Chrome is the dominating browser on today's Internet both on the desktop and on mobile. The company is well aware of the fact that content blocking is hurting its revenue the rise of Chrome put Google in a position to do something about it. Raymond Hill, the developer of the content blocking extensions uBlock Origin and uMatrix, suggests that Google is now in a position to limit the effectiveness of content blocking extensions on Chrome. Google's argument that the limiting happens because of performance impacts of filter lists that are too large seems like a pretextual argument to limit content blockers on the platform. Manifest V3 is available as a draft and it is possible that Google is going to increase the values of the filtering options to values that match what content blocking extensions require. Chrome engineers added support for dynamic rules recently and Google has stated that webRequest API blocking capabilities will remain available to Enterprise customers but not for non-Enterprise customers. Google has stated in the past that the values are not set in stone and that it may raise the values before the new Manifest lands. The change will impact the effectiveness of ad-blockers on Chrome unless extension developers find a way to compress the list, find ways around the limit, or bring it down to the 30,000 mark using other ways. EasyList alone, a list of blocking filters used by many content blockers, has over 75,000 rules currently. Google plans to limit the number of rules that an extension can specify to 30,000 entries, and the number of dynamic rules to 5000 entries.
There will be a replacement for the current API that content blockers may use instead to continue blocking web content but it will limit the number of filters that content blockers may load at any given time. Without going into details: Google plans to remove an API that is used by content blockers currently to filter content on the Internet. One of the planned changes impacts content blockers. The company revealed plans to publish a new manifest for extensions, called Extension Manifest V3, that defines the core functionality of browser extensions for the Chrome browser.
0 kommentar(er)
