Google’s war on ad blocker it gets harder and harder. In particular, this refers to the extension review process when Chrome adopts the new one Manifest V3 in summer 2024. For those who don’t know, Manifest V3 represents the new APIs that will regulate the permissions of Chromium browser extensions.
Proceeding in order, Google, for some time now, is waging an uphill battle against ad blockersespecially regarding YouTube. In this sense, the technical director of the ad block extension Ghostery, Krzysztof Modran, highlighted something regarding the review time of extension updates. In particular, the well-known video platform frequently changes its detection scripts: therefore, users who use an ad blocker may not be able to view the video.
To overcome this process, ad blockers often change their detection filters. In this sense, Manifest V2 – with which Google Chrome is equipped – allows rather rapid modification, unlike Manifest V3.
The latter, in fact, will force extension updates to go through a fairly lengthy review process before approval. Simply put, this process – which allows ad blockers to update the block list of sites and services – could take much longer than it does now.
For this reason, Modras stated that “To counteract changes to ad serving and ad blocking detection, blocklists need to be updated at least on a daily basis and sometimes more often. While all industry players are innovating, some ad blockers simply cannot keep up with these changes.”
