Google's plans to limit ad blockers in Chrome have already led many users to consider switching browsers. People's anger was made worse by the confirmation that the only people who will avoid the changes to the way ad blockers work in Chrome will be Google's enterprise users. Advertising is at the heart of Google's business model and so unsurprisingly, users have been questioning the software giant's motives.
And now, another prominent voice has entered the debate. Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says the move will not help security and in fact, will probably hinder it.
The plans, dubbed Manifest V3, represent a major transformation to Chrome extensions including a revamp of the permissions system. As a result, modern ad blockers such as uBlock Origin—which uses Chrome's webRequest API to block ads before they're downloaded–won't work. This is because Manifest V3 sees Google halt the webRequest API's ability to block a particular request before it's loaded. The plans are earmarked for release into the Google Canary channel around now.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @05:09PM
The problem isn't so much the software vendor (not that I disagree with you on that point), but more that anybody who gains control over the update pipeline will gain control over everybody hooked into the
botnetforced automatic updates.