the workings of extensions like DecentralEyes and others that try to protect users from being tracked. The whole changing of the API into a "sure we'll block that URL for ya, sometimes maybe" model reeks of increasing user tracking. They'll work out the kinks to le…

They are not trying to kill advertisements. They want to replace API to provide better performance. That's about it. ad blocking extensions won't disappear. May be some will, and new extensions emerge.

> They want to replace API to provide better performance.

The replacement API is incompatible with what it is replacing. The supposed gain in performance is not without loss in ability to block ads.

> ad blocking extensions won't disappear. May be some will, and new extensions emerge.

Some kinds of ad-blocking is simply impossible in the new API, without replacement or workaround. No extension can implement those methods.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#265

Post by rndgermandude »

wffurr wrote: post #224

Half of all detected malicious extensions used the web request API to spy on users. The rule limit has already been raised to 150,000. Plenty of ad blockers will still work in Chrome. This thread is chock full of motivated reasoning and deliberate misinformation.

> Half of all detected malicious extensions used the web request API to spy on users.

And they can continue doing so because spying is passive and the passive (just eavesdropping, no modifications) webRequest API still will be there.

>The rule limit has already been raised to 150,000.

And it could be 10 billion rules. The point isn't so much the actual number, but that you cannot programmatically judge and block request anymore.

>Plenty of ad blockers will still work in Chrome.

Of course, those ad-blocker crippling changes aren't in the Stable yet, and even in Canary they are only "preview" and the old APIs still work.

>This thread is chock full of motivated reasoning and deliberate misinformation.

Yes, that's more or less what you did here.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#266

Post by claudeganon »

gjm11 wrote: post #233
TeMPOraL wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Betting protection from antitrust issues on getting cozy with a political party is a risky strategy; political landscape shifts on quite regular basis. It's safer to keep a competitor alive so that if and when the power goes to people who don't like you, it won't be easy for them to go after you.

That would be why they're (allegedly -- I haven't checked) buying up those lovely Republicans. I think it's likely to be a while before any political party other than the Democrats and the Republicans holds a lot of power in the US.

It’s been ongoing since Trump’s win. I can’t find the link right now, but they’ve also been bankrolling and having speakers at those weird, right wing DC conferences. And they’ve been supporting ALEC for years.

https://fortune.com/2016/12/14/google-conservative-outreach-...

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#267

Post by hendersoon »

Everybody saying declarativeNetRequest is sufficient and Apple's Safari content blocking works perfectly fine is entirely missing the point. Both of those statements are true enough, _for right now_.

Losing the ability to modify content in this manner means adblockers can't compete in the arms race against advertisers. Anti-adblock scripts running locally with randomly-generated names will render this sort of declarative content blocking ineffective.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#268

Post by Kaiyou »

sub7 wrote: post #169

Sooner we move off ad renvenue based products the better. Surely there's a way to get people to pay a tiny bit to get great quality products that don't fuck them in the arse. We need some benevolent dictatorship in tech to sponsor this ecosystem.

You'd need a convenient, anonymous payment system. Tough luck.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#269

Post by hendersoon »

apexalpha wrote: post #162
johnpowell wrote: post #86

Back in the IE 6 days I was in charge of fixing my families computers, and my family's friends computers. I was dealing with a few things a week, some requiring a full re-install. This was back in the early 2000's. Eventually I snapped and started charging hourly unless people switched to Gmail and Firefox. I started getting a lot less calls since Gmail was pretty good about filtering out malicious attachments and IE…

Nowaways I put a pihole in every home of my family members. Together with unchecky (windows) my calls dropped by 95% or so.

DNS adblockers like Pihole are markedly _less_ effective than the declarative content blocking proposed for Chrome and currently in-use by Safari.

They do have the advantage of covering your entire LAN and working inside apps, so they are definitely useful. But they don't replace real adblockers, or even the castrated ones Google is pushing on its users.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#270

Post by rndgermandude »

chopin wrote: post #241
bnegreve wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So rather than be alarmist [..] we should be pushing for changes that make this workable If, as the author suspects, the intent is to break popular adblockers, I have no interest in trying to make this workable. Personally, I think this is a typical half-legit move: there's a good intention (security) but it's also hard to believe they did not realize that by pushing these changes, they were going to break several…

There's no security involved whatsoever: Extensions can still read page content. They're only not allowed to block.

Not just page content. They can read your cookies, they can see all requests (just not modify them on the fly). The extensions tracking you acting as spyware will see no change, the other kind of malicious extensions that want to modify your requests will still do so by modifying the DOM of pages for example.

So the "security" reasons google gave have long been debunked as non-sense.

The other half is the performance reasons. What's the performance burden of calling a (chain) blocking webRequest listeners? Last time I checked it was single digit milliseconds per request. So a very ad-laden worst-case website with 100 requests will spent maybe 500ms in the webRequest listeners, but will still load faster thanks to all the cruft being blocked away. So what's the win for performance exactly?

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