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> So rather than be alarmist [..] we should be pushing for changes that make this workable If, as the author suspects, the intent is to break popular adblocker

> So rather than be alarmist [..] we should be pushing for changes that make this workable If, as the author suspects, the intent is to break popular adblockers, I have no interest in trying to make this workable. Personally, I think this is a typical half-legit move: there's a good intention (security) but it's also hard to believe they did not realize that by pushing these changes, they were going to break several of the most popular extensions available. And, that the direct impact of this would be that for a short moment (at best) many more ads were going to be displayed on Chrome. I think we've seen a lot of these half legit moves recently (apple battery scandal?). So I'm starting to be more and more suspicious.

chopin 7y ago
There's no security involved whatsoever: Extensions can still read page content. They're only not allowed to block.
- rndgermandude 7y ago
  Not just page content. They can read your cookies, they can see all requests (just not modify them on the fly). The extensions tracking you acting as spyware will see no change, the other kind of malicious extensions that want to modify your requests will still do so by modifying the DOM of pages for example. So the "security" reasons google gave have long been debunked as non-sense. The other half is the performance reasons. What's the performance burden of calling a (chain) blocking webRequest listeners? Last time I checked it was single digit milliseconds per request. So a very ad-laden worst-case website with 100 requests will spent maybe 500ms in the webRequest listeners, but will still load faster thanks to all the cruft being blocked away. So what's the win for performance exactly?
cletus 7y ago
How hard exactly is it to use Firefox instead of Chrome? It literally takes 2 minutes to switch. This isn't a Microsoft situation where, at the time, there was no alternative to Windows. It is the easiest thing in the world to change browsers. Google knows this too. Not every surface is a slippery slope.
- bnegreve 7y ago
  > How hard exactly is it to use Firefox instead of Chrome? I don't understand, you're saying these discussions are useless because anyone can switch to Firefox anytime? But why would anyone decide to switch to Firefox if it weren't for these discussions. This is not something users can experience directly (like bad UX), clearly they need some level of understanding. And Google taking full control on yet another thing on the web, does sound like a slippery slope to me.

chopin 7y ago

There's no security involved whatsoever: Extensions can still read page content. They're only not allowed to block.

rndgermandude 7y ago
Not just page content. They can read your cookies, they can see all requests (just not modify them on the fly). The extensions tracking you acting as spyware will see no change, the other kind of malicious extensions that want to modify your requests will still do so by modifying the DOM of pages for example. So the "security" reasons google gave have long been debunked as non-sense. The other half is the performance reasons. What's the performance burden of calling a (chain) blocking webRequest listeners? Last time I checked it was single digit milliseconds per request. So a very ad-laden worst-case website with 100 requests will spent maybe 500ms in the webRequest listeners, but will still load faster thanks to all the cruft being blocked away. So what's the win for performance exactly?

cletus 7y ago

How hard exactly is it to use Firefox instead of Chrome? It literally takes 2 minutes to switch. This isn't a Microsoft situation where, at the time, there was no alternative to Windows. It is the easiest thing in the world to change browsers. Google knows this too. Not every surface is a slippery slope.

bnegreve 7y ago
> How hard exactly is it to use Firefox instead of Chrome? I don't understand, you're saying these discussions are useless because anyone can switch to Firefox anytime? But why would anyone decide to switch to Firefox if it weren't for these discussions. This is not something users can experience directly (like bad UX), clearly they need some level of understanding. And Google taking full control on yet another thing on the web, does sound like a slippery slope to me.