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Google Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled
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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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IT guys will stop using it...
Which means they'll stop deploying it as the default browser on some large enterprises, it won't ship as defaults in pre-baked images going forward.
Average joes and janes will use Safari and Edge depending on OS.
Where is their growth going to come from after this change? Chromebooks? lol.
I hope they do it, it will hurt them in the long run.
You can bet 300 new uBlock replacements to spring up practically overnight, some of them scams, reducing trust in the Google ecostystem.
Unfortunately it's a bigger problem.
Google doesn't plan to block uBlock Origin itself, but the APIs it uses to integrate into Chrome in order to function. This will effectively disable all adblockers on Chrome. uBlock won't be removed from the Chrome extension store, it will just have 90% of its functionality removed.
Additionally, this isn't a Chrome-only change, but a change in the open source Chromium, an upstream browser of Chrome all other Chrome-based browsers use (essentially everything aside from Firefox and Safari themselves).
The change itself is involved in changing the browser's "Manifest", a list of allowed API calls for extensions. The current one is called Manifest v2 and the new one was dubbed Manifest v3.
Theorethically Chromium-based browsers could "backport" Manifest v2 due to the open source nature of Chromium. However that is unlikely as it's projected to take a lot of resources to change, due mostly to security implications of the change.
Vendors of other Chromium-based browsers themselves have little to gain from making the change aside from name recognition for "allowing uBlock", which most users either wouldn't care for or already use Firefox, so the loss for Google isn't projected to be large, just as the gains for other vendors.
TLDR: uBlock won't be removed from the Chrome extension store, but the mechanisms through which it blocks ads will be blocked. The block isn't a change in Chrome but in Chromium and affects all Chromium-based brosers (all except Firefox and Safari). Other vendors could change that to allow adblockers but it's projected to take a lot of time and resources.
There is already a "lite" version of uBlock origin that conforms to the new manifest and will still work.
There are still a few features missing, some can't be implemented but others will be.
Is it by the same author? Nik Rols, iirc?
Raymond Hill (gorhill) is the author of uBlock Origin, uBlock Origin Lite, uMatrix etc.
I remembered... poorly.
The 'block element' picker is the big one that can not be implemented in the lite version.
Also included block lists can't update unless the extension itself updates.
Those seem like really big hurdles. How can those be worked around?
Is it not possible to trigger a manual block list update?
It's not something that can be worked around. It's specifically a design feature of manifest v3 to restrict these types of things.
Your options are to accept this or use a different browser.