To improve its Chrome browser, Google will soon change the way extensions should work. A beneficial change in principle, but which could seriously harm ad blockers.
Will Google kill ad blockers? We can ask ourselves the question when we know that advertising is the main source of income for the Internet giant, particularly through the advertisements broadcast in its search engine and its various services. And anything that prevents ads from appearing on the Web inevitably leads to a loss of revenue. Google has just tightened its policy on its YouTube platform, preventing the playback of videos when an ad-blocker is detected, which certainly annoys users (read our article). And things could well become even more complicated in 2024, this time directly in Chrome, its home browser. An essential tool for Americans, whether on computer or mobile.
However, if it is still at the top of the ranking with nearly 65% market share (far ahead of Safari with 19.5% and Edge and its 4.5%) at the last survey carried out by StatCounter in May 2023, Chrome is often singled out for his voracious consumption of resources, particularly in memory, and for his indiscretions – he collects a huge amount of data for Google, which monetizes it. For some time now, Google has been working to improve its browser – for example, by putting inactive tabs to sleep, as is the case in the latest versions. But the giant also wants to take other measures, some of which could directly impact extensions, and more particularly ad blockers.
Manifest V3 Google: a drastic change of rules
Google has in fact been working for more than four years to review the way extensions for Chrome work. And a major change should occur in 2024 with the transition from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3. The Manifest is a sort of specification that defines the rules that Chrome extensions must respect to function (behavior, access and permissions, triggering, execution of scripts in the background, etc.).
However, if the Manifest V2 in place since 2012 was generous enough to leave a rather wide field of action for extensions, the Manifest V3 is much more restrictive, in particular on the blocking of content on the fly. Because the first extensions to suffer are those dedicated to blocking advertisements such as AdBlock, uBlock or AdGuard to name just a few. These extensions use a large number of rules to dynamically filter the content displayed on web pages. uBlock Origin for example would contain more than 300,000. However, with the new version of the Manifest, the maximum number would be set at 30,000 in order to guarantee more flexibility to the browser and better performance. Enough to make ad blockers much less effective.
Google had already presented the outlines of Manifest V3 last year. The restrictions were then even stricter with a maximum number of rules set at 5,000. Following public outcry, the firm paused its development in order to take the time to consult the developers. Before returning to the charge at the end of the year with “improved support for content filtering by providing more generous limits” in his own words. On the AdGuard side, we seem to welcome this step forward. The developers of other ad blockers are remaining silent for the moment. There is therefore still a way to go so that everyone can find it. his account… and quickly. Google has indeed announced that the preview versions of Chrome 127 scheduled for June 2024 will deactivate extensions based on Manifest V2 (the current version). It will no longer be possible to use them, let alone deactivate them. recover and install them from the Chrome WebStore. There is a strong risk of seeing the Chrome extensions store quickly empty.