Google continues plans to block development of extensions dedicated to ad-blocking in your browser, it will disable Google Chrome As of January next year.
Mountain View company checks your browser through the so-called Manifest, a text file listing some features of browser extensions. In this document, the company defines which system resources are available and the permissions it grants to the application programming interfaces (APIs) from which it accesses extensions or functions.
The company has released a proposal for changes to its open-source browser base, Chromium, where it details a set of measures applied to a specific API, WebRequest. Due to these changes, most ad-blocking features will be removed. So Google justified what it was looking for with this action. improve browser speed without having to rely on these extensions to filter network requests. He also said that this protects privacy users
In September 2021, Google released a timeline of support for Manifest V2, a roadmap that shows January 2022 as a starting point for the product to be discontinued. opportunity to update their extensions in Manifest V2 and that they will stop working in Chrome in June 2023.
This way Manifest V3 overrides the WebRequest API for developers. integration of these extensions in the browser and expand the blocking features. In reality, this API allows you to observe the traffic between the browser and a website and then modify or block requests for certain domains as explained by Chrome on the developer page.
Opportunity for hackers
However, this feature allows hackers capture user credentials and even modify and add additional ads on web pagesAs highlighted by The Verge, this is why Google would disable it.
Thus, in Manifest V3, the WebRequest API was replaced by Declarative Net Request, whose process was developed by Google on its blog in June 2019. Unlike the first, the new interface examines the request for blocking extensions and saves rules that tell the browser what to do when certain types of requests are filtered.
This change is consistent with the company’s filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) at the end of 2021.risk factor“existing and new technologies that block online ads.”
The developers of these ad blockers have raised concerns regarding the following: possible consequences of this change in other browsers According to US media, Microsoft Edge is based on Chromium like Opera and Brave.