How is google killing AD BLOCKERS with Manifest v3.

Google has recently come up with its new version of Manifest (Manifest v3) for browsers.

Now let's begin with what manifest V3 actually is because I'm sure a lot of you aren't familiar with it just like I was when I started researching this.

Web browser extensions all work in relatively the same way they use a file called manifest.json to tell the browser the name and version of the extension who created it what permissions it wants to access the icons it wants to display in the browser's UI and the various CSS and JavaScript files it wants to load and when it wants to load them it's basically a description of the extension and what it does inside of the browser as of now most browser extensions use manifest V2 the second version of that specification and this dictates what extensions can or can't do on the browser and it's necessary to ensure that your browser extensions aren't doing anything weird with your data or with the sites you visit it's not a guarantee of safety of course and that's why there are many annual review processes on Google Chrome's extension store as well as on Mozilla's and apples all modern web browsers conform to this specification whether it's Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome.

Now manifest V2 is being updated into manifest V3 its biggest changes are in using service workers instead of background pages and using a new API to block or modify Network requests some of his workers are a good thing they are part of what devs use to make Progressive web apps like handling websites cash preloading resources using website offline and more the new API Firefox will continue supporting Manifest v2 and v3.

Manifest V3 right now with manifest V2 extensions have access to a feature called Web request to summarize it quickly it lets the extension look at the data going through a web browser notably the calls it makes to various URLs and it lets extensions act on these URLs like blocking them or modifying them and this API is the backbone of all ad blockers and privacy protection extensions they use this API to block requests to add servers to display ads or to block requests to tracking servers or to remove the tracking identifiers from the tracking URLs and while this API is very powerful it can also lead to some abuse and some extensions could instead decide to reroute traffic to their own tracking servers or to replace ads by their own or to steal some data and that's where Google came in trying to fix browser extension security or at least that's what they're saying in manifest V3 pushed heavily by Google the web request API is gone it's replaced by a new one called declarative net request and this new API basically prevents any extension from monitoring traffic extensions now must declare in advance how they'll handle certain types of requests or they can't handle them at all and these extensions also won't be able to load code from outside of the currently displayed website. 

On paper it's a good move it means that extensions can't abuse the older web request API to monitor your traffic or steal your data Google says that 42 percent of malicious extensions use the current web request API to do their dirty business and that this API also creates a performance penalty because there are many back and forth.

Now first this performance penalty has been debunked by most ad-blocking extensions it's been Quantified as being a few milliseconds at best so this argument doesn't hold and second this new API halves the capabilities of ad blockers and tracker blockers because now they need to declare in advance what they'll want to block when with web requests they were able to react in real-time to the various calls and answers that the server made and that's where the problem is this new API severely limits what browser extensions can do and will make all ad blockers and privacy-focused extensions a lot less useful. 

Ghost Story one of the biggest privacy extensions said that it harms privacy and that most extensions will be affected with some of them even being unable to work at all and they're not the only ones complaining that the move is going to be a real problem including people who don't work at ad blocker or privacy related companies. 

Now what is Google's business model is it providing free services for the betterment of whole Humanity no is it making an awesome free web browser no is it using all this free stuff to track you create a profile and push ads? Yes you got it that's it and that's the biggest issue here this spec specifically destroys the capabilities of everything that currently hurts Google's business model everything that prevents Google from tracking you or serving you ads will be hamstrung by this new API at least on Chrome because other browsers are not taking it without saying anything, fortunately, Firefox will adopt manifest V3 at the end of the year but they will also keep supporting the older web request API because they feel it's needed to let users choose which extensions they want to use and what these extensions can do. Safari never supported web request and won't support it at all but they have their own way of letting ad blockers work they already support manifest V3 other chromium-based browsers will have no choice but to adopt manifest V3 because they use chromium which uses this spec but they have also implemented ad blocking and tracker blocking features directly in the browser like brave for example so they don't really need other extensions that do the same job but if you wanted to use your own favourite blocking extension that you trust more you'll be out of luck so there's no issue really only Chrome and chromium will be affected and every other browser can keep using extensions how they like it.