Google will soon kill Ad Blockers with Manifest V3

Hi,
As far as I know, Google will soon kill Ad Blockers with Manifest V3. How Brave browser will deal with that since it is based on Chromium browser?
Thanks.

Question #16 Will Brave ever go away from Chromium and develop its own browser?

Answer No intent to ever get away from Chromium at this point. Of course, we’re starting to see some things diverging, such as how Google is talking about Manifest V3 and everyone is committed to try to make sure V2 and everything remains available. So I think at some point in time there will be enough functionality built on top of Chromium that there will be a lot of meaningfully different pieces of Brave. It’s a little tough to imagine ripping it out and replacing it or rewriting it at this point. Who knows though? Maybe we’ll eventually get to a point we’re at a size and level of resourcing where we’ll do just that.

Question #21 Do we see Manifest V3 having an impact on Shields?

Answer Not at all. This Manifest V3 been delayed for a couple years. They first announced it in 2019 and our team put together a rewrite of our adblocking engine with Rust and then put it into the core for the browser for the network request. So we’re not coming in on the same API that’s affected by Manifest V3. Brendan has also talked about possibly providing support for other adblocking extensions too, but that will be disclosed at a later date. When this rolls out, most likely you’ll see a softer experience on blockers that aren’t on Brave, but Brave will still have the blocking you expect.

2 Likes

And the Filter lists will be affected? I think that they are not in the core of the browser for the network request, right?

No they will not be affected. Filter lists are independent of the adblock and are hosted on github.

They are downloaded every 24 hours in the background via component updater.

All the current filter lists will work in brave for ‘eternity’.

It has come to my knowledge that brave shields uses network stack for adblocking, the stuff browser uses to connect to internet. Meaning it is so deeply integrated in the chromium browser that google cannot make any changes in the chromium code to specially target and kill brave shields without killing chromium and inturn chrome.

2 Likes

@chh_68 Thank you. The answer that I was looking for.

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.