Google backtracks on Chrome modifications that would have crippled ad blockers

[sgx]

Google changes stance on upcoming Chrome Manifest V3 changes as benchmark shows they lied about performance hit.

A study analyzing the performance of Chrome ad blocker extensions published on Friday has proven wrong claims made by Google developers last month, when a controversy broke out surrounding their decision to modify the Chrome browser in such a way that would have eventually killed off ad blockers and many other extensions.

The study, carried out by the team behind the Ghostery ad blocker, found that ad blockers had sub-millisecond impact on Chrome's network requests that could hardly be called a performance hit.

Source

[harlan4096]

Additional info: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/02/17/benchm...rs-chrome/

[silversurfer]

Google still plans to cripple ad-blocking in Chrome, but enterprises will be exempt

In a message on a Google Groups page about Manifest V3, Google staffer Simeon Vincent explained the motivation for the deprecation and mentioned an exception for enterprise instances of Chrome.
 
"Chrome is deprecating the blocking capabilities of the webRequest API in Manifest V3, not the entire webRequest API (though blocking will still be available to enterprise deployments)," wrote Vincent. 
 
"Extensions with appropriate permissions can still observe network requests using the webRequest API. The webRequest API's ability to observe requests is foundational for extensions that modify their behavior based on the patterns they observe at runtime."

[silversurfer]

First Chrome version with Manifest V3 to land in Canary this summer

The first version of Chrome that will feature revamped Extensions API functions is expected to be ready for public testing as a Chrome Canary version "at the end of July or beginning of August," according to Simeon Vincent, an Extensions Developer Advocate for the Chromium Project.
 
However, please note that this version is intended as a "Developer Preview." Some ad blockers will not work because they are still running on top of deprecated Chrome code.
 
This version is intended as a test base for developers so they can prepare their extensions for the upcoming changes in the Chrome extensions code, which currently is scheduled to arrive in the main Chrome stable release at the start of 2020, barring any problems.
 
Extension developers will have around six months to migrate from the old Chrome extensions codebase to the new ones.