Tech news doesn't understand ad blockers or Chrome extensions
Tech news doesn't understand ad blockers or Chrome extensions
There's a lot of reporting about YouTube's war on ad blockers and Google's new Chrome extension limits, and most of it is wrong.
What a shitty article. The entire point is "well, they're not wrong that Google is evil and clearly wants to kill adblockers, but they're MAYBE factually incorrect on some aspects", reported by the extension developers themselves (who may or may not be more knowledgeable about this than the author).
Yes, it might be the case that extensions manage to work through the limitations and still limp along. In fact, this is probably what's going to happen. The point still stands that MV3 will severely gimp adblockers and Google knows what it's doing, the factual aspects of which (that the author doesn't actually know about, by the way) are largely irrelevant.
It was the first article about this subject with explained at least a little bit how MV3 will hurt ad blockers so it was still an interesting read.
Did you read the article?
It was specifically calling out tech outlets erroneously stating that extensions must undergo an extensive review process. This wasn’t supported by the original interviews.
The new limitations placed on extensions I digress on.
It's not maybe, it's incorrect on the major aspect of every rule requiring a full update. There's enough space for no-full-update-needed blocking of most ads and swapping out filter lists. Still, it'll gimp the corners.
That image was definitely made by AI, lol.
It does say "Credit: Microsoft Designer / DALL-E 3"
“Credit: Prompt Engineer/ DALL-E 3”
However, extensions using Manifest V3 can still update some filters the old way, without a full update to the extension and a review process by Google. These are called “dynamic rules,” and starting in Chrome 121 (which arrives in January, several months before Manifest V3 becomes mandatory), up to 30,000 dynamic rules are allowed if they are simple “block,” “allow,” “allowAllRequests,” or “upgradeScheme” rules.
Maybe the filter rules required specifically for YouTube don’t work with those rule formats, I don’t know! If they’re not, then Google still allows an additional 5,000 rules with more broad capabilities. Either way, the statement “whenever an ad blocker wants to update its blocklist […] it will have to release a full update and undergo a review” is not true and can be easily disproven by checking the Chrome developer documentation, Mozilla’s documentation, or a blog post that Google published a month ago.
Perhaps my reading comprehension is off here, but I don't follow the logical jump being made here. My only guess is that the author is reading claims regarding the need for a full extension update to update block rules as meaning that the extension update & review are needed for any/all updates to the filter rules. That seems a rather pedantic and ungenerous reading to me. Especially when considering that the impact on users is the same if an update to those 5,000 rules is needed to effectively block the most frequently encountered and obtrusive ads.
Regardless, I think I'll take my info from the folks developing these tools rather than someone who admits to not understanding how ad blocking works before acting on their urge to correct "someone who's wrong on the internet." 🙄
The limit for dynamic rules is 30K (for basic block/allow) + 5K for more complex blocking, plus a minimum of 60K more for static complex rules: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/declarativeNetRequest/#property-GUARANTEED_MINIMUM_STATIC_RULES
I agree the original article/quote was probably just worded weird and not being malicious. The issue is more all of the other articles that picked up on that with the wrong interpretation, as many outlets have through the whole Manifest V3 situtation.
The rush to publish first has become very frustrating because so much tech reporting has become catering to the doom-and-gloom crowd that rush to post links on link sharing sites and social media because it gets views and updoots.
Specifically with Ars Technica, this isn’t the first article they’ve published with at least a misleading premise. The commenter base there really basks in negativity and it seems like that’s the target audience.
I kinda agree, the whole adblocking space has felt very circle-jerky lately. Tech news writers are just cashing in on the hype with low quality articles. That said, even if google is not technically locking down adblockers, this does tend to be the first step towards killing such a thing. Its kinda the unspoken implication of the whole conversation
Also, considering you are criticizing clickbait-y tech articles, you should probably stay away from clickbait.