Google did NOT backtrack on ANYTHING. From the new thread:
> Another clarification is that the webRequest API is not going to be fully removed as part of Manifest V3. In particular, there are currently no planned changes to the observational capabilities of webRequest (i.e., anything that does not modify the request). We are also continually listening to and evaluating the feedback we’re receiving, and we are still narrowing down proposed changes to the webRequest API.
"We are still narrowing down proposed changes" means they still plan on removing the part of webRequest that everyone cares about, the feature that lets it block requests.
There was an initial thread about these changes: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom.... Lots of people made great comments about why the proposed change was a bad idea. What did Google do? Ignore the thread and post another about how they are "iterating" on Manifest V3. Google's strategy is clear: wait for the outrage to subside, keep making new threads to divert discussion if you have to, then go ahead and make the changes you were planning on anyway.
Keep in mind that their story about performance has been shown to be a complete lie. There is no performance hit from using webRequest like this. This is about removing sophisticated ad blockers in order to defend Google's revenue stream, plain and simple.
Well quite frankly, I dont care what google does. I am doing if old school since forever, squid proxy doint mitm. And it works for all my OSes from android to linux laptop. It is not as easy to set up as in browser ads blockers, but is completly out of control of browser and ad blockers or OS vendor. Anyway there is firefox too, while for chrome, as everything from google, I can only say - I told you so (10 years back).
Btw, it is quite interesting, that over all those "we were right" years, people are still trying to confort themself about how great their favorite brand is, we have a saying that even donkey walks on ice only once.
Every year Stallman sounds less crazy. I used to think it didn't matter what tools I chose as a lone developer making consumer tech products and DSP audio applications. But over time, I saw that consumers rely on frontier-makers more than you think, even though they may lag behind by a few years.
I reluctantly switched to Firefox because it still has add-ons and since Chrome's web tools are so good. With Mozilla's Rust adoption, Firefox got fast. This means my web products work a little better on Firefox, intentional or not. When enough people make that choice, a tipping point forms in the future. Paul Graham wrote about this in "The Return of the Mac" [^1].
Don't underestimate the power of your choice at the frontier, even if it takes a while to reverberate through time.
What’s frightening is that most people agreed with his views, but weren’t willing to commit to them because of practicality. I of course am one of them.
Decades later, I think we are still at a point where following his ideas come at a very steep price in performance and day to day usage.
For instance any dev that touches an iOs app in any way or form (even if it’s just to run in on test devices) is better off with a mac.
There’s ton of prevalent android apps that won’t work without the Play Store, and even rooting the phone is already seen as an hostile act from many vendors.
The list goes on and on, keeping hardware or software free is still an insane move that needs sizeable sacrifices. And it’s scary there’s no indication of the situation to change for the better.
Footnote in pg's article makes me wonder what the stats are today. I'd guess Windows down, Mac way up, Linux/FreeBSD about flat [maybe slightly up], but I have no idea.
[2] Y Combinator is (we hope) visited mostly by hackers. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%. The Mac number is a big change from what it would have been five years ago.
I tried switching to Firefox about two years ago and went straight back to Chrome because it was so slow. It would lag when I opened a new tab and started typing to get to another site. Many times, the first few characters off a hostname or search would get dropped.
Tried again about six months ago, and I haven't looked back. Firefox is great again. Not sure if the Rust adoption happened between those two points in time.
I still have to use Chrome for Hangouts for work. And still trying to figure out a way around this.
They've done nothing of the sort. The ZDNet article quotes:
> "Another clarification is that the webRequest API is not going to be fully removed as part of Manifest V3," said Chrome engineer Devlin Cronin [emphasis his].
But the full quote shows what he's talking about:
> Another clarification is that the webRequest API is not going to be fully removed as part of Manifest V3. In particular, there are currently no planned changes to the observational capabilities of webRequest (i.e., anything that does not modify the request). We are also continually listening to and evaluating the feedback we’re receiving, and we are still narrowing down proposed changes to the webRequest API.
The only commitment is to not modify the read-only "observational capabilities".
Sounds like Google will still move towards what they were planning but will likely just take a bit more time and more versions to get there (as the outrage subsides).
From my perspective, the biggest improvement in their proposal would have been the increased privacy and security users would receive with adblockers that use the proposed scheme.
Under the current scheme, any Chrome adblocker can see all of the pages that users browse; a potentially huge privacy hole.
At least with the proposed scheme, adblocker extensions wouldn't have had access to a user's browsing history. This is the same approach that Safari uses with its content blocker API.
Yes, the Safari approach has more limitations, but it is also significantly better from a privacy perspective.
> Under the current scheme, any Chrome adblocker can see all of the pages that users browse; a potentially huge privacy hole.
I hate that argument if it's used to cripple the users ability to have full control of their own devices. It is NOT a privacy hole when you install software that has access to your data. If you don't want that, don't install that software. If you don't trust that software, don't install it.
"At least with the proposed scheme, adblocker extensions wouldn't have had access to a user's browsing history."
No, that's not true. They aren't removing onBeforeRequest() and friends. They are only removing the "cancel" function in it.
Extensions can still log and forward every request.
The only tiny kernel of truth here is that an extension that only asks for the declarative API permissions couldn't do that.
I doubt there will be any popular blocker that only asks for that declarative API. They still need access to onBeforeRequest() for any sort of heuristics to allow the user to add/change rules based on page behavior.
Also, separately, extensions can inject JS into the DOM. So they can do anything that Google Analytics can do anyway. Like track visited pages.
As per the quotes in other comments on this article, it sounds like the 'observational' functionality of the API is staying, so this doesn't seem like a win from a privacy perspective at all.
At some point, new ads the system can't block will surface. The adblocker will become less and less useful, and Google will have no incentive to improve it.
There is already a big difference between even existing adblockers. E.G: some show youtube ads.
And I'm much more worry about the privacy concern from many random ads poping unexpectedly, than from one extension that the entire community get to vet.
A better example of how this could be done is iOS keyboards. They’re run in a sandbox (by default), and they have no internet access. An ad blocker could be sandboxed like this. Sure, such a sandbox can be bypassed by intentionally leaking bits through keyboard input or, in the case of an ad blocker, exactly which requests are blocked, but that would be very obvious nefarious behavior.
The Safari approach is next to useless, because it can be easily circumvented. That many publishers don't do it, that's only because they don't have the know-how or because they don't want to piss off what's still a minority.
Note that the browser is the "user agent", acting on behalf of the user and extensions are for extending the capabilities of the user agent. The browser should be yours and should do what you tell it to do.
Users only need one or two extensions that they need to trust. Can't you trust uBlock Origin? If no, given its open source nature and the people that work on them, then why can you trust Chrome and Google more?
The privacy angle is a complete red herring.
Yes, Chrome's Store is filled with spyware, but that's Google's fault for having a broken review process. Firefox (addons.mozilla.org) does not have the same problem, in spite of the fact that Firefox lacked permissions until the Quantum release.
> Under the current scheme, any Chrome adblocker can see all of the pages that users browse; a potentially huge privacy hole.
Isn't there solution to have the blocker send a limited list of declarative block-rules of a particular style?
Why not just let the adblockers pass in an uncapped quantity of javascript that will run in some kind blocking context, but be sandboxed from any external outgoing communication? That would give the flexibility of the current adblockers, but still plug the privacy hole.
This is a win-win situation for Google. I doubt they haven't done the maths.
If they lose a percentage of the userbase, but get increased revenue, it's only logical to do that.
If their userbase decreases, their monopoly status also decreases, making regulation harder.
The percentage of users who install firefox is low because of the inertia of the default. Having Google as the default search engine in firefox certainly didn't help.
Imagine downloading firefox to replace IE or Edge on a fresh Windows install and then immediately witness Chrome ads in your search results.
Mozilla should had disrupted the third party tracking/ads business, when it had the chance, by providing a default ad blocker and severing ties with no-privacy-respecting search engines (before Google disrupted the browsers market that is).
Google's Android browser is doing well by not supporting extensions, why would they miss the chance of additional revenue by not crippling their desktop browser the same way?
Not seeing any comments here about the most interesting part of the OP: how Ghostery ran tests disproving Google's claim about the length of ad blocking lists causing noticeable performance degradation. Yet in the mailing list announcement from Google that instigated this article they doubled down on that claim:
Increased Ruleset Size: We will raise the rule limit from the draft 30K value. However, an upper limit is still necessary to ensure performance for users. Block lists have tended to be “push-only”, where new rules are added but obsolete rules are rarely, if ever, removed (external research has shown that 90% of EasyList blocking rules provided no benefit in common blocking scenarios). Having this list continue to grow unbounded is problematic.
Yet, if there's a limit it will also be problematic. The lists only grow in size because of the cat-and-mouse game caused by ad blockers existing in the first place. If there's a size limit, that immediately gives a win to the ad servers because they will find a way to subvert the known limit.
As people said in the thread about the actual study, this isn't a real backtrack, they're still locking down the rules, just being a bit more accommodating to the current gen of adblock, but the second ads adapt around current tech, adblockers will be stuck in the mud.
I never understand the intent behind introducing this move - is it greed for more ad money through lockdown ? The company is literally a monopoly and still it wants more. This seems like the company is bowing down for shareholder supremacy.
In my opinion its not really a conspiracy. People at Google are so far up their own ass that they don't understand the importance of content blockers.
Personally I just can't deal with websites without ublock modifying them.
> I never understand the intent behind introducing this move
I think the reasons provided are valid (namely, faster blocking with less data flowing through extensions), whether or not you think they are good enough to outweigh their disadvantages.
The only argument that made sense to me was the one that the current APIs makes it quite difficult to reason about what the extension actually does once installed and running.
By dynamically installing rules downloaded from the web a nefarious ad blocker could, for example, not just block ads but also hide certain political content from search results.
By requiring the list of rules to be hard-coded in the extension, it's easier to see what exactly the extension will do once installed.
For me though, this benefit does not outweigh the cost.
Coincidentally Chrome 72 upgrade seems to break adblockers so that they can't block google analytics, and maybe other ads/tracking as well, if web page uses a service worker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19185637
Someone pointed out that every Chrome user got that way because a techie got them off Internet Explorer... and those same people can just as easily get them onto Firefox.
That was the original reason, yes. Now Chrome is installed by default on tons of new laptops etc because Google makes so much money by tracking users via Chrome that they can pay serious $$ to manufacturers to tweak their base build.
Some of them may also have got that way because of the billions Google spent advertising Chrome. I doubt Mozilla could afford to put Firefox ads all over the web to anything like the same extent.
You seem to have forgotten the extremely agressive marketing from Google. At some point, practically all major free software was bundled with Chrome, which installed by default. It was almost similar to malware in its persistence, and adopted many dark patterns just for the opportunity to get on your PC.
Dear Google, you have a chance to do so much good! Don't fritter that opportunity away for easy dollars! We know ads are your cash cow currently, but you seriously have enough cash and talent to generate cash flows from less annoying (and perhaps, useful) things. Have some faith in your people. And above all, please don't be evil, and don't fib.
Dear DuckDuckGo, please can you focus a little less on search, and more on a producing a high quality browser? Seriously, I feel if you want to rid the world of Google's stranglehold, you don't need to make a better search engine, but a better browser. Google has bloated Chrome enough that any alternative that is lightweight, cross platform, with a solid password manager and dev tools would make me jump ship in a flash. Be sure to support PWAs too. And shorten your name - duckduckgo as a name is a bit weird - your new domain, duck.com might be worth doubling down on. Thanks!
Maybe now people will start to use Tor Browser for daily browsing. If you are inside EEA you don't even have to actually connect to Tor network just use Tor browser.
The sub-title immediately below the title is: "Google changes stance on upcoming Chrome Manifest V3 changes as benchmark shows they lied about performance hit."
> Following the publication of this study, Google engineers made it official on a Google Groups posting hours later, announcing a relaxation of the Manifest V3 changes that would have impacted ad blockers.
There is no backtracking or lying here. The thread states:
> there are currently no planned changes to the observational capabilities of webRequest (i.e., anything that does not modify the request).
This was the plan in the earlier thread as well. The API wasn't going away, they were just removing blocking and modifying.
The article also goes hard on how they clarified that "they never intended to prevent or break content blocking". Again, they never said they wanted to limit this, they were just "moving fast and breaking things" by requiring the content blocker extensions to move to a new API. The original thread mentioned uBO because it was going to be the main source of discussion due to it having 50k+ rules already.
>>Google changes stance on upcoming Chrome Manifest V3 changes as benchmark shows they lied about performance hit.....Hours after the Ghostery team published its study and benchmark results, the Chrome team backtracked on their planned modifications.
Adios Google that once was. Ad blocking does cause performance issues, but revenue ones.
Ahhh, I'm lazy and wanted my final reason to switch to FF. Oh well, I'll let google track me through browser for now, if they leave my uOrigin+NoScript alone. The second those won't work I'll make the switch.
xkapastel|7 years ago
> Another clarification is that the webRequest API is not going to be fully removed as part of Manifest V3. In particular, there are currently no planned changes to the observational capabilities of webRequest (i.e., anything that does not modify the request). We are also continually listening to and evaluating the feedback we’re receiving, and we are still narrowing down proposed changes to the webRequest API.
"We are still narrowing down proposed changes" means they still plan on removing the part of webRequest that everyone cares about, the feature that lets it block requests.
There was an initial thread about these changes: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom.... Lots of people made great comments about why the proposed change was a bad idea. What did Google do? Ignore the thread and post another about how they are "iterating" on Manifest V3. Google's strategy is clear: wait for the outrage to subside, keep making new threads to divert discussion if you have to, then go ahead and make the changes you were planning on anyway.
Keep in mind that their story about performance has been shown to be a complete lie. There is no performance hit from using webRequest like this. This is about removing sophisticated ad blockers in order to defend Google's revenue stream, plain and simple.
londons_explore|7 years ago
Citation needed. My personal experiments show that blocking webrequest has more latency than the network connection!
justanother-|7 years ago
Btw, it is quite interesting, that over all those "we were right" years, people are still trying to confort themself about how great their favorite brand is, we have a saying that even donkey walks on ice only once.
pgt|7 years ago
I reluctantly switched to Firefox because it still has add-ons and since Chrome's web tools are so good. With Mozilla's Rust adoption, Firefox got fast. This means my web products work a little better on Firefox, intentional or not. When enough people make that choice, a tipping point forms in the future. Paul Graham wrote about this in "The Return of the Mac" [^1].
Don't underestimate the power of your choice at the frontier, even if it takes a while to reverberate through time.
[^1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html
hrktb|7 years ago
Decades later, I think we are still at a point where following his ideas come at a very steep price in performance and day to day usage.
For instance any dev that touches an iOs app in any way or form (even if it’s just to run in on test devices) is better off with a mac.
There’s ton of prevalent android apps that won’t work without the Play Store, and even rooting the phone is already seen as an hostile act from many vendors.
The list goes on and on, keeping hardware or software free is still an insane move that needs sizeable sacrifices. And it’s scary there’s no indication of the situation to change for the better.
sokoloff|7 years ago
[2] Y Combinator is (we hope) visited mostly by hackers. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%. The Mac number is a big change from what it would have been five years ago.
kgwxd|7 years ago
Vogtinator|7 years ago
Those are unrelated.
isoskeles|7 years ago
Tried again about six months ago, and I haven't looked back. Firefox is great again. Not sure if the Rust adoption happened between those two points in time.
I still have to use Chrome for Hangouts for work. And still trying to figure out a way around this.
itissid|7 years ago
- People preferring the compiler to yell at them to fix their Type mistakes before they hit the "run tests" button.
- Getting a better IR for better error messages.
Amongst others...
bufferoverflow|7 years ago
kome|7 years ago
zamakan|7 years ago
esistgut|7 years ago
comex|7 years ago
> "Another clarification is that the webRequest API is not going to be fully removed as part of Manifest V3," said Chrome engineer Devlin Cronin [emphasis his].
But the full quote shows what he's talking about:
> Another clarification is that the webRequest API is not going to be fully removed as part of Manifest V3. In particular, there are currently no planned changes to the observational capabilities of webRequest (i.e., anything that does not modify the request). We are also continually listening to and evaluating the feedback we’re receiving, and we are still narrowing down proposed changes to the webRequest API.
The only commitment is to not modify the read-only "observational capabilities".
ccnafr|7 years ago
happybuy|7 years ago
From my perspective, the biggest improvement in their proposal would have been the increased privacy and security users would receive with adblockers that use the proposed scheme.
Under the current scheme, any Chrome adblocker can see all of the pages that users browse; a potentially huge privacy hole.
At least with the proposed scheme, adblocker extensions wouldn't have had access to a user's browsing history. This is the same approach that Safari uses with its content blocker API.
Yes, the Safari approach has more limitations, but it is also significantly better from a privacy perspective.
jackewiehose|7 years ago
I hate that argument if it's used to cripple the users ability to have full control of their own devices. It is NOT a privacy hole when you install software that has access to your data. If you don't want that, don't install that software. If you don't trust that software, don't install it.
tyingq|7 years ago
No, that's not true. They aren't removing onBeforeRequest() and friends. They are only removing the "cancel" function in it.
Extensions can still log and forward every request.
The only tiny kernel of truth here is that an extension that only asks for the declarative API permissions couldn't do that.
I doubt there will be any popular blocker that only asks for that declarative API. They still need access to onBeforeRequest() for any sort of heuristics to allow the user to add/change rules based on page behavior.
Also, separately, extensions can inject JS into the DOM. So they can do anything that Google Analytics can do anyway. Like track visited pages.
ubercow13|7 years ago
sametmax|7 years ago
There is already a big difference between even existing adblockers. E.G: some show youtube ads.
And I'm much more worry about the privacy concern from many random ads poping unexpectedly, than from one extension that the entire community get to vet.
amluto|7 years ago
bad_user|7 years ago
Note that the browser is the "user agent", acting on behalf of the user and extensions are for extending the capabilities of the user agent. The browser should be yours and should do what you tell it to do.
Users only need one or two extensions that they need to trust. Can't you trust uBlock Origin? If no, given its open source nature and the people that work on them, then why can you trust Chrome and Google more?
The privacy angle is a complete red herring.
Yes, Chrome's Store is filled with spyware, but that's Google's fault for having a broken review process. Firefox (addons.mozilla.org) does not have the same problem, in spite of the fact that Firefox lacked permissions until the Quantum release.
ardy42|7 years ago
Isn't there solution to have the blocker send a limited list of declarative block-rules of a particular style?
Why not just let the adblockers pass in an uncapped quantity of javascript that will run in some kind blocking context, but be sandboxed from any external outgoing communication? That would give the flexibility of the current adblockers, but still plug the privacy hole.
Edit: Apparently Google is actually not plugging any privacy holes, since it will still allow monitoring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19184169
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
x15|7 years ago
The percentage of users who install firefox is low because of the inertia of the default. Having Google as the default search engine in firefox certainly didn't help.
Imagine downloading firefox to replace IE or Edge on a fresh Windows install and then immediately witness Chrome ads in your search results.
Mozilla should had disrupted the third party tracking/ads business, when it had the chance, by providing a default ad blocker and severing ties with no-privacy-respecting search engines (before Google disrupted the browsers market that is).
Google's Android browser is doing well by not supporting extensions, why would they miss the chance of additional revenue by not crippling their desktop browser the same way?
r00fus|7 years ago
How do you expect Mozilla to undercut a major funder?
jzl|7 years ago
Increased Ruleset Size: We will raise the rule limit from the draft 30K value. However, an upper limit is still necessary to ensure performance for users. Block lists have tended to be “push-only”, where new rules are added but obsolete rules are rarely, if ever, removed (external research has shown that 90% of EasyList blocking rules provided no benefit in common blocking scenarios). Having this list continue to grow unbounded is problematic.
Yet, if there's a limit it will also be problematic. The lists only grow in size because of the cat-and-mouse game caused by ad blockers existing in the first place. If there's a size limit, that immediately gives a win to the ad servers because they will find a way to subvert the known limit.
vxNsr|7 years ago
skybrian|7 years ago
mosselman|7 years ago
takeda|7 years ago
Saying we need multiple browsers, then using chrome or its clone actually makes the situation worse.
Also chrome is no longer snappy as it was initially.
bobajeff|7 years ago
rajeshmr|7 years ago
Tsubasachan|7 years ago
saagarjha|7 years ago
I think the reasons provided are valid (namely, faster blocking with less data flowing through extensions), whether or not you think they are good enough to outweigh their disadvantages.
magicalhippo|7 years ago
By dynamically installing rules downloaded from the web a nefarious ad blocker could, for example, not just block ads but also hide certain political content from search results.
By requiring the list of rules to be hard-coded in the extension, it's easier to see what exactly the extension will do once installed.
For me though, this benefit does not outweigh the cost.
ikisusi|7 years ago
SquareWheel|7 years ago
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...
kkm|7 years ago
XorNot|7 years ago
chillydawg|7 years ago
jfk13|7 years ago
kerng|7 years ago
Its so frustrating.
kirion25|7 years ago
jointhefuture|7 years ago
https://github.com/domenic/proposal-function-prototype-tostr...
osrec|7 years ago
Dear DuckDuckGo, please can you focus a little less on search, and more on a producing a high quality browser? Seriously, I feel if you want to rid the world of Google's stranglehold, you don't need to make a better search engine, but a better browser. Google has bloated Chrome enough that any alternative that is lightweight, cross platform, with a solid password manager and dev tools would make me jump ship in a flash. Be sure to support PWAs too. And shorten your name - duckduckgo as a name is a bit weird - your new domain, duck.com might be worth doubling down on. Thanks!
luord|7 years ago
Then again, by that point it might be better to just switch to Firefox.
kuwalu123|7 years ago
dang|7 years ago
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here.
jiaweihli|7 years ago
grzm|7 years ago
ThrowawayR2|7 years ago
RodericDay|7 years ago
[deleted]
OnlyRepliesToBS|7 years ago
[deleted]
devrand|7 years ago
[deleted]
zzzcpan|7 years ago
But every single one of your comments defends Google and is spreading doubt. Even causing people to flag legitimate articles like this one.
judge2020|7 years ago
> Following the publication of this study, Google engineers made it official on a Google Groups posting hours later, announcing a relaxation of the Manifest V3 changes that would have impacted ad blockers.
There is no backtracking or lying here. The thread states:
> there are currently no planned changes to the observational capabilities of webRequest (i.e., anything that does not modify the request).
This was the plan in the earlier thread as well. The API wasn't going away, they were just removing blocking and modifying.
The article also goes hard on how they clarified that "they never intended to prevent or break content blocking". Again, they never said they wanted to limit this, they were just "moving fast and breaking things" by requiring the content blocker extensions to move to a new API. The original thread mentioned uBO because it was going to be the main source of discussion due to it having 50k+ rules already.
jiaweihli|7 years ago
techntoke|7 years ago
[deleted]
chaosite|7 years ago
zamakan|7 years ago
onetimemanytime|7 years ago
Adios Google that once was. Ad blocking does cause performance issues, but revenue ones.
techntoke|7 years ago
unnouinceput|7 years ago