Google making Chromium block adblockers?

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.

</end-text-flood>

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.

abm0

I don't know what everyone's getting worked up about, uBlock isn't the only ad blocker in the universe. I use AdBlock Plus and I'm fine with the results, and an article in The Register about the Chromium change said AdBlock Plus will be able to stay mostly functional with some tweaks. So I'm not scared and certainly not planning to move away from Vivaldi just because of the news I've seen so far.

xyzzy

@abm0 One of the AdBlock Plus developers says otherwise:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-extensions/veJy9uAwS00/CxEIxy_OGgAJ
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-extensions/veJy9uAwS00/a9znezCvDQAJ

an article in The Register about the Chromium change said AdBlock Plus will be able to stay mostly functional with some tweaks.

However, as I said in a previous comment, the Manifest V3 spec has not been finalized as of yet. We'll have to wait and see what Google ultimately decides to do. Fortunately, it doesn't look like they'll be getting rid of the webRequest API.

Russtopia

The best solution to avoid being held hostage to the whims of Google/Alphabet and the Chromium dev team is to fork. Vivaldi and all other browsers based on Chromium need to announce an alliance to maintain a fork, and an alternate app store, and the browser ecosystem would benefit for having choice assured.

Does no one remember the phrase ".. cut off their air supply?" This could be what Google wants to do to ad blockers.

I love Vivaldi, but it's been a very dangerous trend over recent years, this uptake of the same core engine by nearly every vendor. It's time to split things out again as an insurance policy.

I'd be personally willing to pay a few bucks a year directly to a browser vendor that would earmark those funds directly to keeping a more consumer-friendly fork of Chromium up to date to prevent another browser monoculture like the bad old days of IE.

xyzzy

@nl255 That's a rather scary solution. For all our sakes, I hope it doesn't come to that.

greybeard

@MrGrimm said in Google making Chromium block adblockers?:

@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.

EXACTLY. for the pc side of things it's pretty easy to avoid google and get more relevant search results. for those scared for their Android devices i've done some research and other than keeping the Android OS you can completely ungoogle you phone or tablet and lose non of your functionality. there are plenty of alternatives out there that do ONLY what they say and nothing else. no selling the data, no letting others see the data.

Agreed. I never use google. If just browsing, I find Bing to give more relevant results. I also have specially configured search engines for more detailed work.
For my Android Tablet, I use a Kindle Fire, already de-googled for the most part.

Gaëlle

@Nicd thanks for sharing these insights. In case you want to follow the discussion happening with chromium (as we do), check the following links:

xyzzy

FYI, the Chromium team has officially backtracked on some of the changes that they proposed in their initial Manifest V3 draft and have posted a response to the backlash that they received from users and extension developers. I suspect that extension developers will still be upset, and it will be interesting to see how Google responds to ongoing feedback from the community. However, keep in mind that Manifest V3 is still a work-in-progress and the Chromium team have not posted any new/revised drafts as of yet.

zakius

for this, and many other issues, the best solution would be supporting slightly less broken WebExtensions alongside Chromium extensions
but even these have some issues that have to be addressed properly, though it's out of scope for this topic

bhtooefr

Looks like the backtracking has been itself backtracked on partially - paid enterprise users will be able to use the old APIs, free users won't be.

I hope Vivaldi implements the paid enterprise version of the API...

MattSolo45

can add add-ons from firefox by creating an add-in that translates the structure of add-ons from firefox to chromium. Something in the shape of an add-on to the opera with the possibility of adding additions from the chrome web store. I know this would be more difficult but in the face of dictating by Google, the conditions of Vivaldi must adapt or create a browser on a new engine or somehow regain presto.

LonM

@MattSolo45 said in Google making Chromium block adblockers?:

can add add-ons from firefox by creating an add-in that translates the structure of add-ons from firefox to chromium.

The web extension format used by modern firefox is largely compatible with vivaldi already. The only thing that's missing is sidebar API support.

ficciones

As a user who flips back and forth between Vivaldi and Firefox, and finds them both excellent, I'd be happy to see Vivaldi move towards leveraging the Firefox code base and rendering engine. They're just getting Webrender ready for full scale release so this is not a bad time to think about switching.

Steffie

I admit that my naive pollyanna mind simply cannot grasp that evilcorp would really truly go ahead & do this crazy thing. It just seems so utterly bizarre.

MattSolo45

@Gwen-Dragon So let's create a post for support for firefox add-ins as an alternative to the user. It would be best to create a proprietary Web Store from Vivaldi where the user will have a choice from whom the add-on will be installed either from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox, and of course it will link to the right side of the add-on and maybe add the third choice directly from the Vivaldi store. Who is behind? :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_cold_sweat:

Pesala

@raed I don't use an ad-blocking extension, and never have. Dodgy sites are often full of ads, so their presence is a red flag to go elsewhere.

Pesala

@raed Those sites are often those that infect visitors with malware or sell your browsing history to advertisers. I don't see that as a restriction. YMMV.

Pesala

@raed You can subscribe to such legitimate sites to avoid the ads.