Chrome Extension Manifest V3 could end uBlock Origin for Chrome
Google is working on the Chrome extension manifest version 3 at the moment which defines the capabilities of Chrome's extensions platform.
The updated manifest is available as a draft currently that anyone may access. Draft means that it is not set in stone yet and that things may change. Google will release the updated version of the manifest eventually though and make it mandatory after a transitional period.
Interested users and extension developers may follow the tracking bug, issue 896897, on the Chromium Bugs website.
Raymond Hill, known as Gorhill online, the author of the popular content blockers uBlock Origin and uMatrix, voiced his concern over some of the planned changes; these changes, if implemented as proposed currently, remove functionality that the extensions use for content blocking.
Google plans to remove blocking options from the webRequest API and asks developers to use declarativeNetRequest instead. One of the main issues with the suggested change is that it made to support AdBlock Plus compatible filters only and would limit filters to 30k.
Hill mentioned on Google's bug tracking site that the change would end his extensions uBlock Origin and uMatrix for Google Chrome. While it would be possible to switch to the new functionality, it is too limiting and would cripple existing functionality of the content blocking extensions.
If this (quite limited) declarativeNetRequest API ends up being the only way content blockers can accomplish their duty, this essentially means that two content blockers I have maintained for years, uBlock Origin ("uBO") and uMatrix, can no longer exist.
There are other features (which I understand are appreciated by many users) which can't be implemented with the declarativeNetRequest API, for examples, the blocking of media element which are larger than a set size, the disabling of JavaScript execution through the injection of CSP directives, the removal of outgoing Cookie headers, etc. -- and all of these can be set to override a less specific setting, i.e. one could choose to globally block large media elements, but allow them on a few specific sites, and so on still be able to override these rules with ever more specific rules.
The new API would limit content blockers for Chrome-based browsers and eliminate options to create new and unique content blocking extensions. All that would be left are AdBlock Plus like filtering extensions that would all offer the same blocking functionality.
While there would still be adblockers for Chrome, the limit of 30,000 network filters would make even those less capable than before. EasyList, a very popular blocking list, has 42,000 filters and if users add other lists used for other purposes, e.g. social blocking, that number would increase even more.
You can follow the discussion on uBlock Origin's GitHub page as well.
Closing Words
Could this have been Google's plan all along? Create a web browser and use it to combat the use of content blockers? Block some annoying ads, allow basic content blockers, and block any other form of content blocking to make sure that Google's advertising business improves again?
Some users would certainly move to Firefox if uBlock Origin, uMatrix, and other content blockers would no longer work in Chrome-based browsers. Even if millions would migrate, it would still leave Chrome dominate the entire desktop browser market.
It will also be interesting to see how Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and other Chromium-based browser developers react to the change, if it passes the way it is proposed right now.
Now You: What is your take on this?
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I’d imagine that Opera, Vivaldi et al have no say in it, neither will they work around it. The only one I think possibly would are Brave.
If it does happen to all then hopefully by then FF will sort out their horrible power usage which is especially bad on the mac and move to something like Librefox.
I love this. This will cause a mass migration to Firefox and other browsers, myself included. I’m using Chrome with a ublock Origin group policy on over 50 workstations and will promptly migrate users to Firefox if ublock Origin is no longer supported on Chrome.
Dont love it, Firefox like a slave follows google’s policies and will do the same since they have embraced the WebExtensions which is aderivative of Chrome’s Extensions.
That’s my main fear since those days you can’t trust Mozilla to do the right thing sadly.
@NoT-Today
If Mozilla is smart enough, this is the chance they’re waiting for. I see no reason why Mozilla has to follow Google’s step
@Anon: The problem is they aren’t. They’ve already had a couple chances in the past but screwed up miserably (eg the Mr. Robot fiasco)
@Not So Anonymous, I doubt that the Looking Glass issue and this are comparable. Mozilla might make odd decisions at times (by subjective feeling; more in the last couple years), but they probably will not pass by the chance of ~5% of Chrome’s userbase.
Yeah I figured this is what Ublock Origin fans would do. It is what I would personally do if I was using Chrome and they stopped supporting Ublock Origin.
On another note, I decided to be a nice person and disable Ublock Origin on Youtube the other day. And then I was promptly assaulted with a 2 and a half minute unskippable video ad. So I quickly switched UBO back on. I do think that the system is slowly tearing itself apart. Advertisers get more aggressive and obnoxious, so more people block ads, so advertisers get more aggressive and obnoxious, so more people block ads, and so on and so fourth until the system just collapses.
But I don’t think ad blockers or people who use them are to blame. After all, annoying ads came before the ad blocker!
The Purge begins. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Google is the new Microsoft.
If all browsers go down this path then expect: UBLOCK PROXY. System-wide adblocking… and maybe more, like a firewall.
Already exists. It’s called pihole.
no windows version though
hosts file perhaps?
Good. That’s what they get from standing on Google’s side.
Long live XUL!
Time to move back to firefox then…
This is devastating.
Obviously it is done by design, but this will be the beginning of the end of Chrome for professional users. I waited for this moment, when I realized that you can’t find uBO easily on the chrome extension store. They advertize all kinds of ad blockers, but the only one they do not is uBO. Because it is incorruptible.
The web is unusable without ubO, tens of millions of professionals rely on it.
I can’t even switch to FF for my main work because the usability is to weak, and I’m on a Mac. Hopefully Brave will be ready by the end of the year.
Firefox FTW!
Seriously though, you should probably be using Firefox anyway, regardless of what happens here.
If Google begins I think other Chromium based browsers fill follow. I wonder if for Brave it would be a chance to promote their BAT.
Firefox would be smart to launch kind of a media offensive (if they have enough money for that).
Anyway a sure sign Google, Facebook and the like don’t care one bit about all the negative news and EU penalties.
They won’t have a choice unless they are able to and want to patch it out. Brave seem more focused on privacy than the rest, always talk about it on github and their blog, the others don’t say a lot. So if anyone does they will but it may be that it’s pretty much impossible.
I am afraid so it will be.
*laughs in waterfox*
well, but it’s understandable: they are going to block non-google ads themselves and anyone trying to block google-ads is in the wrong from their standpoint
Remember the age-old adagio that one ‘ending’ gives rise to another ‘beginning’? Although it would be very regretful indeed to see uBlock Origin disappear from the Chrome content-blocking landscape, this move might very well inspire people to migrate to system-wide (host file based) alternatives.
“Could this have been Google’s plan all along?”
Yes!
I watch very little TV primarily because of the generally horrible advertising/show ratio. If I cannot mitigate the same potential problem using the Internet and tools like uBlock Origin, I will be back to 1985 again where a PC is just a tool for programming for my own pleasure.
I wish there was an adblocker for TV ;)
Hmmm… I use Vivaldi and Opera v12. Hereon in, I’ll make sure that I don’t update Vivaldi. If it breaks, it breaks. Opera v12 still works with 99% of sites, so I’ll stick with that. I can’t be doing with all this fucking about, myself. Apart from Vivaldi, I have Google locked well out of my system and I’m not about to let them screw me over, like this.
> It will also be interesting to see how Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and other Chromium-based browser developers react…
Vivaldi and Brave would do well to base their technologies off Mozilla’s FF Quantum Code. Opera, I think, is a lost cause in terms of how they view privacy. As one user already commented: Mozilla has been a bit flaky and could well implement the same set of changes (WebExtensions a derivative of Chrome’s Extensions).
It would be great if Mozilla actually addressed this.
> One of the main issues with the suggested change is that it made to support AdBlock Plus compatible filters only and would limit filters to 30k.
I know why they did this. Adblock Plus is being developed by the Eyeo GmbH. The business model of eyeo GmbH is to put advertisers who pay them a decent chunk of money, in order to be put on eyeo GmbH’s whitelist. Being on the whitelist is a good thing for advertisers, as that means that all of their ads come through despite the adblocker.
Google is one of the major clients of eyeo GmbH, having paid them 25 million Euro in order to be put on their whitelist, according to Sascha Pallenberg, a German blogger who exposed the shady business model of the people behind Adblock Plus.
Adblock Plus is thus favored by Google, as they are corrupt. Raymond Hill, developer of uBlock Origin and uMatrix, isn’t corrupt. Google’s failure to bribe him into submission is why he is now being put at a disadvantage.
Our reaction to this should be a shit storm without equal, and if that doesn’t work, boycotting Chrome.
By allowing 30K filters, Google ensures that only a tiny minority will switch to other browsers, as that’s “just good enough” for a decent browsing experience. Forbidding adblockers is not possible just yet, but Google is moving n that direction, by killing off legit offerings such as uBlock Origin first, leaving only their minions (eyeo GmbH) in the market for now.
imo, the real solution isn’t to hopscotch from one browser to the next while this sort of policy migrates around, but to buy a raspberry pi and deploy pi hole on your network.
Great post Iron Heart.
Google is a million miles away from the “don’t be evil” days. They’re more or less anti-trust era Microsoft but way more Orwellian.
Google has figured out that too many of us have jumped ship…I knew this was coming and mentioned on another thread that within 3 months they would come up with a way to pump their preferred propaganda to the rubes.
Associates have informed me Apple is already doing this by not allowing uBO on their latest browser…I’m told If you download the Firefox browser on an updated Apple OS, uBO works but it’s restricted. Any lists added to the URL custom box will not work.
Avoid the googler, tim cook-apple and faKeBo0k maoist/chicom business as usual model at all costs
Whoever told you that is lying or an idiot; or both.
UBo is not restricted on macOS, however, nowadays if you want to make an extension for Safar, then you have to have a developers account just like with apps on the App Store. Maybe devs don’t want to pay $99 a year just to make an extension, so they don’t bother now.
The Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) devs had to stop making a Safari version of the extension for this exact reason.
“Apple says it will continue to accept new submissions to the existing Safari Extensions Gallery through the end of 2018. It warns, however, that it will eventually transition away entirely from the Gallery platform.”
“The issue is that safari will no longer support extensions of this type and that it is impossible to reproduce ublock’s functionality using Apple’s new requirements and limitations.”
https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/142
https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/130
Glad I got that lifetime license for Adguard all those years ago.
1- This Chrome extension manifest is available as a draft currently. Wait and see;
2.1- If abandoned I’d consider the manifest as a test;
2.2- If adopted, I would be surprised : I know Google is aggressive but I doubt to the point of puching under the waist.
3- Happy to not be a Chrome user, happy to be a Firefox user;
4- My top criteria will always be privacy which means that if Firefox itself ever followed such a manifest I’d switch immediately — immediately — to any browser supporting unlimited blocking features, uBlockO and Matrix essentially.
5- Tomorrows, 2, 3 5 years from now, a browser market monoplized by Google, “take it, ads and tracking included, or move off” … I’d move off. But I consider such a scenario as unlikely : there will always be resistance and I have faith in developers’ capacity to counter-strike even if such a Web would mean that Net freedom has become an area for lesser and lesser users, creating as such an elite, not an elite of education or money makers but an elite of refusal.
I hope they will reconsider this. I seriously don’t want to have to get back to firegarbage.
I noted years ago that Chrome only allowed extensions and ad-blockers on Windows, and not on Android. Why? Chrome needed to allow them on Windows to take on Firefox, which of course pre-dated Chrome and had them, whereas on Android, very few users even realize they have a choice when it comes to their browser, and Chrome is bundled in (Although, in case anyone is unaware, there is a Firefox for Android in the Google Play Store- and it does offer several ad-blockers- it’s just that it only represents like half of a percent of mobile traffic from Android, so Chrome doesn’t view it as something it needs to complete with yet.). Clearly and predictably, the behavior of a company that gets the majority of it’s income through hosting ads on the Internet doesn’t want those ads blocked, and will only allow them to be blocked if they feel they have to do so to complete.
This is just one of many reasons why the Blink/Chromium/Chrome monopoly is a bad thing and why people should seriously switching to Firefox. Google may back off this change now, but as Firefox’s user base continues to slip, Google can revisit the issue later when people have no alternative but to use Chrome or a related browser and take their medicine. Firefox may not be perfect, but it is the only browser on the market over 1% marketshare that’s cross platform and can present an “Option B” on some issues. Sure, there are all these other browsers based on Blink and Chromium, but *generally speaking*, they are about UI, and follow Chrome’s lead under the hood even when they don’t like where it is going because it would be expensive not to- many even just directly dump you to the Google maintained Chrome extension site, so even if there were differences on issues like this, the extensions will all follow the Chrome rules.
Many web pages already are designed solely for Blink/Webkit and the number of those will only grow if Firefox can’t take back marketshare.
I really think this proposed change (Outlined in the article) happened because Edge is switching to being based on Chromium. It’s now Google’s world, we’re just living in it. Unless…
It may sound counter-intuitive but now would be the time for Mozilla to spin-off a side-project which forks Chromium into something usable.
They could stop the useless experiments, marketing and virtue-signaling and put 10% of their workforce into this project.
The idea would be to have something that feels entirely like current Firefox, but with Chromium in the back-end.
Just look at Vivaldi. They have 41 employees and managed to create a front-end. So it can be done with a very small team.
I think it all depends on whether the chromium source code could be patched to revert google’s obnoxious changes. But, I imagine google will make the changes as inextricable as possible – true to form for them.
It is a precarious situation with chromium as there really is no true fork other than chrome itself. And chrome’s changes are fed upstream.
@ clake
The Chromium Open Source Project/COSP is sponsored and controlled by Google Inc, just like the Android Open Source Project/AOSP. What Google says, goes. COSP is used as a development base for her proprietary or close source Chrome browser.
It would probably be pretty easy for chromium based browsers like Opera to keep v2 compatibility, while going with v3 as well, but I bet Google will not allow it come to that, they will offer just enough features to keep the majority happy.
Well, well, well, what a “surprise”.
First we get the news that Google Chrome will be blocking ads by default and now they intentionally limit the functionality of ad-blocker extensions that we all know work pretty damn well. I’m just going to go ahead and assume that all other Chromium-based browsers will happily follow this trend.
I wonder if regular users will suddenly notice the amount of ads they’ll get and start asking questions.
The next big question I believe some people have already address it is: will Firefox follow or step up for once and take this opportunity to do the right thing?
This is why you shouldn’t use a browser made by a company that’s main revenue source is ad revenue.
Chrome is my backup browser. I only use it for websites that don’t render/work properly on Firefox.
Firefox is better than Chrome in every possible way, IMO.
I’m laughing at all the Chrome users, who have been acting like they are better than Firefox users.
As Kirk said, “I’m laughing at the superior intellect.”
then Let Firefox (if they dont cave in) be your Moses,
& let the exodus begin !
Chrome for Android does not allow extensions = unusable because of unblockable ads everywhere. So, Chrome for desktop will also soon become unusable.
.
This will likely signal the beginning of the downfall of Chrome.
I use AdGuard so no problem here, of course is a paid ad blocker on system level, but at least is a possibility of laugh in Google’s face.
I have tried it out and it seems be a good solution.
Again, this is where Linux comes to your rescue…..
Its a secure enough OS that you/I could run FFx52ESR on it with no Anti-Virus
& still be 99.999% safe.
Without even being careful or cautious about “malicious” websites…Dangerous for who exactly?
When I first started using Linux I was getting browser malware.
I set browser cache to zero, problem solved,page closed malware gone.
I dont think I even do that anymore.
So if you REALLY like that POS called chrome you could just run an older version probably for years.
Microsoft, Google & Facebook will continue to abuse everyone anally until people stop whining & fight back.
Understand this, Google is at YOUR mercy, no ad revenue & they would fold up in Year or 2.
Good riddance,I say.
Always remember the people who rise to the top in Capitalism are Narcissists & Sociopaths.
Do not encourage or empower them…… LoL
Did you even read what this is about? It has nothing to do with the OS neither has it anything to do with malware.
I don’t like this measure by the side of Google. Anyway, I always thought that the Ublock extension will be “blocked” before than the Ublock Origin one. Now I am little confused, Ublock Origin is the good or it is the bad? My memory always make me same kind of unuseful jokes. :(
This same excuse of security against evil extensions was used to justify Firefox switching to the WebRequest API of WebExtensions so that uBlock Origin can no longer block Google Analytics internal requests made by Firefox itself or evil requests made by other extensions. Irony.
This same excuse of speed was used to justify that with WebExtensions, Firefox security and privacy extensions like uBlock Origin can no longer safely block/modify HTTP headers of requests if there are several extensions trying to change the same header, while most of users are completely unaware that they are unprotected in spite of their extensions being installed.
History repeats itself, people just have short memory.
Opera has a built-in adblocking functionality which is pretty good and has no 30k-rule limitation. I wonder how this decision will affect them…?
I’m not sure what the fuss is all about.
Won’t developers just find ways around this as they have likely done for pretty much every major change introduced?
Or am I missing the larger scheme of things?
Some developers have stopped developing for W10, because Windoze updates often breaks things and they can’t be arsed to keep having to fix things. Maybe Booble hopes that this kind of thing will stop devs bothering to keep ublock &c. going?
Would this limit be browser-wide, as in 30.000 ad-blocking rules maximum in total for the whole browser, or would it be a per extension limit?
Because if it is meant to be per extension limit, would it be possible for users to simply install for instance 3-4 different adblock extensions and in each of them use a different adblock list up to 30000.
It would probably be less efficient and more resource intensive than using multiple lists per 1 extension but at least it would enable the users to cover more bases instead of being limited to just 1 list of 30000 rules total.
You mean the end of Chrome. Everyone else will continue using another browser. These Chromium developers always ignore user concerns. DirectWrite gone, childish playground UI forced, now WebRequest API going away.
Chrome and Chromium users either don’t understand IT (for the bulk of them) or have no self-respect (for the “corporations have the moral right to penetrate us and I’ll earn 10 ms load time in the process” crowd). I doubt having to use Adblock Plus instead of uBlock Origin will make those sheeps massively use another browser. Just look at the pile of shit Firefox fans already accept without switching for a decent fork.