Google making Chromium block adblockers?

luetage

@LonM It's not that easy, when that happens affected extensions will cease to be developed for chromium and therefore the version we would like to use will disappear from webstore. In the best case scenario this means we load a crx from some 3rd party site (github), which means no automatic updates and manual install, but the problem is there is no point in maintaining such an extension for chromium in the first place, if it doesn't work on Chrome.

luetage

@Gwen-Dragon The link to the bugtracker is in the article OP provided.

kde

Loosing uBlockOrigin would lead me the first time to using Firefox.

LonM

@luetage One could be optimistic and imagine that the users of uBO and other affected extensions would be bothered so much that they would switch from chrome to another browser.

It's a stretch of the imagination, but not totally impossible.

And besides, such extensions can continue to be built against the WebExtensions API, which would still be supported in Firefox and other browsers (so long as google doesn't mess that up too).

Nicd

Response from Vivaldi: https://twitter.com/vivaldibrowser/status/1088021233738891264

Manifest V3 seems to still be in the design stages and we expect that Chromium developers will take into account the needs of users and extension developers as they finalize this new manifest. We'll be following closely and come up with a plan based on their final decision.

RogerWilco

OK, now that I have collected myself after having become aware of this intended change by the data hog / kraken Google (Alphabet Inc.) I am asking myself:

What kind of concerted action can WE start WHERE?
Please understand this as trying to support the (Vivaldi) developers so that we don't end up with devs shrugging and saying "Well, there is nothing we can do about it.".
It needs to be well targeted and come as a massive flood of disapproval for it to stand a chance of succeeding against the Google.

The days of the old Goolge motto "Don't be evil." are long gone.
Without such extensions we'd totally be at the mercy of this -hyperbolically speaking- blood sucking, quasi monopolist in the browser market and it feels like being forced to use the internet without appropriate means to defend ourselves from the creepy tracking and exploiting us more and more and more.

Principles matter! Otherwise we'd be (turning into) sheeple.

tropo77

@Nicd "Relax, they are not shooting you, just loading a gun."

tropo77

@RogerWilco I hope Vivaldi team will be lobbying their interests and the interests of their users.
I came to Vivaldi from Chromium, but I'm going to setup Firefox just in case. I'd rather use something like Midori (which is underdeveloped) if it will support uBlock

RogerWilco

@tropo77
Unless there is an outcry loud enough by the affected users which will be heard by the Google, I am afraid this is going to move forward. It has to be that loud that it can not be ignored by the kraken.

So solely hoping that e.g. the Vivaldi team will have enough leverage (you do know the browser market share figures, don't you?!) to achieve this by themselves wouldn't reflect reality imho. Hence my question about a concerted action.

greybeard

@RogerWilco And I believe the best start is to stop using google, Search, Docs, Drive, YouTube, mail and any other of their services.
I know goo has become so ubiquitous that we can't seem to live without it.... but what did we do before goo? Somehow we managed.
It is an ongoing process for me. Downloading all my google drive back onto my computer and external drives.

domicron

@greybeard Unfortunately for me, that is impractical. I like the idea, but I'm not willing to completely ditch Google (yet, anyway).

xyzzy

I'm not going to freak out about this... yet. Google asked for feedback... and they got it... and (unsurprisingly) the technical experts didn't have any positive things to say about the proposed declarativeNetRequest API. Devlin Cronin (from the Chromium team) at least did acknowledge their concerns:

The webRequest API offers much more flexibility than the declarative version, and there are some known cases that it won't properly address. Because of this, we are certain that we will need to keep the webRequest API around. We are discussing limiting its capabilities, though these exact limitations are still being discussed (and is the main reason we are gathering feedback about what can/cannot be accomplished today with declarativeNetRequest).

So, it looks like they've conceded that webRequest needs to stay around... and that's good since the declarativeNetRequest API (in its current form) is basically next to useless. Now we'll just have to wait and see what the Chromium team decides to do next.

RogerWilco

@greybeard said in Google making Chromium block adblockers?:

@RogerWilco And I believe the best start is to stop using google, Search, Docs, Drive, YouTube, mail and any other of their services.
I know goo has become so ubiquitous that we can't seem to live without it.... but what did we do before goo? Somehow we managed.
It is an ongoing process for me. Downloading all my google drive back onto my computer and external drives.

I don't, apart from Youtube. But that one without signing into it and cookies being disabled. And obviously not without uBlock Origin and uMatrix in both Vivaldi and Firefox, next to a limited few other extensions/addons. And yes, I do look at the extension's/addon's permission requests.

Google's search engine? Rarely, very! Mostly DDG, Startpage, Searx, Metager.

Cloud? No, thanks. Not for personal data.
(Anti-) Social media? No, thanks. Not for personal data.
Closed source software? I'm trying to avoid it in as many cases as possible.
Windows 10? Until authority and sovereignty over OS is given back to users, they can keep that piece of cr*p.
... etc. pp

Dr.Flay

Google may have started as a search engine with no adverts (why people originally used it), but now it is fuelled by adverts.
They were just as good as many others until they bought go2net which provided many engines with results, thus gaining an immediate advantage over search results.

They didn't release a browser because they had the best browser, they simply wanted a better way to track and deliver advertising.

They didn't gain dominance by being the chosen browser, they paid Oracle and Adobe to bundle it with Java and Flash updates, in exactly the same way other adware and PUPs are delivered.
The install-base of Java and Flash being higher than an an individual browser meant they could quickly boast an impressive install count.

Google didn't make Chromebooks because they thought the world needed them, they simply wanted even more control over the users experience and total dominion over tracking and advertising within this portal to the googleverse.

Google provide or gain from most of the adverts online.
Tracker and advert blockers block google revenue, which is why certain blockers are already barred from google stores and only available from the home page or FOSS sources like F-Droid.
Whatever changes and concessions they make over this topic, they will continue to come up with ways to avoid people blocking their adverts, because the use of blockers is still climbing.

Catweazle

@Dr-Flay said in Google making Chromium block adblockers?:

Google may have started as a search engine with no adverts (why people originally used it), but now it is fuelled by adverts.
They were just as good as many others until they bought go2net which provided many engines with results, thus gaining an immediate advantage over search results.

They didn't release a browser because they had the best browser, they simply wanted a better way to track and deliver advertising.

They didn't gain dominance by being the chosen browser, they paid Oracle and Adobe to bundle it with Java and Flash updates, in exactly the same way other adware and PUPs are delivered.
The install-base of Java and Flash being higher than an an individual browser meant they could quickly boast an impressive install count.

Google didn't make Chromebooks because they thought the world needed them, they simply wanted even more control over the users experience and total dominion over tracking and advertising within this portal to the googleverse.

Google provide or gain from most of the adverts online.
Tracker and advert blockers block google revenue, which is why certain blockers are already barred from google stores and only available from the home page or FOSS sources like F-Droid.
Whatever changes and concessions they make over this topic, they will continue to come up with ways to avoid people blocking their adverts, because the use of blockers is still climbing.

As much as Google wants, no one is interested in the ads, in my humble opinion an obsolete business model.
The announcements of the manufacturers in their day made sense, but nowadays they virtually drown us in ads on all sides and not only in the network. This completely detracts from the advertiser's original purpose.
I like chocolate, but not when I'm forced to eat 3 kg a day.
Although Google dispenses with ads, it has other revenues to sell services to the company, web positioning, payment services, etc., to go bankrupt by adblockers.
But greed ....

teddyher95

ads are getting smarter, a new era of internet i guess

QuHno

The most hilarious thing for me was when the chromium authors asked the blocker authors to list in detail what they need to make their extensions work.

So we have literally thousands chromium developers asking some private persons to detail an API for them despite they only need to look in their store to see what the blocker authors need?

That's pathetic.

Pathduck

It's no big surprise, really. Google wants to control the web so they can push more ads and make more $$$.

I am sure young developers starting work at Google are all Idealistic and filled with Great Things To Accomplish. But once they get used to making money to buy themselves Teslas and McMansions, they drop all that and start nodding to whatever the middle-managers tell them. And Google has a lot of middle-managers.

I've always thought it was a Really Bad Idea for Vivaldi to be based on Chromium, and hence dependent on the whims of a corporate giant.

QuHno

@Pathduck Well, at the time the Vivaldi development started Mozilla was not up to par with Chromium and it was not really foreseeable that they would manage to come back again that fast. Other open source rendering engines JS, engines etc. pp, that could work together and on which one can build were not available and Chromium was at least a quite regression-free base.

Always remember that the Presto engine was the last engine that was built more or less from ground up. All other engines are older (chromium / blink is only a fork of webkit which is only a fork of KHTML, which is old), Mozilla is (despite the partial refactoring / rewrite with Rust) still Gecko and such more than 20 years old by now too - Trident (and no matter how MS calls it Edge is still Trident) is not open source, so they could not use it. So, what remains?

It is easy to say: Write your own rendering engine and all the rest that is needed to make a browser fit for today's web (hint: the rendering engine is only a small part) - but the web has become a darn complicated thing by now and the engines contain a lot of patches and workarounds to the standards to display all that kind of crap code that websites present today - and then you are not even allowed to break compatibility to older sites (at least not too much) ...
... and no, even only maintaining an API that was removed - especially such a dangerous one - is at the time probably a thing which would need a much bigger team than Vivaldi has right now - and there would be no more extensions anyway, because they would vanish from the chrome store.

Back to Chromium:

I can understand why they want to get rid of the webRequest API because it is a quite open and dangerous API and because it is a blocking API (blocking this time meaning it blocks execution in the JS thread), which can and does stall the whole browser if something goes wrong.

The declarative web request API does not have that problem that much, but as it runs inside of the browser instead of the JS part, it can react faster and is indeed much safer to use and to check - simply because you have to declare what you want to do from the beginning and can not rewrite the stuff on the fly - but it comes at another cost too:
One is that it is impossible to do some things that the "normal" web request API can do. The normal web request API can not only block stuff (now meaning web blocking) but can be put in productive use for requesting, rewriting and general communication too, not only for good things but for malware too. There were enough examples in the past where it was abused by Extensions for really evil stuff.

As I see it from the discussions in the chromium lists it seems they don't want to kill off the normal web request API completely but cut out some of the dangerous parts. I only hope they don't overdo it, because the declarative web request API is in no way capable to do the same stuff.

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idimitro

@Pathduck
I am very happy that Vivaldi is Chromium based. Coming from Pale Moon (firefox with the old extensions support) Chromium with light customization is really powerful combination.
What worries me with this decision is that Vivaldi should either follow Google and limit the adBlocker functionality or fork. I don't think forking is sustainable and/or sustainable.