You Have until June To Dump Chrome
Google has announced that starting in June 2024, ad blockers such as uBlock Origin will be disabled in Chrome 127 and later with the rollout of Manifest V3 (#Mv3).
Resuming the transition to Manifest V3 – Chrome for Developers
Firefox is RIGHT there
The original post does not explain it well enough, so I will do it instead:
Google intends to make a change to Chromium that has been announced a while ago, and the deadline has been moved a few times, that among other things, affects how extensions can act upon what happens when a browser downloads a webpage, which will affect ad blocking.
The new approach is fundamentally different to what extensions could do before, and ad blockers for Chromium-based browsers will need to adapt to new approach in order to keep working after this change gets introduced.
The link above leads to the Google’s announcement, where in one of the linked pages, they provide an explanation for why they do this
Blocking or modifying network requests in Manifest V2 could significantly degrade performance and require excessive access to sensitive user data. The Declarative Net Request API allows extensions to block or modify web content with fewer permissions and without hindering performance.
The link below leads to a discussion on what it will specifically affect, and in particular it has gorhill (the original author of uBlock Origin, and also the current maintainer), mentioning an attempt at making a version of uBlock Origin that works under the new approach, and a technical overview of the differences.
Chrome extension manifest v3 proposal · Issue #338 · uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues
The summary of what is no longer working in uBlock Origin Lite in comparison to regular uBlock Origin is as follows:
- Filter lists update only when the extension updates (no fetching up to date lists from servers)
- Many filters are dropped at conversion time due to MV3’s limited filter syntax
- No crafting your own filters (thus no element picker)
- No strict-blocked pages
- No per-site switches
- No dynamic filtering
- No importing external lists
which leads to the conclusion that the ad blockers will be more restricted and less effective.