Google let loose ad blocking policy for Chrome extensions

After numerous angry remarks to their address, Google developers were quick to assure irritated users that changes in Chrome browser extension system would not break their favorite ad blockers.

This was the main fears of users – everyone was afraid that they would take away the opportunity to block intrusive ads and other unpleasant content.

However, Google representatives emphasize that new API for extensions will only benefit – increased confidentiality and speed. Moreover, corporation promised that one of the new APIs would fix the problem, which received a huge amount of criticism from the developers of ad blockers.

“One of changes is to move away from the blocking version of the Web Request API towards a new API, called Declarative Net Request. There’s been a lot of confusion and misconception around both the motivations and implications of this change, including speculation that these changes were designed to prevent or weaken ad blockers. This is absolutely not the goal. In fact, this change is meant to give developers a way to create safer and more performant ad blockers”, — reported in Google.

Recalling, feature of the new API that infuriated developers intention to limit number of “rules” for extensions. In total, 30,000 “rules” were assigned, that, considering number of extensions is completely inadequate, since they often have to filter web requests for hundreds of thousands of advertising domains.

Some developers argued that the number of rules should be made between 90,000 and 150,000 – this should be enough for the quality of the ad blockers.

Initially, Google employees resisted, but yesterday they made concessions and increased the number of rules to 150 thousand.

“Declarative Net Request, and the whole of Manifest V3, is still very much in design and development. We are currently planning to change the rule limit from maximum of 30k rules per extension to a global maximum of 150k rules. We will continue working with the developer community moving forward. We understand that adopting Manifest V3 will require developers to update their extensions and we will continue to support them through this transition”, — said Google developers.

It is worth reminding despite the fact that Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and Chrome browsers use the same foundation – Chromium, developers of first three Internet browsers are not going to follow blindly Google rules, imposing advertising on users.

Source: https://blog.chromium.org