Quote:If you’re running Google Chrome 72 and your ad blocker no longer seems to do anything and offer you a completely clean browsing experience, it’s all because of the search giant which has accidentally broken down some extensions.

As it turns out, Google Chrome 72 introduces a new feature called “Enable network service” which allows the browser to create background tasks for each website.

But because bugs in these service workers, the new feature available in Google Chrome makes it possible for extensions to be ignored completely, eventually leading to the features of some to be fully disabled.

This is the case of ad blockers, which reportedly leave ads on a number of websites to get through, but other extensions seem to be broken down too, including VPNs.

The problem has already been fixed in Google Chrome 73, which is the next stable release for the browser, but more surprising is that Google doesn’t want to shut down its experiment for now. Because, as the company puts it, this is key for the feature of the browser.

Quote:Google has recently confirmed that it would actually roll out a fix for the Chrome 72 bug that breaks down some extensions.

Google originally said it resolved the issue in Chrome 73, explaining that it wouldn’t disable the experiment because devs should use the beta build of the browser and the number of impacted users is very small.

Now Google says it has resolved all issues related to the new experiment and promises to resolve the bug with a patch that would be released for all Chrome 72 installations later this week.

“The fix will go out this week in an update to 72. Please switch to Chrome beta and not stable; fixing these regressions is much easier for everyone and won’t impact users if they’re brought up in beta,” a Google engineer explained.