Changes to Google's API mean that only professional Chrome users will be able to access the entire adblock / Boing Boing



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Since January, Google insists on changing the management of its extensions in Chrome. One of the consequences of this change is the ability to block unwanted content before it is loaded, effectively killing privacy tools and ad blockers.

After a public outcry, Google has tweaked the change, but only for companies, who will have access to an API allowing this type of blocking. This means that companies will develop plugins for internal use that perform the filtering that adblockers perform for the rest of us today.

Google has warned investors that "new and existing technologies could affect our ability to personalize ads and / or block online ads, which could hurt our business," and developers such as Raymond Hill of Ublock Origin have Assuming "Google's core business is incompatible with unfettered content blocking." Now that Google Chrome has a large market share, content blocking issues in its 10 KB repository are currently resolved . "

Google denies it and states: "We are actively collaborating with the developer community to gain insight and think about the design of a privacy-preserving content filtering system that limits the amount of sensitive browser data shared with users. third."

Nowadays, Chrome is the dominant browser on the Web. Even if it's nominally open source, Google has used a variety of ways to make sure it needs to decide who can adapt it and what features these adaptations can have.

Firefox is available for virtually any operating system – mobile and desktop – and supports complete blocking of ads.

Chrome disapproves of the blocking features of the webRequest API in Manifest V3, and not the entire WebRequest API (although blocking is still available for enterprise deployments).

Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the ability to block unwanted content, but this will be limited to only paid Chrome business users. This will probably allow companies to develop internal Chrome extensions, but not to block ads.

For the rest of us, Google has not changed its content blocker changes, which means that ad blockers will need to migrate to a less efficient, rules-based system called declarativeNetRequest. ".

Chrome limits ad blocking extensions to business users [Kyle Bradshaw/9to5Google]

(via /.)

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Cory Doctorow

I write books. My latest are: A graphic novel by YA titled In Real Life (with Jen Wang); a documentary book on the arts and the Internet titled Information Does not Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age (with introductions by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer) and a science fiction novel YA entitled Homeland (continuation of Little Brother). I speak everywhere and I tweet and tumble too.

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