Google Says That It Isn't Killing Ad Blockers, What's The Impact?

The search giant said that it’s not trying to kill ad blockers, according to a Wednesday blog post that Google posted as a response to criticism towards its plan to enhance extensions better in Chrome.

The post went on Google Security Blog, in which Devlin Cronin wrote that the company is not preventing users from blocking ads or the development of ad blockers. They, in fact, want to offer help for developers with writing extensions in a manner that secures user privacy.

In October last year, the company revealed its broad plan of improvement for Chrome extensions. Then, this January, it was noticed by developers that Manifest v3, a part of this plan, was able to hurt blockers. Google designed Manifest v3 to improve the performance of Chrome extensions; however, a part of it limits the extensions’ ability to examine aspects of sites. According to some developers, this will hurt their privacy and ad blocking extensions.

As per the tech giant, Simeon Vincent said in a Chromium Blog post:

In the debate, there are arguments that ad blockers used to determine what to display and what to screen. The current design of Chrome allows many of the rules, which means an ad blocker is able to check whether or not a website has elements coming from a list including ad-related internet addresses. With the new approach, this action will be limited to 30,000 rules at most; as a result, ad blockers as well as other extensions can’t face hurdles in using those lists.

Also on Wednesday, Google stated that the limit of rules will go up to 150,000 max. In May, the company also revealed its intention to exempt enterprise users.

In its posts, Google stressed that it’s still working on Manifest v3, which will work with developers. Nevertheless, it also said it feels right to let users limit how much sensitive info shared with third parties while letting them curate browsing experience on their own.