Raymond Hill, the original author of ad blockers uBlock Origin and uMatrix, said the changes would mean his extensions could “no longer exist.” Tens of other extension owners and developers piled on to the comment, saying the change would also hinder the capabilities of their extensions-ultimately limiting the choices offered to users. Developers for uBlock, Amnesty International, Ermes Cyber Security, noScript, and others commented on how the change would largely harm the functionality of their extensions.

The proposed changes caused a firestorm on the Chromium bug tracker forums. We want to help all developers fall into the pit of success,” said Google on its blog. “Manifest v3 will entail additional platform changes that aim to create stronger security, privacy, and performance guarantees. Browsers such as Brave, Opera, Vivaldi-and after 2019, Microsoft Edge-would all impacted by the change. If implemented as is, the change would have far-reaching ramifications since many of the top browsers use the open-source Chromium engine. In October, Google proposed changes to the Chromium codebase (Manifest v3) that would introduce a new set extension standards that would cripple dozens of popular ad blocking and privacy-enhancing browser extensions. Google is embroiled in another controversy around user privacy. Meanwhile, Brave and Opera may deviate from Chrome to retain the functionality of these extensions. Proposed changes to Google Chrome, the browser of choice for 63 percent of devices, would cripple ad blockers and other privacy-enhancing extensions.

Brave browser adblock