Google recently shared some important news about the move to Manifest V3. The Mountain View giant, after pausing the update, decided to continue the transition to Manifest V3 albeit with several key changes. The first will affect the “improved content filtering support” for the Declarative Net Request API, which is the one used by ad blocking extensions. In particular, the company had previously proposed limiting the functionality of this API for security reasons. This would have resulted in ad blockers being less effective on all Chromium-based browsers, including Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
Despite the concerns of developers and users, Google has stated that it will continue on this pathautomatically disabling Manifest V2 extensions in browsers in June 2024. In this regard, the Chief Technology Officer of AdGuard, Andrey Meshkov, judged the changes evaluated by Google in positive terms. In fact, in a post, Meshkov stated that these changes should allow ad blockers to “offer nearly the same filtering quality demonstrated with Manifest V2.”
Not everyone, however, agrees with what Meshkov expressed. For example, Alexei Miagkov, the senior technician of Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that Manifest V3 would impose unnecessary limitations on developers. In fact, to The Verge, he declared that “These are helpful changes, but the problem remains the same: If extensions fail to innovate, users lose and trackers win. Now we all depend on Google to continue evolving the API to keep up with advertisers and trackers “.
