Google Reverses Plan to Cripple Adblockers, Other Extensions in Chrome

Last month, we detailed Google’s proposed changes to how extensions function in Chrome and the significant impact this was expected to have on adblockers and other privacy and security-minded extensions. In short, Google had proposed a series of changes to Chrome in its Manifest V3 document that would have put substantial limitations on the types and kinds of extensions that could be built within the browser. Adblockers, script blockers, and various privacy extensions were all going to be impacted in various ways.

The response from extension authors was significant and overwhelmingly negative. Ghostery published a report on the performance impact of adblock and privacy extensions, given that one of the stated reasons for the changes Google wanted to make was to improve overall web performance. The report — which you can read here — demonstrates that among all of the major adblock extensions, none of them have a significant performance impact on the browser in the first place.

You can read about the limits and specifics of Ghostery’s tests on its own site, where the company discusses its metrics, why it tested the ways that it did, and what the implications are of these results. But what the benchmarks show in aggregate is that the network filtering engines these extensions use are efficient and continuously improving. This was seen as undercutting the rationale for the changes that Google was proposing, and the company backed down not long after Ghostery published its report.

Devlin Cronin of Google posted a message in Google Groups discussing the team’s new plan. Two major new features not initially included in the Manifest V3 document are dynamic rule support and a higher maximum ruleset size for block lists. Previously, Google had stated that only static rules and a maximum list size of 30K would be permissible, and both constraints were seen as major issues.

Google hasn’t stated yet what the new limit on rule lists will be — the company is still taking feedback on its proposed changes — but has pledged to continue working with the extension community to ensure that these issues are dealt with. There are hints at what the company’s original thinking may have been with the proposed changes in the first place. In his response, Cronin points out that the performance considerations for websites are often different on low-end hardware than on higher-end machines. Google may have been considering some of its proposed alterations to Chrome based on the performance characteristics of Chromebooks using ARM or low-end Intel hardware with limited amounts of RAM. Then again, as extension authors rather loudly pointed out, the performance impact of Google’s proposed Manifest V3 changes would have likely been larger than any slowdown caused by the add-ons themselves.

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