There is a new discussion or issue in Google Chrome development about a proposed change to the extensions system in Google Chrome / Chromium development.
In a nutshell, the suggested change would break the functionality of most, if not all popular ad-blocker extensions in Chromium, which the developers of these extensions have been pointing out to the development team. (source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-extension-manifest-v3-may-break-ublock-origin-content-blocker/ )
Why do I bring this up here?
Well, since ad-blocking is one of the essential features of Brave, and Brave is now forking Chromium, this might become an issue if Brave continues to implement changes made to Chromium.
Now, I understand that Brave isn’t Chromium and that Chromium isn’t Chrome.
But it should be in everybody’s interest that the Brave code stick as close as possible to the Chromium base, to benefit from the security, compatibility and up-to-dateness of Chromium.
And Chromium is, for all intents and purposes, a project that is both “open source” and, at the same time, completely under the control of the big G (just like Android, for that matter). I don’t see Google implementing the changes to Chrome without Chromium going through them first, since Chromium development is essentially Chrome development. So if these changes make it to Chromium, they will come, in extension, to Brave and I fear that this might break its ad-blocker.
My questions are
- Are the Brave development team aware of this change?
- Is the ad-blocker in Brave implemented in such a way that this change would impact it?
- If it were impacted, are the devs considering a way around this?
The changes are supposed to not only break popular extensions such as uBlock Origin as they work at the moment, but will make them unfeasible in the future because of limiting the amount of actions an ad-blocker can do to a page in a given time. This suggests that all current ad-blockers would be impacted.
This all fits nicely with recent developments at Google about Chrome coming up with its own ad-blocker while allowing for certain “acceptable ads”. I do applaud Google for wanting to create a new standard for the types of ads we see, blocking overly intrusive ads by default and so forth.
But looking at the big picture, and recent changes, it seems that Google wants to make sure People don’t use their own ad-blockers anymore, and are forced to use Google’s version.
Like a child, they want to break everyone else’s toys so all that’s left to play with is them.