Google's extensions system is known as Manifest, and it's currently at V2. V3 launches next week, and it's going to break a lot, if not all, of V2. Ad blockers, etc.
They announced V3 in 2019 and it's been oft delayed, but will now be launched. And lots of controversy is following it, particularly with ad blockers and content filtering. Keep in mind that Google is - first and always - a company built around serving ads.
From the article:
"A big source of skepticism around Manifest V3 is limitations around "content filtering," aka the APIs ad blockers and anti-tracking extensions use to fight ad companies like Google. Google, which makes about 77 percent of its revenue from advertising, has not published a serious explanation as to why Manifest V3 limits content filtering, and it's not clear how that aligns with the goals of "improving the security, privacy, performance and trustworthiness." Like Kewisch said, the primary goal of malicious extensions is to spy on users and slurp up data, which has nothing to do with content filtering. This is all happening while Google is building an ad system directly into Chrome, and Google properties like YouTube are making aggressive moves against ad blockers." (emphasis mine)
It's not easy to not use Google, I use their email as mostly receive-only (newsletters mainly) and their search engine, and that's about it. As bad as it's become through it getting gamed, it's still pretty good.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-starts-deprecating-older-more-capable-chrome-extensions-next-week/![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
