While Google has responded to criticism by saying the proposal was subject to change, it hasn’t yet backed off the proposal, which would be implemented this fall at the earliest. The EFF says it was “particularly worrisome” that Google is going ahead with these changes despite all of the criticisms it's received from the developer community, adding that “security extensions should not be a privilege reserved only for enterprise users.” Why not let independent developers innovate where the Chrome team isn't? Tracker blockers have improved the performance and user experience of many sites and the user experience. “Sites today are bloated with trackers that consume data and slow down the user experience. “Google's claim that these new limitations are needed to improve performance is at odds with the state of the internet,” the organization said. The group also wasn’t particularly sold on Google’s justification for the move. In an email, an EFF spokesperson argued that Google’s move would stifle developer innovation in the browser space and hamper user security and privacy. The EFF’s Privacy Badger extension is one of the ad blocking tools that would be impacted, and its development team has also spoken out against the changes. The group frequently argues that Chrome’s ad tracker blocking technology has lagged behind other browsers because Google, whose online ad market share currently hovers around 37 percent, doesn’t want to hamstring the profitability of tracker-driven, behaviorally-targeted ads. That concern has long been mirrored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Notably, the move will insulate the largest ad blocker AdBlockPlus, who Google pays to whitelist their ads and tracking behavior.” “It's hard to escape the suspicion that this is driven primarily by a desire to protect third-party tracking and ad revenue, where Google is the overwhelming market leader,” he said.
#Google chrome adblock code
“This is a very bad decision on Google's part,” Justin Brookman, Director of Consumer Privacy and Technology Policy at Consumer Reports told Motherboard in an email.īrookman noted that millions of users rely on extensions like uBlock, Disconnect, and Ghostery to limit cross-site tracking and block malicious code from third-party servers, and that pushing these extensions to use a different API with lesser functionality would only weaken them. Now that Chrome’s market share is greater, the company’s in a better position to “shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google's primary business,” Hill said.Ĭonsumer advocates are similarly unimpressed, noting that the changes could also harm the effectiveness of some parental control, privacy, and security extensions. Hill argues that the blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield some control of content blocking to third-party developers. “Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.” “In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers-these are the top most popular extensions for any browser,” he said.
Hill said that Google’s motivation here had little to do with the end user experience, and far more to do with protecting advertising revenues from the rising popularity of adblock extensions. “Web pages load slow because of bloat, not because of the blocking ability of the webRequest API-at least for well crafted extensions,” Hill said.
#Google chrome adblock software
In the wake of ongoing backlash to the proposal, Chrome software security engineer Chris Palmer took to Twitter this week to claim the move was intended to help improve the end-user browsing experience, and paid enterprise users would be exempt from the changes. While some extensions, like AdBlock, already use the latter, developers say the overall result will be tools that simply don’t work quite as well overall. But Google’s proposal would require extensions use the declarativeNetRequest API, which leaves it to the browser to decide what gets blocked based on a list of predetermined rules.
The extension development community didn’t respond well, and said the changes would harm many popular user tools.Ĭurrently, many Chrome adblock extensions use Chrome's webRequest API, letting users block ads before they even reach the browser. Under these changes, Google said it would be modifying permissions and other key aspects of Chrome’s extensions system.
Last year, Google began hinting at some changes to Chrome’s extension system as part of its Manifest V3 proposal.
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