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posted by chromas on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:12PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Thursday January 24 2019, @05:27AM (1 child)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Thursday January 24 2019, @05:27AM (#791070) Homepage

    Last I checked, Chromium was just as FOSS as Firefox. There are in fact many forks of Chromium that "removes the parts you don't like".

    RMS is in fact wrong. Most people don't care to alter software, and of those that do care, most do not possess the skills or time to do so even if the software is FOSS.

    With that said, I fall into that camp so I greatly prefer using FOSS, but I am irrelevant in the Total Perspective Vortex.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @01:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @01:11PM (#791207)

    RMS is in fact wrong. Most people don't care to alter software, and of those that do care, most do not possess the skills or time to do so even if the software is FOSS.

    That is irrelevant, and you greatly underestimate the importance of community. Even if you do not know how to alter software, or don't have the time, you can benefit from others' contributions. In addition, since free software respects users' freedoms, the software is much less likely to abuse users, because abuses can be spotted and forked much more simply. Proprietary software, however, has a long and dark track record of abuse.