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Google Backtracks on Chrome Modifications That Would Have Crippled Ad Blockers (zdnet.com) 112

Posted by msmash 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.
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Google Backtracks on Chrome Modifications That Would Have Crippled Ad Blockers More

Google Backtracks on Chrome Modifications That Would Have Crippled Ad Blockers

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  • Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:07AM (#58134508)

    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:09AM (#58134520)

      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:11AM (#58134530)
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:33AM (#58134624)

        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

          by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @11:36AM (#58134876)

          >"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 (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            At the time the drama was starting for this new standard (which OF COURSE would have removed backwards compatibility with ublock origin), firefox openly considered a similar step, to keep pace with google.

            Firefox is a risk too, just a smaller one.

        • But Microsoft said that Mozilla is wasting their time, and that they should give up their silly 'own browser' stuff and just reskin Chromium like Microsoft is doing!

          I mean, if Microsoft said it, it can't be wrong!

          (Wow, I can't believe I managed to type all that with a straight face...)

        • I use a browser called Adblock Browser on Android, which is based on Firefox. I'm using it to post this right now.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by caseih ( 160668 )

            I just use normal firefox on Android, with the ublock origin add-on. And also ghostery. Android on Firefox is actually really good.

            And another essential add-on for mobile browsers is a tap to reflow column add-on. I have a simple one in firefox that works well enough. Many mobile sites are awful compared to the desktop sites (slashdot I'm looking at you), so being able to zoom in on some text for a normal website and reflow it is wonderful. I never quite figured out why Google removed that feature from

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by trawg ( 308495 )

          Huh. This post kind of explains why Microsoft opted for Chrome for their next browser engine instead of Firefox. They're actually probably better off with a Chrome-lead monoculture for this reason.

          The more resources they can starve from Mozilla, the more powerful a position they will be in in terms of being able to dictate the terms of the browser-based advertising market.

        • But why do they let it on youtube? Google could blend the ad seemlessly into the video. Not sure when they will do it; until then we can enjoy youtube ad free with ad-blocker. I"m sure even firefox or other software can't solve that problem that easily.

      • 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.

        Maybe someday, if Google starts struggling to grow revenues and profits. The situation now is what it's been for pretty much the whole life of the company, that Google has a money-printing machine so effective that the bottom line rarely figures in decisions made by most engineers building the products (and most of these decisions are made by the engineers, not by management)... and even from the upper management's perspective it's considered far more important to make products that people want to use than

        • Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Informative)

          by theweatherelectric ( 2007596 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @01:22PM (#58135410)

          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 [whotracks.me].

          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 [ghacks.net] for better performance, but Chrome does not allow this yet.

          • Not just that - even if adblockers and scriptblockers were quite a bit less performant, it would still provide a faster browsing experience than letting some advertising network’s 500kb of JavaScript run rampant.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          The rest of us can only go by what Google releases publicly. And what was released publicly was that they were removing an essential API for ad blockers and replacing it with nothing at all useful.

          Now that the excuse has been publicly debunked with actual measurements, they are reversing that decision.

          The size of the static list was never the point of controversy. Even an infinite static list would be less useful than the current API.

          I agree that we can't prove a particular intent form what we see, we can o

      • Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:4, Insightful)

        by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @04:51PM (#58136316)

        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.

    • Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cheesybagel ( 670288 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:20AM (#58134564)

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

      • Some of my boxes still have them in the hosts file :)

        Oh, doubleclick? I love them so much, I love them like localhost. ;)

    • Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jahta ( 1141213 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:47AM (#58134676)

      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 [bbc.com] (for example ~2.5 seconds for Wordpress WordAds), you are probably still coming out ahead by using a blocker.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

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

      You're right, but you're missing the point.

      Google makes 60+ Billion dollars a year. Nearly all of it from advertising. This is only the beginning. Google is not simply going to give up. They aren't just going to say "Oh, OK, we were wrong, performance isn't that bad after all. Never mind."

      No, I guarantee they are hard at work trying to figure out a new excuse to kill off ad blocking.

    • It was never an issue of performance. That was just an excuse that Google expected would be hard to prove otherwise. As you say, it is a very shaky excuse too, when add-ons are optional. Google is #1 in the ad space and they make their money from that, not from Chrome directly. Controlling the browser market does help them maximize their ad revenue and disallowing Ad-blockers they don't control it is one way. As they are trying to not alienate people too much, once this excuse was shot down they backtracked

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by swillden ( 191260 )

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

      It should be pointed out that the new API being proposed will actually make adblocking more efficient. The new API allows extensions to configure Chrome with a set of rules that specify what URLs to block. These rules would be evaluated by Chrome, in native code. In contrast, the method currently used by adblockers is an API that simply calls a snippet of extension-provided Javascript on each network request. While this can be fast if the adblock extension author codes it well, it clearly will never be a

      • Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday February 17, 2019 @11:50AM (#58134962) Homepage Journal

        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @12:02PM (#58135032) Homepage Journal

        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.

      • It should be pointed out that the new API being proposed will actually make adblocking more efficient.

        But adblockers aren't inefficient. If Chrome's interested in efficiency then it should enable WebAssembly for add-ons, like Firefox does [ghacks.net].

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        And of course, nobody could ever possibly want to use a general purpose API for a general purpose that may or may not be ad blocking.

        The rule list size limit is a bit of a red herring, that's not the worst feature of the new API. The new API is a static list. Point out the error if I'm wrong, but it certainly looks like the rule list is loaded at browser startup and I see no API for updating it. No more "allow this for this site" or "don't allow this anymore" etc. No more OK for this but not with cookies.

    • for the moment i am using chromium, but if a new version was released that broke adblocker extensions i would abandon chromium in a second, i already have all my bookmarks and passwords exported where i can use them in another browser, and i do have firefox kept updated and sitting on standby just in case chromium turns on me (dont keep your eggs in one basket)

      • i would abandon chromium in a second

        Then you should abandon Chromium now. The fact that you use it (or any Chrome based browser) now is what emboldens Google to do this sort of thing in the first place.

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

      Yup.

      Frankly, until companies can prevent malicious ads from being broadcast over their networks, I'll use an ad blocker. Which means for that reason alone I'll be running an ad blocker forever.

      But it's not just the potential for malicious adware to wreck your PC that I hate. Ads take up a lot of page space, they increase load times, they increase bandwidth usage, and they're a fucking distraction.

  • has to ad.
    The ads still get in.

    • Re:An ad company (Score:4, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:30AM (#58134612) Homepage Journal

      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?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Unskippable ads are at the discretion of the person who uploaded the video (or the company that stole it with a bogus copyright claim). Google offers it because some uploaders want it, but no-one is forced to use it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hjf ( 703092 )

          As a user I can't choose if I want to see unskippable ads or not though.

          • I'm a user, and I choose not to see any of the ads. They're not skipable because I never saw them in the first place.

  • What backtracking? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:19AM (#58134560)

    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.

  • We still need to fight against Chrome (Score:3)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:23AM (#58134580)
    I have warned in several posts that the current browser monoculture is bad for the web. Mo$illa is too closely connected with Google and browsers like Pale Moon and Waterfox also have their own paid deals. Until we have a truly independent browser engine we will be at the mercy of ads which are a form of DRM.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      An ad company making the ad ready OS and the ad supporting crypto.
      Its in the OS, crypto, browser. Extensions cant keep protecting at that level of support for ads.

    • ads which are a form of DRM.

      How so? This is a very interesting claim. I'm not saying it's false, just that I don't see the connection.

  • Adblockers are performance enhancers (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'll take that sub milisecond delay to prevent the ad that takes much longer.

  • Mistake (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:37AM (#58134640) Journal

    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.

    • The world is not black and white. Just because this wasn't some engineering mistake, doesn't automatically make it some huge conspiracy. The reality was probably somewhere in the middle:

      Engineer proposes something, likely nothing to do with ads in the first place, something aligns well with Google's business model and how it would block adblockers so it gets fast tracked to production, someone realises the backlash may cost market share and they roll it all back.

  • Google wants Ads (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They are the ADVERTISMENT COMPANY. Fuck you slashdot, i'll scream as much as i want, cause they deserve it.

    we can't use caps to convey what we mean ?? GO FUCK YOURSELF SLASHDOT.! !!!!!!!

  • Too late. (Score:3)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @10:56AM (#58134708)

    I already switched to Firefox.

    • I am in awe of how successful Google shills were in pushing this "google backtracks" message by citing article clearly stating V3 proposal is full steam ahead and NOTHING is being changed apart from maybe considering bigger static list ...

  • About Time For A Monopoly Investigation (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Sunday February 17, 2019 @03:31PM (#58135952) Homepage Journal
    The shit Microsoft and IBM did seems a lot less bad than what Google's been up to recently. Perhaps it's time for a FTC inquiry?

    • Possibly, but I think you'll need to cite examples other than this.

      This being Google trying to sandbox extensions a little more at the cost of ad-blockers, then backtracking.
      While there was a report that showed blockers having little negative effect (and mostly overall positive effect) Google's announcement of winding their changes back happened only hours later. I doubt their internal technical strategy can pivot that quickly so I assume the strategy had already changed but this accelerated their announcem

  • I refuse to leave Chrome 70 and put in a hack to disable Google update until that happens.

    Current Chrome is unusable and migraine inducing. They need to fire these kids with their flat phone interfaces. I can't even see which tab is which now on my monitors

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