Everybody's timeline today is Facebook's new cryptocurrency thing, and yeah, I have opinions, but so does literally every other tech blog on earth right now, so I'm going to leave that one alone. Go read somebody else's hot take. I want to talk about something smaller that's been bugging me all week: Google quietly trying to change how ad blockers work in Chrome.
This isn't brand new news exactly (the Manifest V3 proposal has been kicking around since last year) but it got a fresh round of attention after the EFF wrote about it a couple weeks back, and the developer of uBlock Origin has been posting increasingly annoyed updates about it on GitHub. The short version: Chrome extensions are getting a new API for content blocking called declarativeNetRequest, and it's supposed to replace the old webRequest API that ad blockers currently use to inspect and block network traffic as it happens. The new one works differently: you register a fixed set of rules ahead of time instead of evaluating every request live, and it caps how many rules an extension can register. Something like 30,000, last I read, which sounds like a lot until you remember EasyList alone has way more entries than that once you start combining filter lists.
Google's official reasoning is about performance and security, and honestly, some of that is probably true. The webRequest API is powerful in a way that could be (and has been) abused by malicious extensions that spy on everything you do in the browser. I get why they want to lock that down. But Google also happens to be the largest ad company on the planet, and Chrome happens to be the browser something like two out of every three people on the internet use, so forgive me for squinting a little at "trust us, this is purely technical."
I've been using uBlock Origin since forever, on every machine I own, and I don't really see myself switching that habit off. My current setup is a 2015 MacBook Pro that's held together mostly out of spite at this point (the battery swelled up last year and I still haven't gotten around to replacing it, don't @ me), and even on that thing pages load noticeably faster with blocking on. Turn it off for five minutes to test something and you remember instantly why you have it in the first place: the layout shifts, the autoplay video in the corner, the newsletter popup that covers the article before you've read one sentence of it.
So this week I did the thing I do about once a year where I reinstall Firefox and try to make it my daily driver again, just in case Chrome actually ships something that guts my ad blocker down the line. It lasted three days. Not because Firefox is bad (it's genuinely fine now, faster than it used to be, and Mozilla has said flat out they're not adopting the same restrictions) but because I have about eleven years of Chrome muscle memory and a dozen extensions I'd have to rebuild from scratch, and I just didn't feel like doing it on a Tuesday.
Also, small tangent, but E3 wrapped up last week and I'm still thinking about the Keanu Reeves moment during the Xbox briefing more than any of the actual games that got announced. "You're breathtaking" is going to be a meme until the heat death of the universe and I say that with zero complaints.
Anyway. Manifest V3 is apparently still in an "early days" phase according to Google, and they've said they're taking feedback, so maybe the rule caps loosen up before this actually ships to everyone. I'm not holding my breath. Companies that say they're listening to feedback on something that conveniently benefits their ad business have a pretty mixed track record, in my experience. I'll keep using uBlock Origin until the day it stops working, and then I guess I'll actually go finish that Firefox migration I keep starting and abandoning. Somebody remind me I said that.