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

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

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.

5 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Even if the performance was bad by fred6666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Even if the performance was bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Even if the performance was bad by olsmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Even if the performance was bad by Jahta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Mistake by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    Better known as 318230.