“It's hard to escape the suspicion that this is driven primarily by a desire to protect third-party tracking and ad revenue, where Google is the overwhelming market leader,” he said. “This is a very bad decision on Google's part,” Justin Brookman, Director of Consumer Privacy and Technology Policy at Consumer Reports told Motherboard in an email.īrookman noted that millions of users rely on extensions like uBlock, Disconnect, and Ghostery to limit cross-site tracking and block malicious code from third-party servers, and that pushing these extensions to use a different API with lesser functionality would only weaken them. Now that Chrome’s market share is greater, the company’s in a better position to “shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google's primary business,” Hill said.Ĭonsumer advocates are similarly unimpressed, noting that the changes could also harm the effectiveness of some parental control, privacy, and security extensions. Hill argues that the blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield some control of content blocking to third-party developers. “Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.” “In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers-these are the top most popular extensions for any browser,” he said. Hill said that Google’s motivation here had little to do with the end user experience, and far more to do with protecting advertising revenues from the rising popularity of adblock extensions. “Web pages load slow because of bloat, not because of the blocking ability of the webRequest API-at least for well crafted extensions,” Hill said.
In the wake of ongoing backlash to the proposal, Chrome software security engineer Chris Palmer took to Twitter this week to claim the move was intended to help improve the end-user browsing experience, and paid enterprise users would be exempt from the changes. While some extensions, like AdBlock, already use the latter, developers say the overall result will be tools that simply don’t work quite as well overall. But Google’s proposal would require extensions use the declarativeNetRequest API, which leaves it to the browser to decide what gets blocked based on a list of predetermined rules. The extension development community didn’t respond well, and said the changes would harm many popular user tools.Ĭurrently, many Chrome adblock extensions use Chrome's webRequest API, letting users block ads before they even reach the browser. Under these changes, Google said it would be modifying permissions and other key aspects of Chrome’s extensions system. Last year, Google began hinting at some changes to Chrome’s extension system as part of its Manifest V3 proposal.
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