Google still on track to limit ad-blockers in Chrome

[harlan4096]

Google is still on track to limit the effectiveness of ad-blocker extensions in the company's Chrome web browser by making changes to APIs available to Chrome extensions.

The company revealed plans to publish a new manifest for extensions, called Extension Manifest V3, that defines the core functionality of browser extensions for the Chrome browser.

One of the planned changes impacts content blockers. Without going into details: Google plans to remove an API that is used by content blockers currently to filter content on the Internet. There will be a replacement for the current API that content blockers may use instead to continue blocking web content but it will limit the number of filters that content blockers may load at any given time.

Google plans to limit the number of rules that an extension can specify to 30,000 entries, and the number of dynamic rules to 5000 entries. EasyList alone, a list of blocking filters used by many content blockers, has over 75,000 rules currently. The change will impact the effectiveness of ad-blockers on Chrome unless extension developers find a way to compress the list, find ways around the limit, or bring it down to the 30,000 mark using other ways.

Google has stated in the past that the values are not set in stone and that it may raise the values before the new Manifest lands. Chrome engineers added support for dynamic rules recently and Google has stated that webRequest API blocking capabilities will remain available to Enterprise customers but not for non-Enterprise customers.

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