Changes in Chrome May Restrict Ad Blockers
Google has announced a timetable for moving away from the Manifest V2 spec. Its abandonment may cause big problems for ad blocker developers.
The official Chrome browser blog posted an entry that caused a lot of excitement and raised concerns of people who use ad blockers. It was announced that as of January 17, 2022, plug-ins created according to the Manifest V2 specs will no longer be accepted for distribution in Chrome Web Store.
Existing plug-ins will still be eligible for updates, but no new ones will be allowed. This state of affairs will only last for a year, as of January 2023, Chrome will completely stop supporting plug-ins built on Manifest V2.
The whole problem stems from the fact that many of the most popular ad blockers currently use Manifest V2, and the V3 version is so different that it's hard to predict how developers of ad-blocking plug-ins will cope with the switch.
Google argues that the change is dictated by a desire to increase user security. However, Manifest V3 will limit the number of WebRequestAPI features that many ad blockers, such as uBlock Origin or Ghostery, use.
This is why some users suspect a ruse and see Google's move as an attempt to limit ad blocking. In financial reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the conglomerate has acknowledged that ad blockers have the potential to seriously hurt revenue.
Manifesto V3 was announced several years ago and Google assures that it will enable the creation of even better ad blocking plugins. However, not everyone believes these words. For example, Alexei Miagkow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in an interview with The Register that the reasons given by the company for the changes do not really make sense. On the other hand, developers of the Brave, Mozilla, Opera, and Vivaldi browsers have announced that they will try to support useful features for ad blockers in the API that will be removed by Manifest V3.
