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US justice department plans to push Google to sell off Chrome browser
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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Technology
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Where to start with this? Didn't Google just kill adblockers in Chrome?
That is a more complex story then that. The manifest v3 changes primary give a lot of security and privacy changes that stop extensions from doing a lot of questionable things in the background on all your page you visit. But that does stop ad blockers from doing a lot of what they currently do - blocking in page elements and modifying the pages you visit. But it does not block them from blocking page requests so ad blockers like ublockorigin lite can still function in a more limited capacity to block ads.
I do think the teams outside of the chrome team are happy for this change - but I don't think the chrome team set out to do this purely or even mainly to block ads.
Besides even if they did it does not change my argument - whom ever buys chrome will likely want to squeeze it for more money then google currently are doing and will likely do far worst things like including ads directly in the browser. Or trying to monetize it in some other way.
I would love it if chrome where maintained by some non-profit foundation. But how likely is that going to be from a court order sell off?
I would rather they split up google in other ways first.
It also killed a lot of other genuinely useful extensions.
And if security is their main concern they should have spent resources on making sure the extensions they themselves redistribute are safe, not on killing a huge chunk of extensions. Sorry but you'll have a very hard time convincing anyone that getting rid of ad blockers wasn't their primary motive.
It completely changed how they do this, and made it way less effective and more limited. All completely unnecessary from a security standpoint.
No but their executive overlords assigned this to block ads. I cannot believe that an ad company removed ad blocking because of reasons outside of adblocking.
If that were the main goal why not just ban them from the extension store? Or why allow manifest v3 extensions to block requests at all? Ad blockers still work and this did not kill off any of them. Just forced them to change some of their functions. I don't doubt the executive overlords are happy about the turmoil that this has done to ad blockers but they would be pissed if that was the only or main goal of this as there are still loads of effective adblockers about.
Adblockers work now because they removed functionality, don't get it twisted.