Is Google About To Block Adblockers?

is Google blocking the ad blockers ladies and gentlemen now this is a pretty uh heavy uh heavy title here okay and you might have seen this Reddit post some news articles which are talking about Google confirms they will disable ublock origin in Chrome in 2024 now U block Origins is one of the uh most popular ad blocking extensions available across the world right now now we've talked about how YouTube basically inadvertedly strengthened ad blockers a few days ago but today we're looking at a bit of information regarding uh Google Chrome Google itself possibly stopping or at least hindering massively these ad blocking tools that exist now to understand ladies and gentlemen this is not a simple topic okay this is a pretty complicated topic but I'm going to try to make this as Layman as I possibly can so in this Reddit post they say Google confirms they will disable mv2 extensions including U block Origins okay so what is an mv2 extension let's go over what Google says here so this is from developer. chrome.com they said that they are resuming the transition to manifest version 3 and this was posted November 16th 2023 so December of last year they said they paused a plan depreciation of manifest version two in order to address developer feedback and deliver better solutions to migration issues so here they mention four exact points such as offscreen documents uh they provide better control service worker lifetimes adding a new user script API but what's important for us here is improving content filtering support by providing more generous limits in the declarative net request API so you might be like whoa that's a lot of fancy words mudo what's going on right over here so to give you an idea what manifest is according to google manifest V3 or manifest in general is basically a rule set that describes uh changes or how specific core functionalities work in Chrome extensions in regards to specific apis so again they update these with the motivation of increasing security privacy and performance again this is all related to extensions so again to give you an idea what a Chrome extension is obviously some of you probably have a web extension installed on your browser whether you're using Firefox whether you're using Chrome you probably have something installed right that adds extra functionality to your browser so for instance if you go to the Chrome Store right now you can access U block Origins right don't use this on YouTube because apparently it's violating their to just warning you right there you've also got things like volume Master something as simple as downloading an extension adding it that allows you to increase the volume of tabs past 100% okay so they can be really simple they can be tabs that record your screen for you and at the web basically do a bunch of things that you want do you want to add some extra games to your browser you can if you really felt like it do you want to add things like news extensions you can if you feel like it that's generally what an extension does now manifest V3 has been criticized for years remember this is not new this didn't just come out 3 days ago we've actually been debating this for years now and massive organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been claiming that it hurts privacy security and Innovation so to understand developers are pissed about this so again even from October 29 2021 you have developers saying frankly I'm at a loss for words I understand the benefits of service workers for websites they make sense it needs a persistent background page when these sessions are active it's a corporate security product there's simply no way to replicate Its Behavior here with manifest V3 there's no way to implement web request blocking and onof required so again you are seeing web request blocking constantly mentioned and developers are not having a good day talking about this so let's discuss what that specific web request is called now this is chrome.web request and according to Chrome it is an API that observes and analyzes traffic and to intercept block and request modifications in flight so the reason for this existing and the reason why this is so important for ad blockers is it allows ad blockers to obviously as you're loading a page observe what servers you're hitting remember the last time we talked about ad blockers and YouTube I told you about ad networks all over the world well a massive amount of AD networks belong to places like Google Amazon and Facebook how ad blockers work is in the middle of that traffic in flight they analyze all of the domains you commun communicate and they basically remove all of the ad blocking domains so all you see on the page is the website that you initially requested not advertisements from domains that aren't even related to the website now this is both a double-edged sword to understand why this is dangerous as well too according to Google this exact technology can be used for bad purposes such as stealing your information so like a lot of extensions that exist to block your ads there can be extensions that are malicious that are designed to inject ads into your page using that same API malicious advertising or they're designed to steal your credentials or possibly launch some cryptocurrency mining on your system remember when you're installing an extension on your browser you better 100% trust it or it can actually steal your information or change what you see on your web page because you gave it permissions that you shouldn't have so Google has actually used this as justification to change it to something known as a declarative net request which is a new API that they have so what Google says is there's been a lot of confusion and misconception around both the motivations and implications of this change including speculation that these changes were designed to prevent or weaken ad blockers that is absolutely not the goal in fact this change gives developers a way to create safer and more performant ad blockers they say so again the declarative Network request is an API used to block or modify Network requests by specifying declarative rules this lets extensions modify Network requests without intercepting them and viewing their content thus providing as Google says more privacy in their developer sheet okay what's insane is when you look at Google's own form 10K their SEC filings over here they do write one of the risky parts of their business such as risk factors uh we generate a significant portion of our revenues from advertising and reduced spending by advertisers a loss of Partners or new and existing technologies that block ads online and or affect our ability to customize ads could harm our business so they actually talk about how they generate 80% of their total revenue from the display of ads in the year 2021 many of our advertisers companies that distribute our products and services digital Publishers content providers can terminate their contracts with us at any time these partners may not continue to do business with us if we do not create more value such as increasing the number of users or customers new sales leads brand awareness uh for all of their systems right now and again that can only happen if less people use ad block because if they can't see the campaign maybe Google's customers may choose not to do campaigns with them going on forward now to understand this has been a bit of a I guess you could say conflicting report on one hand Google biggest service YouTube right now says ad blockers are against their to but Google developing a massive web browsing platform or at least spearheading it claims that they don't want to stop ad blockers in fact they're designing tools that make ad block better so again I wanted to get the exact idea from the people behind ad block as well too and there's been massive speculations there as well which is all we really have so for instance VX underground they say to be more specific and avoid confusion Google Chrome is transitioning to manifest V3 and while they say it improves content filtering support with that declarative net request which can be used for many ad blocking plugins Google States these changes are for API security concerns like I said people using the original the version two uh the web request for nefarious purposes Google States these again many plug-in developers Express concern you block as well that this move to version three will render their plugins useless or nonfunctional despite this feedback Google has stated that they're going to move forward irregardless they're going to go head first some speculate this is an intentional move by Google due to suspected loss of AD revenue and the thing is no one really knows okay at the end of the day Google is updating and they claim it's for security performance and privacy and again there are some merits to it like I said that original request while it helped a lot of ad blockers there were malicious extensions using those exact systems for bad purposes but you can kind of look at this situation maybe as throwing the baby out with the bath water right like in order to kill that one security flaw you end up ruining of the one of the biggest reasons that people install extensions in the first place which is to block advertising or even if it's not blocking advertising it's to increase your privacy and your control over the internet right that's one of the primary reasons so again I wanted to look further into what Google was doing so I looked into a write up from ghosty a very very popular privacy focused extension and they actually talk about their specific perspective to manifest version 3 so here they say that manifest V3 which again internet privacy is a constantly evolving domain new trackers and new tracking techniques are uncovered every day ghost re publishes the world's largest trackers and again you can read this for yourself go Google is according to these guys 75% responsible for the trackers that exist on the web after that comes Amazon by a pretty significant [ __ ] margin then it comes Facebook Cloud flare Microsoft Twitter uh comore Adobe One Trust I think AOL was somewhere put into it but yeah that's a whole different story manifest V3 so for instance they say does it protect privacy their tldr is with enforcement of V3 Google dramatically limits capabilities of browser extensions it removes access to powerful apis that allowed us to provide innovation in privacy protection being subject to those constraints we may have to reinvent the way our extensions operate intended or not manifest V3 takes Choice away from users exposes them to new threats and is ultimately hostile to you so again they definitely say that it affects them specifically because they have no access to the network layer they have to use the declarative net request instead of the web request API and of course service workers instead of background pages so again these guys have been in the game for a long time and I'm going to trust what they say uh especially when it comes to discussing privacy and matters of privacy over again Google Facebook Microsoft really any Fang organization so what they said about declarative net request is it was designed to replace web request and while it was inspired by Safari's content blocking API this design is actually less powerful than what Apple has and comparing it to the web request API it lacks the capabilities to inspect and modify requests it is uncertain whether the DNR API in its current form will outperform state-of-the-art ad blockers expressing the rules in declarative format might include hidden abstraction costs some of the optimizations that went into specialized ad blocker engines might be hard to replicate in the browser and again this all kind of goes back to exactly how U block is discussing it it's not that this isn't going to it's not that this is going to kill ad blockers the best ad blockers in the business will obviously find uh countermeasures against it but will it be as optimal as what we have now probably not see even Brave so if you don't know Brave browser it's the browser that I personally use again no sponsorships it's just what I use on a daily basis they have said Google's up upcoming manifest V3 has the potential to break many ad blockers and that was last year but manifest V3 will not prevent brave from blocking ads we built ad blocking into the browser itself and again furthermore they said we realize many of our users may still want thirdparty ad blocking extensions to give you as many options as possible Brave will support manifest V2 such as U block Origins even after Chrome stops doing so now you might be wondering wait a minute I know that brave is just Google Chrome right it shares the same base remember Chrome is based off chromium which is the open source uh Chrome project and because of that several of the biggest web browsers in the world all kind of run off the same base let's look at top web browsers according to the market share 63% of the world uses Chrome and 20% uses Safari which I assume is both on iOS and the mac and of course 6% use Edge now if you want to talk about it everything aside from Safari Edge Chrome and I guess uh actually not Opera and Firefox or Samsung maybe Samsung internet I'm not sure these browsers all run off that Chrome backend but the thing is if you can't trust Google Chrome you could possibly trust Microsoft Edge again I always say it's cringey when I see somebody downloading Chrome via Edge it's like I use Chrome to download Chrome but uh Brave is a very privacy focused browser and same for Firefox so if Google stops supporting a lot of these ad blockers Nothing Stops the average person from downloading Brave downloading Firefox importing all of their functions within minutes and just switching browsers again I feel like if this really kills ad blockers for Google Chrome Google could actually hurt themselves in the browser war and allow other competitors to actually win and rise to the Top Again ladies and gentlemen I wanted to get into it because right now at block is a pretty pretty hot topic and there's been a lot of discussion around it this is something that I do have an understanding of and I wanted to demystify Google is not destroying ad blockers but according to the ad block developers they're making it harder to operate which I guess one could say is kind of a slippery slope but ladies and gentlemen not something that surprises me if you care about your ad block and privacy maybe it's time to reconsider what browser you use ladies and gentlemen this is me mudahar if you like what you saw please like comment and subscribe dislike it if you dislike it I am out

Channel: SomeOrdinaryGamers

Views: 256,248

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Id: ygUf9TDUCVE

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 19 2023