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Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

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Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#81

Post by cute_boi »

tbeseda wrote: post #53
abtinf wrote: post #37

Someone ought to build a browser that is designed from the ground up to treat the web for what it is: the most hostile ecosystem on the planet. uBlock/uMatrix functionality should be built into the core. Every domain and PSF should be sandboxed to its own profile. User agents and many js queries should return standard responses. Forcing display of video controls should be trivial. Manipulating pages to show/hide elem…

Vivaldi (not affiliated) kinda aims to do this. At least they build the blocker in. It uses the Blink engine, too. I don't think this move by Google will adversely affect Vivaldi in the same way it does Chrome.

they aren't open source...

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#84

Post by markstos »

sheept wrote: post #51
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #16

Firefox is the only sane option. It’s not perfect but it’s better than the alternatives. Chromium forks are at the mercy of Google doing everything they can to stop ad blocking. Firefox forks are often maintain by just “some dude”. If they decide they don’t want to maintain it anymore, it’s done. If everyone switches to a fork and then Firefox goes away because nobody is using the browser anymore, it’s done.

As you alluded to, many Chromium forks (notable exception is Ungoogled) are backed by tech companies. There's already plenty of intentional changes they maintain in their forks, like Privacy Sandbox,[0] so I don't think preserving support for v2 is a large hurdle for them. [0]: https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/10742158329613-W...

Google described Manifest V2 as significant tech debt with new bugs still found there. Either they are lying or it's a non-trivial feature set to continue to support.

So will be interesting to see how many other browsers actually do keep this support alive.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#85

Post by cute_boi »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #16

Firefox is the only sane option. It’s not perfect but it’s better than the alternatives. Chromium forks are at the mercy of Google doing everything they can to stop ad blocking. Firefox forks are often maintain by just “some dude”. If they decide they don’t want to maintain it anymore, it’s done. If everyone switches to a fork and then Firefox goes away because nobody is using the browser anymore, it’s done.

We can use helium. It works fine.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#86

Post by cholantesh »

vablings wrote: post #68
haritha-j wrote: post #65

i keep hoping google will stop giving me reasons to switch ,because i can't be bothered to move all my passwords and stuff over, but every year they keep making it harder. Likewise, I desperately want to stay on windows because of anticheat, but every year they keep making it harder.

Make the switch now! Gaming on Linux is really only getting better every year with much hard work from valve. Outside of developers opting out pretty much every single game works out of the box. I value my limited leisure time and to be able to just jump on my computer and start playing without any annoying nags about windows updates or restart this and strange unexplainable issues. Move all of your passwords and log…

Someone in the Thief community was celebrating the Nightdive remaster announcement because it is apparently getting much harder with each passing year to install and run the Dark Engine games on Windows; meanwhile I've been doing this multiple times a year for about a decade with Lutris.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#87

Post by AntonyGarand »

qnleigh wrote: post #64

Naive question: will it not be possible for ad blockers to upgrade to ManifestV3? Is there something about it that makes ad blocking much harder. What does Manifest actually do?

There is ublock origin lite[0] on chromium which is the v3 compliant ad blocking strategy, but it is severely limited by the new ruleset and limitations, being a crippled version.

There are more details available on this fan site of ublock[1]:

> What Was Manifest V3?

> Manifest V3 was Google's major update to the Chrome extension platform. The most significant change was replacing the webRequest API with the more limited declarativeNetRequest API. While Google cited security and performance benefits, this change removed capabilities that content blockers like uBlock Origin relied on for effective ad and tracker blocking.

> How This Affected uBlock Origin

> uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. As a result, the full uBlock Origin extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store in late 2024. Chrome permanently disabled all remaining MV2 extensions in July 2025.

[0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

[1]: https://ublockorigin.com/

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#90

Post by Izmaki »

kgwxd wrote: post #47
neves wrote: post #4

Will Brave, which is based in Chromium, still block ads? Since they are changing Chromium, I don't think so.

The ones Brave choose to block, sure. You're going to end up with the same problem eventually.

In my experience they're sometimes a little too aggressive and I have to disable the "shields" for the page to function correctly. I have never seen an add while using Brave and that's after 1.5 million trackers blocked and 50 gb bandwidth "saved".

The only browser I would switch to away from Brave is one that, as was described by another user in here, sandboxes all pages/domains and ensures that no data leaks outside unless you are actively allowing it. Think Qubes OS but for browsers. I imagine a nice "drag this domain-box into the Facebook domain blob of a tree structure to allow linking and sharing of data" would be a cool feature. That would make it easy to select and confirm which FAANG company gets your data on which domain.

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