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from the bring-back-common-sense-adctl dept.
Google engineers have proposed changes to Chromium which would completely break content-blocking extensions, including various ad blockers, ostensibly for "security" reasons.
Per The Register:
In a note posted Tuesday to the Chromium bug tracker, Raymond Hill, the developer behind uBlock Origin and uMatrix, said the changes contemplated by the Manifest v3 proposal will ruin his ad and content blocking extensions, and take control of content away from users.
Content blockers may be used to block ads, but they have broader applications. They're predicated on the notion that users, rather than anyone else, should be able to control how their browser presents and interacts with remote resources.
Manifest v3 refers to the specification for browser extension manifest files, which enumerate the resources and capabilities available to browser extensions. Google's stated rationale for making the proposed changes is to improve security, privacy and performance, and supposedly to enhance user control.
"Users should have increased control over their extensions," the design document says. "A user should be able to determine what information is available to an extension, and be able to control that privilege."
But one way Google would like to achieve these goals involves replacing the webRequest API with a new one, declarativeNetRequest.
[...] Hill, who said he's waiting for a response from the Google software engineer overseeing this issue, said in an email to The Register: "I understand the point of a declarativeNetRequest API, and I am not against such API. However I don't understand why the blocking ability of the webRequest API – which has existed for over seven years – would be removed (as the design document proposes). I don't see what is to be gained from doing this."
Hill observes that several other capabilities will no longer be available under the new API, including blocking media elements larger than a specified size, disable JavaScript execution by injecting Content-Security-Policy directives, and removing the outgoing Cookie headers.
And he argues that if these changes get implemented, Chromium will no longer serve users.
The Register points out that this will not just affect Google Chrome and Chromium, but also Chromium based web browsers such as Brave Browser and Microsoft Edge.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:45PM (6 children)
Then why are you using chromium? You would be better off with one of the Firefox forks.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:50PM (3 children)
Not that firefox development hasn't gradually drifted into a place where they're tightly bound to a narrow revenue stream from sources whose interests don't align with Firefox's users'.
Closed source was clearly never the problem with proprietary software, it was always profit motive.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @05:22PM (1 child)
While your user name is "ikanreed", this obviously does not mean that you can read. Because otherwise you would have noticed that the parent didn't suggest using Firefox, but one of the Firefox forks.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 23 2019, @05:47PM
I wanted to pedantically defend my position because I had considered that when I made my post and decided the downstream effects from pulling changesets being easy still influences them the way chrome basically decides chromium's features.
But you know... that's a totally fair point and worth more than a pedantic disagreement.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @12:56PM
Profit motive leads to problems, yes, but so does software being "closed source" in general. It just gives the developers far too much power over the users, since they have no freedoms when using the non-free software. Profit motive may lead developers to actively abuse users, but even if they didn't, denying users their freedoms is an abuse in and of itself.
(Score: 4, Disagree) by Apparition on Wednesday January 23 2019, @06:14PM (1 child)
The problem with the Mozilla Firefox forks is that they are all run by one or two core developers, much like the systemd-less Linux distributions. Therefore, they are susceptible to the bus factor. Not only that, but they also can't keep up with all of the various Internet and web changes. Much like Pale Moon is still very reliant on Mozilla for code, with the Basilisk browser being based on Aurora even though one of the primary original reasons for Pale Moon in the first place was to skip Aurora.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:43PM
Looking for free shit? Beggars can't be choosers.
If you don't want to be a slave to Google or Mozilla, man up and hack on your own browser.