The Mozilla Foundation has decided not to follow certain rules initiated by Google that impact the operation of ad blockers. Beyond the controversy, it is the plurality of browsers that is at stake.
“Content blocking is one of the most important use cases for extensions, and we’re committed to ensuring Firefox users have access to the best privacy tools available.” Behind its innocuous airs, this statement from the Mozilla Foundation on ad blockers was in fact a small bomb dropped against Google last May since its official blog.
Google has defined a set of new rules regarding extensions for its Chrome browser. This is the Manifest V3 (MV3), launched in 2019. It aims to solve security and privacy issues, and it is establishing itself as a standard.
The limited capabilities of ad-blockers
If Firefox will also move to MV3, the Mozilla Foundation still intends to stand out. She believes that some changes would be counterproductive, in particular the blocking of the WebRequest API. Because it allowed to observe the traffic between the browser and a website and to modify or block certain web requests. Chrome has replaced a new, more restrictive API: declarativeNetRequest.
Even though Google says it will continue to support ad blockers, MV3 will limit their capabilities. So, of course, he counts AdBlock Plus among his supporters. But this group is, remember, linked to Google by an agreement. We find in fact a majority of ad-blockers to have expressed their dissatisfaction. The Ghostery extension, for example, will no longer be able to replace data that unintentionally identifies a user with generic information. Mozilla security chief Marshall Erwin told The Verge that the immediate security benefits were “not obvious.” As a result, Firefox will maintain support for WebRequest blocking in Manifest V3, even after June 2023, when extensions built under MV2 will cease to be supported.
Chrome’s dominance in the browser market
This case again highlights Google’s almost absolute dominance over browsers. Chrome represents around 64% of the global market in 2022 compared to 3.4% for Firefox, according to Statcounter. But many other browsers use Chromium, the open source version of Chrome, as their technology base. This is the case of Edge, Opera or Vivaldi. They therefore follow the same rules.
Finally, Google succeeded in imposing MV3 within the discussion group on Web extensions of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), an association for the defense of digital freedoms, had also criticized not only the content of MV3, but also Google’s way of doing things last December.
Firefox could take advantage of this situation, and this little slingshot against Chrome. In any case, it takes the opportunity to stand out and to remind that it is an alternative that takes users’ concerns more into account. It remains to be seen whether this will be enough to switch Internet users to Firefox.
Source :
The Verge