I wrote earlier about Google ending support for Manifest V2 extensions and enforcing the usage of Manifest V3 extensions. They even promised, back in 2019 when they first announced their intentions, to not kill ad blockers. In my previous post, I wrote about how remote code execution was being banned, but that wasn't the whole truth. Manifest V3 allows extensions to declare beforehand which websites they want to download code from, and that would be vetted by Google.
AdGuard, an ad-blocking extension, had its extension denied multiple times by the Chrome Web Store. The promises of "we will make it safer while letting ad-blockers function normally" fell apart, to no one's surprise, at the first time of asking.
AdGuard had to drop its Quick Fixes feature, which is the feature that loads in the latest ad-blocking strategies.
AdGuard was one of the most optimistic ad-blockers when Manfest V3 was announced, declaring that their new extension would be virtually indistinguishable from the old one. On the other end of the spectrum is uBlock Origin, that created an entirely new ad-blocker which was less potent, opting to steer clear of the vetting process entirely.
The most charitable interpretation of this situation is that Google's process, focusing on rules and permissions rather than oversight, is interfering with the promises they made about not killing ad blockers. The least charitable interpretation is, of course, that they planned to bury ad-blockers under a pile of paperwork and bureaucratic red tape all along.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which fights for digital rights, also maintains an ad-blocker called Privacy Badger. It is a lovely little extension, which doesn't just hide ads, it also pretends that the user has clicked on every ad. Junk data is even worse than no data, when it comes to machine learning models.
Alexei Miagkov, who oversees Privacy Badger, said that it feels like "the web extensions team at Google is in no rush to fix the frayed ends, to fix what's missing or what's broken still". Google's documentation says that there are "currently no open issues considered a critical platform gap", and that various issues have been addressed through the addition of new API capabilities.
The issue currently plaguing Privacy Badger is that redirects do not work properly. On Google search, for example, you don't just click on a link to take you to a webpage. You click on a link that tells Google that you have clicked it, and then Google responds with an instruction to the browser to take you elsewhere. This is a redirect, and the redirect code in Manifest V3 fails to account for this, returning an incomplete URL a lot of the time. A Chrome developer relations engineer reportedly helped to identify a clunky workaround.
Again, the most charitable interpretation is that Google moved a lot of ability from the purview of the extensions into the extension engine, and is unable to fix the issues that moved along with it.
A Shameless Shill For Firefox
With uBlock Origin being nerfed on Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, they have written that it works best on Firefox.
The biggest reason is that extensions on Firefox have recently obtained the ability to read DNS records, which allows uBlock to detect two types of evasion. The first is when an ad by, say, adagency.com appears to come from ad.hostwebsite.com (CNAME uncloaking), and the other is when the ad server is linked to an ever-changing list of IP addresses (IP Address filtering).
There are other features of the Firefox version of uBlock (listed in the article) that are unreliable, if not missing, on other browsers.