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Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

speckx

Comments (297)

  • polairscience
    And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it we will be worse for it.
  • throwatdem12311
    Firefox is the only sane option. It’s not perfect but it’s better than the alternatives.Chromium forks are at the mercy of Google doing everything they can to stop ad blocking.Firefox forks are often maintain by just “some dude”. If they decide they don’t want to maintain it anymore, it’s done. If everyone switches to a fork and then Firefox goes away because nobody is using the browser anymore, it’s done.
  • abtinf
    Someone ought to build a browser that is designed from the ground up to treat the web for what it is: the most hostile ecosystem on the planet.uBlock/uMatrix functionality should be built into the core. Every domain and PSF should be sandboxed to its own profile. User agents and many js queries should return standard responses. Forcing display of video controls should be trivial. Manipulating pages to show/hide elements and customize feeds should be trivial. Right clicking to download any asset should just work.And so, so much more.The browser is my agent, not your mole.
  • yaro330
    uBO lite has been working flawlessly for me for the past couple of years.
  • rschiavone
    I remember when they first announced it years ago and they pretended to care by walking back the change. As always, the strategy is to wait for the dust to settle and then push the changes again.
  • siren2026
    Google revealing how evil they really are.That was always the plan with Chrome. Put B$ of engineering efforts into creating a nice browser and pushing people to switch over.Once everyone is addicted and forgot about the competition, start to quietly make it more and more of a Spyware.Chrome has always and will always be an attempt at controlling the client side of the funnel to be in charge of how much ads they can deliver to your brain. It's 100% a spyware with a side-effect of a browser.Switch today. Firefox works well.
  • whitepoplar
    A lot of people have been very vocal about this. I use uBlock Origin Lite and haven't noticed a difference between it and uBlock Origin. Am I missing something?
  • Legend2440
    Bad headline. Popular ad blockers have already switched to MV3, and MV2 has already been disabled for all users.
  • klipklop
    For all the folks that proudly say “fine I will use browser X instead!” Don’t you realize the next step is to slowly change chrome so sites will work in chrome, but not other minority browsers?Google is playing the long game. Boil the frogs slowly.
  • kyrra
    Googler, opinions are my own.My understanding is they're doing this in the name of security, though it obviously has some benefit to ads. this policy more closely aligns with what Safari does today. And it prevents add-ons from scraping information since they have to put in the block list ahead of time.I've been using manifest v3 version of Adblock and it's worked just fine for me. But obviously is not perfect, but it fell into more towards security and privacy of the user against malicious extensions.
  • dbpc
    Blocking ads at the network level seems to be the right approach moving forward.
  • AustinDev
    This is your sign to start using a DNS based ad/tracking blocker. Run it on your VPS with tailscale if you want it available everywhere without significant security overhead.
  • ramijames
    Use Firefox. It's an excellent browser and needs your support.
  • qnleigh
    Naive question: will it not be possible for ad blockers to upgrade to ManifestV3? Is there something about it that makes ad blocking much harder. What does Manifest actually do?
  • janalsncm
    > Meta’s Chief Security Officer resigned the very next day.It would have been very funny if they reassigned him to data labeling too.
  • imzadi
    I've been using Orion with Kagi for search. Every once in a while I hit a site that won't work on Orion (looking at you Cafe Zupas), but then I jump over to firefox.
  • ldom66
    I am scared that with the current status quo, when websites mostly served on chrome start benefiting from the ability to guarantee ad display, that they might start blocking any client that doesn't support it. When that happens we'll start seeing the web degrade in a huge way. This is a huge loss for everyone, I'm very upset with Google for pushing this monopolistic garbage.
  • 0xblinq
    Use brave. I've been using it for the last...I don't know... 6 years? Internet is unusable for me without it. It even makes YouTube usable again.
  • haritha-j
    i keep hoping google will stop giving me reasons to switch ,because i can't be bothered to move all my passwords and stuff over, but every year they keep making it harder.Likewise, I desperately want to stay on windows because of anticheat, but every year they keep making it harder.
  • jasonvorhe
    First line of defense is local DNS based adblocking followed by Brave on all devices. The only time I see ads or Eurocrat cookie nonsense is when GitHub rate limits access to the updated filter lists. Let's hope this will hold for a while.
  • warpfactor
    Firefox is great, and the community "zen" fork is even nicer.
  • neves
    Will Brave, which is based in Chromium, still block ads? Since they are changing Chromium, I don't think so.
  • markstos
    "This will also impact other Chromium-based browsers... Neowin points out that Microsoft Edge and Opera are likely to follow suit."This is story about browser Chromium browser monoculture and Google's influence over it.
  • dainank
    The Ladybird browser could potentially be a nice alternative in the future: https://ladybird.org/
  • twostorytower
    This is a bit of a sensationalist headline. MV3 ad blocking extensions like uBO Lite work fine for 99.9% of cases. MV3 certainly is a pain in the ass, but it's not the end of the world for ad blocking.
  • LogicFailsMe
    End user will close the door on using Chrome for any reason...
  • dwa3592
    I use brave and it seems to work just fine against ads. Brave also has lower memory consumption than google chrome.
  • ApolloFortyNine
    UBlock Origin Lite has been working fine (I had no idea MV2 wasn't actually disabled yet), and uses MV3.
  • asadm
    i have been using uBlock Origin Lite and haven't missed MV2 at all? What's the outrage?https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
  • testfrequency
    This will be great for all Enterprise customers.Employees at companies using corporate computers love a good malicious popup, right?
  • debo_
    I wonder what degoogled chromium will do. I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to drop MV2 support given all the other stuff they're doing, but it would be nice if I could continue to use full uBlock with it.
  • hirako2000
    Brave, Vivaldi (successor of opera), a few others also based on chromium work just fine. No ads.
  • rjh29
    This is a non-story, insofar as the V3 shutdown has been in the works for years and has been rolled out since a year ago at least. I stopped being able to use them about six months ago.
  • _-_-__-_-_-
    Ungoogled Chromium for when I need profiles. Firefox for everything else and DuckDuckGo on iOS
  • romanovcode
    Firefox is great. Safari is also pretty good, Apple ADP is true e2e encrypted bookmarks, history and so on. I really do not see the reason to be using Chrome for multiple years now.
  • Danox
    No surprise Google is being Google and Chrome is great bloated spyware closing out those ad blockers is part of the game.
  • JKCalhoun
    Increasingly, LLMs are my browser.Now, if there were just an LLM browser that would fetch a page, strip the ads, and serve me that…
  • mgrunwald_
    Chrome is the new Internet Exploder.Use anything with built-in adblock-rust.
  • ThrowawayTestr
    On Chrome* Firefox is just fine.
  • anal_reactor
    Sad truth is, internet isn't really worth browsing anymore.
  • xienze
    It's obviously not perfect but DNS-level ad blockers like Pihole or Adguard Home still make a dramatic difference, so all is not lost.
  • anon
    undefined
  • Daviey
    Can we update the title, should be, "Google Chrome's next update will mark the end of me using it"
  • ur-whale
    People are still using the spying machine in June '26 ?Well this is a wake-up call folks, time to switch away from that abomination.
  • mrbluecoat
    Better title: “Google Chrome's Next Update Will Drive Privacy-Minded Users To Other Browsers“
  • righthand
    I’m going home for a visit. Will make sure to switch the family over to Firefox and explain why. Just as all us nerds did back when Chrome came out and we switched our family to that.
  • Gud
    Fuck Google
  • animitronix
    And I will be closing the door on Chrome
  • Noaidi
    I do not mind advertising on websites. What I mind is bad ads, ads with malware, way too many ads, and ads that track me. This is where Google gets the whole ad thing wrong. They are focusing on the wrong problem.If you think about the economics of it, a very popular website could survive on only on ad because the advertiser would pay a premium to be seen on the website.So that is my other argument, bad websites need a whole bunch of ads to be profitable. So better websites would help as well.
  • warpfactor
    Firefox.
  • charcircuit
    This is not true. There are other APIs extensions can use to block ads and browsers like Brave have ad blocking built into the engine itself.
  • anon
    undefined
  • mystraline
    Title: Ad company makes a browser update to disable ad blockingNews at 11.
  • alex1138
    I'm sorry for the glib comment but "they could just not do this"Seriously. Imagine a company that solicits advice from the public. Not all of it is going to be good. The customer isn't always right, but basically the reaction to Should We Do This would be Fuck NoBut they'll do it anyway. You should get fired from your job if you just plow ahead like this
  • ChrisArchitect
  • anon
    undefined
  • inquirerGeneral
    [dead]
  • wetpaws
    [dead]
  • insanitybit
    tl;dr MV2 is going away (after already being deprecated a while ago). MV3 exists, you're probably already using it in your adblocker.
  • zb3
    Stop suggesting this Firefox crap which is not only much slower but it also can't even properly manage RAM usage on mobile, leading to app being killed on my low-RAM device, chrome can deal with it even though that's a "desktop" version with extensions for a much newer high end device.Restricting webRequestBlocking (but it's not going away, just needs a policy extension) and synchronous executeScript did in practice make adblockers unreliable though.. I partially worked it around by using a custom extension that uses the recent userScripts API..BTW, it's not possible to inject scripts to workers like a ServiceWorker or to replace it's content (DNR let's you redirect but this redirect breaks SW origin + it's visible when you disallow redirects), but MV2 was no better, chrome extensions never had advanced capabilities for ad blocking, a bug about not being able to access POST data via webRequest was open for 10+ years and will probably never be fixed.But still, firefox is not the alternative, even WebKit is much better.
  • dbbk
    This is just not true