Google Backtracks on Chrome Modifications That Would Have Crippled Ad Blockers (zdnet.com)

Google has changed its stance on upcoming Chrome Manifest V3 changes as benchmark shows they lied about performance hit. Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: A study analyzing the performance of Chrome ad blocker extensions published on Friday has proven wrong claims made by Google developers last month, when a controversy broke out surrounding their decision to modify the Chrome browser in such a way that would have eventually killed off ad blockers and many other extensions. The study, carried out by the team behind the Ghostery ad blocker, found that ad blockers had sub-millisecond impact on Chrome's network requests that could hardly be called a performance hit. Hours after the Ghostery team published its study and benchmark results, the Chrome team backtracked on their planned modifications. At the root of Ghostery's benchmark into ad blocker performance stands Manifest V3, a new standard for developing Chrome extensions that Google announced last October.

Comments

Even if the performance was bad

[fred6666]

I'd still want an ad blocker. It's optional anyways. Don't like the performance? Don't install the extension.

Re:Even if the performance was bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if the performance was good, google still does not want you to use an adblocker (at least not one they dont control)...

Re:Even if the performance was bad

[olsmeister]

Why do we have a company whose main business is selling ads controlling the software that either allows the ads to be blocked or not be blocked? Seems like an enormous conflict of interest. This only will end one way if Google is in charge... ultimately ad blockers will go away, one way or another. They just need to figure out the way to accomplish it that causes the smallest uproar.

Re:Even if the performance was bad

[cheesybagel]

Remember Doubleclick.com? The lovely people behind those "Punch the Monkey" animated ads a couple decades ago? Guess who bought them.

Re:Even if the performance was bad

[fred6666]

If they banned ad blockers everybody would move to Firefox. They can't afford that. Somehow on Android, people don't move to Firefox so they still don't allow ad blockers in their browser.

Re:Even if the performance was bad

[Jahta]

I'd still want an ad blocker. It's optional anyways. Don't like the performance? Don't install the extension.

Well, given that ads typically increase page load time significantly (for example ~2.5 seconds for Wordpress WordAds), you are probably still coming out ahead by using a blocker.

Re:Even if the performance was bad

[markdavis]

>"If they banned ad blockers everybody would move to Firefox. They can't afford that."

I was about to post the same thing.

THANK YOU, FIREFOX

Whether you use it or not, the fact that it exists most certainly prevents a complete takeover by Google and the resulting lack of freedom. And my suggestion is, if you value freedom, privacy, open standards, and choice, to use Firefox whenever possible, and encourage others to do so, also. The days of Chrome being "much faster" or "better" on the desktop [MS-Windows, Linux, MacOS] are long since gone.

>"Somehow on Android, people don't move to Firefox so they still don't allow ad blockers in their [Chrome] browser [on Android]."

I also use it on Android, even though on Google's platform it seems to have an unfair performance disadvantage (I wonder why that is).

Re:Even if the performance was bad

[drinkypoo]

Clearly, huge rule lists will be slower than small rule lists. Cronin says the rule list size limit will be increased, though there will still be a limit.

There's no technical reason why there has to be a limit that users will run into. It's their problem if the browser gets slower, not google's. I call shenanigans.

Re:Even if the performance was bad

[AmiMoJo]

The other issue was that the Chrome native method was simpler than many ad-blockers allow for. It was a simple rule matching engine, where as something like uBlock is much more complex and has many other anti-ad and anti-tracking features. Even relatively simple stuff like "only block if matching a 3rd party object" is very useful for avoiding breakage.

Re:Even if the performance was bad

[theweatherelectric]

Really, the goal here seems to be to make adblocking safer and more efficient, better for users, not to kill it.

That presupposes that adblockers are inefficient now. But, as linked to in the summary, simple measurements show that isn't true.

And I use an adblocker, advise everyone I know to use adblockers, and would switch to a different browser if Chrome were to block adblockers.

Adblockers work better in Firefox. You should advise everyone to switch to Firefox now instead of waiting. uBlock Origin uses WebAssembly in Firefox for better performance, but Chrome does not allow this yet.

Re: Even if the performance was bad

[lister king of smeg]

Already been done. Get yourself some Brave Browser and enjoy.

Just because I want a independent browser does not mean I want one with associated shady micro transaction processor and cryptocurrency bolted on thank-you very much. I think I will stick with Firefox for a truly independent browser that at least tries to respect my privacy between ill-conceived attempts by their corporate overlords to shoot themselves in the foot.

Re:Even if the performance was bad

[93 Escort Wagon]

This only will end one way if Google is in charge... ultimately ad blockers will go away, one way or another. They just need to figure out the way to accomplish it that causes the smallest uproar.

Per past experience, I expect we’ll see a series of small, under-the-radar moves over the next 18-24 months which will basically accomplish the same thing. They’ll (rightly) assume inertia will keep the vast majority of users on their platform.

What backtracking?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only commitment given by Google is to keep the observational API, but that's not the API adblockers care about! Adblockers need the blocking API, and there's no commitment to keep it by Google. Most likely Google will still remove it later, when the heat is off and people moved on to the next outrage.

Re:An ad company

[drinkypoo]

Remember when Google primarily had text ads? Not even pepperidge farms remembers, their products are pure garbage now. They cheaped them out so much in content without lowering the price, in pursuit of profit, that they're no longer worth buying.

Sadly, many people still make purchases without any consideration for whether they're getting anything for their money. The ad on heavy rotation right now on YouTube is for some shitty horror movie sequel. I see this ad because we use a fire tv stick, obviously I block such things on my PC. Some ads still sneak through occasionally, so if I actually want to watch something without interruption I YouTube-dl it first. But back to the ad. How much have they spent to ensure that I see their unskippable ad 20 times a day? That kind of entrainment might work on toddlers, but it's alienating to everyone else. Even horror movie devotees must get tired of it after the tenth time or so. I, for one, don't want to hear a woman screaming in terror right before I watch a comedy clip, or some daily show. That puts me off right quick.

Did an unskippable ad ever increase revenue?

Mistake

[Dan East]

I guess someone at Google made an honest mistake. Now if we lived in some alternate universe, one in which Google made, say, $116.3 billion dollars in 2018 selling ads primarily viewed through web browsers, then the skeptic in me might think shenanigans were afoot. But since we don't live in that universe, we can have peace of mind that this was purely an error by an overzealous software engineer trying to make browsers faster. Because, you know, there is absolutely no performance impact (CPU, rendering time, network bandwidth) caused by loading multiple advertisements on every web page that stream video. Anyone with a modicum of common sense would realize that blocking those ads in the first place would surely require far more resources than loading and rendering them. So I can totally see how this honest mistake was made.

Electron is Chromium

[tepples]

So don't use Chrome. Problem solved.

Good luck with that. Native applications built with Electron, such as Discord, Slack, Skype, Atom, and Visual Studio Code, all bundle a copy of Chromium. This is Google Chrome with a handful of non-free parts cut out, mostly related to video DRM and Adobe Flash Player. The use of Chromium in Electron encourages development of web applications that work only with Chromium. For example, the owner of a Discord server can upload images to that server for use as emoji, but clicking the upload button does absolutely nothing in Firefox. This encourages Firefox users to switch to Google Chrome (on Windows or macOS) or Chromium (on X11/Linux) to make web applications work again.

In addition, on a phone or tablet running Android 4 or later, Google Chrome has a RAM use advantage over Firefox because its HTML engine is always loaded. This is analogous to IE's advantage on Windows 98 through 8.1.