Ad Blocking in Chrome: Last week, when Google announced Manifest V3, a set of changes to the Chrome extensions platform, some people worried that this would end ad blockers. But Google’s recent decision to put its plans on hold may have given your favorite ad blocker more time.
After getting a lot of pushbacks from developers, especially those who make ad blockers, Google has decided to rethink its plans to stop supporting Manifest V2 extensions. Google has now changed its plans to help these developers work out any problems they might have when it’s time to move.
According to 9To5Google, the tech giant is “monitoring comments from the developer community.” He is “committe to giving developers solutions to migration challenges with new features, bug fixes, and enough time to adopt.”
One of the main problems these developers have with Manifest V3 is that it wouldn’t let extensions use code hosted elsewhere. Instead, all of the extension’s principles would have to be include in the package sent to the website.
This would help Google eliminate malicious extensions, but it would stop ad blockers from working. For example, Tampermonkey is make up of scripts that users write and add to the extension after it has been install. So, Tampermonkey would not work if all of the code had to be in the extension’s package.
The original plan to stop supporting V2 extensions was announce in 2021, and in September of this year, Google gave an update that said Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary builds should start testing, turning off support for V2 extensions. Google plans to test depreciation on the stable Chrome version in June 2023. And the last step to end support for V2 would have happened in January 2024.
Google will give an updated phase-out plan by March 2023 and reevaluate the original plan’s milestones.
