How Google Chrome is declaring war against ad blockers

Ghostery's CEO and director of engineering break down the new Manifest V3 changes, and why they're bad news for anyone who wants to block ads.

- MICHAEL CRIDER

I’ve written a lot about ad blockers in the last few weeks, from Google’s Chrome updates making some popular options inoperable (fave.co/4dY2tVC), to alternatives that will work (fave.co/3U7k3OT), to my reason for blocking every ad on YouTube (fave.co/3TmUtVR). So when I was contacted by representatives from Ghostery (fave.co/3RRFrov), a German company that operates an ad-blocker extension and other privacy products, I was eager to pick their brains.

I’ve been a technology writer for over 10 years, and I can wax poetic on building PCs and keyboards all day. But I’m not a web developer or programmer of any kind, so I relished the opportunity to get an expert opinion on the changes in Chrome’s extension support, from Manifest V2 to V3. The V3 changeover, and its more restrictive access model to some of the browser’s most important internal functions, is the big reason uBlock Origin won’t be compatible with Chrome and Chromium browsers anytime soon.

WHAT’S CHANGING IN CHROME’S MANIFEST V3

Ghostery let me speak with Krzysztof Modras, the director of engineering and product, and company CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz. And the first thing I asked was, what’s the big difference in the Manifest V3 extension support that’s causing all these issues for ad blockers?

“The most important limitation of Manifest V3 is the removal of extension access to the browser’s network layer,” Modras said. “The enforcement of this declarative approach disables advanced on-device protection and in turn will significantly limit innovation in the privacy space. Extensions will lose important tools and permissions that have previously allowed them to quickly react to new threats directly from the user device.”