In June 2024, ad blockers such as uBlock Origin will be disabled in Chrome 127 | Hacker News Reader

In June 2024, ad blockers such as uBlock Origin will be disabled in Chrome 127

infosec.exchange

143 pointsconsumer45152 comments

This seems like a blow to accessibility too. Beyond impact adblockers, would this also make it difficult for me to use tools like DarkReader which dynamically overrides the site's styling to implement a less jarring one for my astigmatism?

uBlock and Darkreader are really important tools for making the web usable for me. I don't mind not using YT, but there are some websites I am obliged to use.

> would this also make it difficult for me to use tools like DarkReader which dynamically overrides the site's styling to implement a less jarring one for my astigmatism?

No, those don’t use blockingWebRequest. Absolutely no relation.

They literally said that since at least January of this year: https://budgetlightforum.com/t/google-chrome-upgrade-planned...

They know it's anti-consumer. They see that the YouTube push is actually causing people to install more, smarter ad blockers. I myself have finally got around to setting up pihole. "We're serious, by 2027 your adblocker will be toast" whatever, if you think we're still using the browser to block ads, you grossly misunderstood your userbase.

can pihole block ads as effectively as ublock origin?

No, it can't, as it primarily supports only domain blocking.

It's DNS level adblocking, so no.

E.g. If sites used a hardcoded IP address, pihole will be useless. Same applies if devices such as TVs use their own DNS/DNS over TLS.

Sort of see IP + DNS blocking catching on next once pihole becomes ineffective.

that's what I thought but I don't use pihole so thought it might be effective somehow.

Maybe this will lead to more people using Firefox and other browsers

IMO the only question is one of magnitude. Based on a cursory search it appears that adblock addons are used by anywhere between 20-45% of users across all browsers. Based on this I wouldn't be wildly shocked if Chrome sheds anywhere between 5-10% of its userbase almost overnight.

I would also expect this to cause a modest-to-significant backlash against Google as a whole. This is a change that will be widely noticed among regular internet users, and rolled out at a time when Google's bread and butter (search) is at its weakest point in decades.

Moving into purely speculative territory here, but I also wonder what impact this might have on their business moving forward. Without having hard numbers to back this up, my anecdotally-backed hunch is that ad blocking is disproportionately popular among younger users. That's a risky demographic for any tech company to alienate in part or in whole.

Doubt it. Ad blockers still work on MV3, just not as well. The vast majority of people won’t notice a difference and the ones that will are the same ones that probably switched already.

Unlike amorphous concerns like “privacy” that for better or worse only resonate with a niche audience, ads are by definition hard to ignore.

Once users are forced to both potentially replace their adblocker entirely and begin mucking around with config settings and filter lists it seems inevitable that many simply jump ship. Doubly so if the advice gets amplified across social media / streaming platforms et al.

The crowd you’re referring to - i.e who follow tech news and the manifest rollout - are a tiny minority many of whom probably never used Chrome to begin with. That’s not who I have in mind here.

It won't take long for ads to start appearing that can't be blocked by a mv3 extension. I'm sure they have already been developed and are waiting for the switch.

From what I can tell from Facebook and Twitter threads, most people still do not use any kind of adblock. FAANG would love it for everyone to abandon desktop OSes and use locked down mobile devices forever.

Joke‘s on them when the EU cracks those lockdowns wide open.

Google clearly feels comfortable enough in their browser share market dominance to pull this rather user-hostile move, but I can't help but wonder if they're overplaying their hand. From my humble POV Chrome is only marginally superior to the alternatives. That margin has been sufficient to keep me around as a user - but crippling such a central feature easily outweighs all of Chrome's relative strengths and then some.

The title is outright dishonest. Ad blockers are not being disabled.

Also, news of the manifest v3 timeline discussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38292409

Is it? From TFA: "The new #Chrome manifest will prevent using custom filters and stops on demand updates of blocklist. Only #Google authorized updates to browser extension will be allowed in the future..."

If this is true, then ad blockers will, de facto, be disabled in Chrome.

The title claims ad blockers will be disabled, and that is just not true. I would bet actual money that adblockers will continue to be available.

The functionality available to adblockers will change, and they will definitely have less flexibility. But nobody would say that Safari doesn't have adblockers, despite having a similar interface.

The "Google authorized updates to blocklist" bit looks like an even more blatant lie. Dynamic blocklists that aren't updated via Chrome Web Store are supported:

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/improvements-to-content-fi...

> The functionality available to adblockers will change, and they will definitely have less flexibility

AFAIU, this is indeed the case of uBlock Origin lite: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

> The title claims ad blockers will be disabled, and that is just not true.

Well, "crippled" is a no-no…

The title claims that ad blockers such as ublock origin will be disabled, which is true.

Other things that don't and can't do the full job, yet have a name that claims "ad blocker", even "ublock origin lite", are something else and irrelevant.

I think this is an example of moving the goal post. Instead of ad blockers being disabled, now it's specific blockers such as ublock origin will be disabled, and even that isn't true.

An honest title would be "In June 2024, ad blockers such as ublock origin will have reduced functionality", or something along those lines.

Ublock origin lite is an ad blocker, it's not something else, and it's not irrelevant, and you use vague language such as "it cant do the full job" without explaining what this means. This is misleading and incorrect.

Ad blockers must use Manifest v2 on Chrome to achieve full functionality, and Manifest v2 extensions will be disabled in June. Any ad blocker that doesn't willingly reduce its functionality is going to be forcibly disabled. The title seems fine to me.

The title literally says ublock origin, and the entire point of the article and countless other such articles for at least the last year is exactly that ad blockers, and yes in particular ublock origin, will not be able to function.

No goal posts have moved and ublock origin is not just a random "specific blocker" it's the gold standard one that actually does what they all should, because the author is principled and not for sale.

In this context, "function" and "does what they all should" means "places ultimate control in the hands of the user" ie, allows you to do things that web sites and google don't like, but which you want. Most other ad blockers don't do that. They say they do, but they don't. Just like ublock itself, which caused the original author to fork and create ublock origin in the first place.

It's been exactly the same story ever since manifest v3 was first proposed.

If you somehow were unaware of that, consider yourself hereby informed.

It's really interesting to see the amount of misinformation being propagated lately.

Do people not bother to fact check anything?

The creator of ublock has made an ad blocker specifically for the new API and it's available to use right now. It's objectively incorrect to claim that ad blockers will not work after June 2024.

The ublock lite extension does have some limitations, such as not allowing you to create filters at runtime. This is the result of not allowing extensions to load code at runtime.

It's fair to criticize this limitation, but that's not what's happening here.

This information is available, it's not hidden, you can read the readme of the ublock lite github repo or something, but are not even attempting to do this for some reason.

I have used the ublock lite extensions to see for myself if it's totally broken, and it worked fine for me, the main limitation for me is not having the "element zapper", but it not blocking ads was not something that I experienced.

I am all for criticizing companies actions, and ad blockers are very important to me just as well as anyone else here, but the dishonestly is very off putting and disappointing.

Chromium is overdue for an IE style backlash

What a wonderful excuse to not use Chrome.

This may advantage Google in the short-term, but it'll suffer in the long-term.

The time is now, either switch to FF or use Brave (and similar)

But rather FF than chromium based stuff :)

This update will also get rolled out to Brave, since it's also Chromium in the back.

Firefox is the _only_ alternative unless you're on Mac and can use Safari.

Oh so Brave is only a soft-fork? I thought they would still support Manifest V2 indefinitely?

That's fine, I switched to Firefox ages ago.

Might be worth making a list of other alternative browsers that are not based on Chromium... if there are any.

Almost donated to mozilla.org too but they kept pushing the recurring donation so I ran away.

Other than Firefox and Safari, there are a few but they're all maintained by small teams and you can expect them to have trouble with some modern sites.

You can look at the Wikipedia list of web browsers, any that aren't listed under Chromium (Blink-Based) will be fine, but notable browsers that WILL be affected:

Chromium:

    Amazon Silk
    Arc
    Avast Secure Browser
    Blisk
    Brave
    Cốc Cốc
    Comodo Dragon[28]
    Epic
    Google Chrome (based on Blink since Chrome v. 28)
    JioPages
    Microsoft Edge[29]
    NAVER Whale
    Opera[30]
    Opera GX
    Puffin Browser
    qutebrowser (Blink backend mostly stable)
    Redcore
    RockMelt
    Sleipnir
    SRWare Iron
    Torch
    Ungoogled-chromium (lol)
    Vivaldi
    Yandex Browser

And suddenly Firefox has runaway CPU usage on YouTube

Honestly, it was a bit shocking that big players allowed ad blocking to go on for so long. The next logical step is for google to pull funding from Firefox unless they implement it too. (They still pay a lot of money for google to be the default search engine, right?)

Between this and Reddit casually crushing third party clients out of existence, we’ve probably entered into a new era of the web.

The era of enshittification.

> Honestly, it was a bit shocking that big players allowed ad blocking to go on for so long. The next logical step is for google to pull funding from Firefox unless they implement it too. (They still pay a lot of money for google to be the default search engine, right?)

Isn't it a "Microsoft has shares in Apple so it has a competitor so they don't get sued/dismembered for being a monopoly" ? So, the next logical step for Google is to keep funding Moz/ff ?

No, during the recent antitrust trial Google was forced to reveal how much they pay each platform to be the default search engine. This is not a Chrome vs Firefox share deal thing. This is a Google Search vs "all other search engines" issue. Google pays most browsers to be the default engine, and has done so for many years.

The legality of it is not my area of expertise and I won't comment on that.

But why is it shocking? Isn't it antithetical to what a browser is to have "content" (ads) be given special privileges?

It’s shocking because Alphabet is in the business of making money at the expense of their users. They aren’t building Chrome because they believe in the open web, they build it to extract every last cent out of us. Ad blockers cost them millions, perhaps even billions, a year. Despite having the ability to stop it, they allow it to occur. And that is shocking from a capitalistic point of view.

Are we entering the period of the true 'dark web' like the dark ages where web innovation is stifled? If dark mode and other features are disabled, then chrome will go the way of navigator, long forgotten. Intelligence will reign victorious over greed, I guarantee that.

Google can not stop funding Firefox

Does this affect chrome based browsers like Brave?

yes it does, since Manifest v3 is being rolled out on Chromium (which Chrome is based on).

unless Brave and other forks (like Cromite, Vanadium, Ungoogled-Chromium) manage to disable MV3, which I think Google will make it impossible to do so, they are affected by this change.

Switch to Firefox.

This isn't true. I'm not a Brave user (I use FF), but Brave have said that

1/ they have adblocking built-in [0]

2/ they will continue to support Manifest V2 indefinitely, esp. so that uBlock Origin continues to work [1]

That doesn't mean uBlock will continue to exist... If it can't be installed on Chrome it's possible the sole dev will lose motivation (although he has already made a V3 version of the extension).

[0] https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822798299729925

[1] https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446

Ublock Origin is the only one that can be trusted. I use Brave on mobile and it's adblocker + JS toggle switch work great, but I don't fully trust them on ads considering how they've tried to push crypto BAT token stuff in the past.

I use Firefox on mobile with Ublock origin installed, works perfectly for me

Brave has written their own (open source) adblock engine (in rust) that is directly integrated into the browser (ie. not an extension, so is not affected by Manifest V3).

https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

Here is a (somewhat dated) article describing it by the authors:

https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/

Pihole works just fine, regardless of browser.

Out of all the anti-trust cases, Google has the most obvious abuse of its monopoly position.

I feel for them. The make >80% of their profits from ads. Ads is everything to them. They need to sacrifice privacy and fuck over the users to satisfy their growth targets.

The world would be a better place if the ads division is split from the rest of org.

Possibly there's a market for pi-hole-like devices?

"Privacy firewall for your house, now just Eur 100".

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