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EVHaste

Youtube's tantrum escalates.

Forced to concede that they cannot outpace ad blocking extensions, parent company Google artificially limits the rate of extension updates in Chrome.

No justification for the user experience is given, and in fact this makes chrome users more vulnerable to attacks injected via ads.

arstechnica.com/google/2023/12

Ars Technica · Chrome’s next weapon in the War on Ad Blockers: Slower extension updatesWhen ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game, make the mouse slower.

@Haste is the Borg decrypting the randomly shifting shield phase faster than the Enterprise can configure the next shift?

@phaysis this is a Star Trek reference and that is the extent of my knowledge

@Haste I feel like “slower extension updates” doesn’t quite capture how large this change actually is. Damn near giving extensions an app like approval process, but even apps could pull that without review.

@BurritoSommelier that’s fair; I wonder if apps can get around it by having the app contents static but import the bits that need to change from elsewhere (sort of like subscription lists for ad blockers today)

@Haste @sphakos wonder how this will impact consumer security products’ bundled browser extensions

@TypeErr0r @sphakos they probably haven’t thought about this at all.

@Haste I can definitely imagine a “preferred extension developer” update fastlane that costs a prohibitive amount for a single dev or small indie team to afford

@TypeErr0r They’ll sell the solution to a problem they created :/

@Haste Man Firefox is just lovelier and lovelier

@pandora_parrot as if I needed additional reasons

@Haste Google makes me proud to use Firefox

@Haste I have basically only had a really brief Chrome phase in the early Aughties when it was fresh, new and fast. Google's actions promptly led me back to Firefox. Haven't looked back since. Nowadays performance is ok and everything else immensely better.

@Haste it'll be amazingly funny if this blows up in Google's face by causing the proportion of people who use Chrome to drop.

@0x2ba22e11 I would love that. I dunno how many of those people haven’t switched already though; like I personally haven’t used it since 2018 or so.

@rother_stuebs @Haste Rather unlikely IMHO . Also Firefox is probably the only alternative and that also depends on Google financially.

@ewolff @rother_stuebs Yeah, I wish this was the case, and I hope it is, but I won’t hold my breath. Hasn’t been previously

@Haste I guess using @mozilla #firefox if not @torproject #TorBrowser is an act of digital self- and mutual defense then!

@Haste this article is very misleading. they're blocking loading code at runtime, which is a major security improvement and something other browsers like Firefox have done for years. they are not making any changes to the review process

@Haste these changes do not affect adblockers in any major way and any adblocker with Firefox support is already designed to cope with it

@leo I don’t think that’s correct. Per the original Engadget article from which this is sourced:

“… under Manifest V3, whenever an ad blocker wants to update its blocklist — again, something they may need to do multiple times a day — it will have to release a full update and undergo a review “which can take anywhere between [a] few hours to even a few weeks.””

engadget.com/inside-the-arms-r

Engadget · Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockersBy Anthony Ha

@Haste the removal of blocking webRequest in favor of declarativeNetRequest is controversial for other reasons but the update process is not one of them. solely in terms of what changes need to go through the addon review process (which is what the Ars Technica article is about), there is no notable difference between firefox's implementation of mv2 and chrome's implementation of mv3.

@leo Thanks for sharing the link. I did read it; it’s useful and interesting reading but does not necessarily contradict Engadget’s reporting.

The developer diary you’ve linked to is more about changes to ruleset limits; it doesn’t really elaborate on review processes or whether those are changing. Both could be true, they aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s also a month older than the interview with the Ghostery employee; it’s possible something has changed since it was written.

@Haste "However, to support more frequent updates and user-defined rules, extensions can add rules dynamically too, without their developers having to upload a new version of the extension to the Chrome Web Store."
for a primary source on the actual changes being discussed: developer.chrome.com/docs/exte
note that it suggests downloading data at runtime instead of code, which is more or less what adblockers do already

Chrome for DevelopersImprove extension security - Chrome for DevelopersThe last of three sections describing changes needed for code that is not part of the extension service worker.

@leo Thanks for the link. I’ll need a bit to digest this but it might be worth follow up by Engadget if this contradicts their source.

@Haste I’m curious what they mean with blocklist in this context.

In manifest V3, the extension can dynamically update the blocklist that Chrome enforces, so no extension update needed.

But blocking YouTube ads needs logic that runs within the YouTube web application. If that logic needs changing, an update to the extension might be needed. And since, reportedly, YouTube changes their ad code multiple times a day, I imagine, so would the extension.

@jornane Yeah, maybe that’s it! If they were conflating those things it would explain the discrepancy. Good thinking.

@Haste This makes it crystal clear ad supported video is broken. I'd gladly pay-as-you-view but don't watch much so the monthly rate is a bad deal, and I bet some others would.

@mattication I’ve not been super impressed with Edge, but I will grant it was better than I expected last time I used it.