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>I have yet to see where Chrome is explicitly telling anyone they plan to phase out support for adblockers Why would they ever want to do that? It would be a P
by rndgermandude 5y ago
>I have yet to see where Chrome is explicitly telling anyone they plan to phase out support for adblockers
Why would they ever want to do that? It would be a PR nightmare if they came out and explicitly said "fuck you".
Instead they opted to take away capabilities from their APIs with the result of severely limiting adblocker capabilities, under the guise that this improves security and performance, which is not entirely wrong, but at the same time hides the fact that there would have been easy enough alternatives that preserve the capabilities of adblockers and some other API users while making sure the security threats they stated they are concerned about can be prevented[0]. Yet they didn't even really look at what was proposed and insisted on crippling their API in a way it cripples adblockers.
I can only conclude that improving security and performance is just one of the engineering goals of their solution, while the other (unstated) goal is to fuck with adblockers.
[0] They were particularly worried about extensions being able to intercept requests, examine requests and exfiltrate sensitive data. One way this can be easily solved is by adding a special sandbox for request blocking that has no accessible output to the extension or anywhere else (no backchannel, no access to the network or file system). You can load scripts (and data) into it, but it may only ever talk to the browser itself during request handling. This breaks the "exfiltrate" part.
- encryptluks2 5y agoThey are still accepting proposals and the changes aren't being forced until 2023. I know everyone likes to think Google is always evil lately, but there is still a lot of time for the new API to be revised and improve on the features you mention. You can even make the suggestions yourself or work on the code to fix it.
- rndgermandude 5y ago>They are still accepting proposals V3 is finalized. And while they say they accept proposals for future changes, they already did not accept or even consider proposals in the timeline leading to V3. >changes aren't being forced until 2023 They pushed the timeline back, because of all the push back they got. And also, the deadline for new extensions using V2 is Jan 2022, so a few months from now. So >but there is still a lot of time for the new API to be revised and improve on the features you mention. Not true either, you have until Jan 2022, a few months from now, to spec and implement and roll out such a revised or new API. This is not going to happen. They had enough time to do all that when the issues were first raised, but didn't. They had enough time to do all this when the first serious proposals for better solutions were made, but they didn't. Why at this point I am wondering: will they ever? Sure, the already established extensions will get a little bit of a longer grace period where things would theoretically happen. That doesn't help you if you want to create something new, tho. >You can even make the suggestions yourself or work on the code to fix it. Have you ever tried to get code into chrome(ium)? That's hard enough by itself. Now try to get code in that affects something google considers important... and they consider this important at least now, for the mere fact it was "news". Trying to work with them is what gorhill did, and a lot of other people too, before he figured out they were set on going the cripple-adblockers route and sounded the alarms.