When in June 2024 Google began the transition to Manifest v3a possibility arose on the horizon: the disappearance of ad blockers. The Mountain View-based company touted this architecture as more secure and efficient, but along the way it limited the effectiveness of adblockers. However, it would make sense: Google’s main business it’s advertising.
It works even better blocking ads. An independent study by Goethe University Frankfurt has revealed that, contrary to what was initially thought, Chrome’s new architecture does not reduce the effectiveness of ad blocking and privacy extensions. There is no statistically significant reduction in ad blocking. In short, the performance of Chrome’s MV3 architecture is more or less similar to MV2. But it also brings advantages in fluidity and tracker blocking.
Why is it important. To begin with, because this finding is independent: it is not a press release from Google, which has an obvious conflict of interest, but an academic study reviewed by Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Furthermore, because it denies that MV3 is a tool designed exclusively to protect Google’s advertising business model by disabling adblockers.
Finally, leave the ball in the court of users: the difference between using a blocker in Chrome or Firefox is barely perceptible, so if this is a differential criterion, in this sense there is practically equal conditions.
How Manifest V3 and V2 worked. The old standard allowed extensions to stop network traffic, examine it, and decide whether or not to block it in real time. It was powerful, but it could slow down browsing, and one malicious extension could read all your traffic. The new standard no longer intercepts traffic directly, but rather gives the browser a list of rules and it is Chrome that executes the blocking, which leads to improvements in performance and privacy (against third parties), but reduces flexibility.
Survival tricks. Going from asking for permission to giving a list of rules seemed like a handicap at first, and yet the blockers have emerged stronger overall for three reasons:
- The adaptability of blocking extensions (actually, of the dev team behind it), translating their complex filters into the format required by Google without losing effectiveness.
- Blockers are the brain and the browser is the execution arm: now it’s the browser that does the dirty processing work, resulting in faster and smoother execution of ad blocking.
- The new rules are stricter on spies. The study discovered that MV3 blocks even better those scripts that try to collect data in the background. Now the system is more rigid and that in terms of security makes it more difficult to circumvent.
But it’s not perfect. However, the study points out the fine print of this change, such as the limit of rules that MV3 imposes, or the lack of dynamism when updating its rule book. Likewise, and although it is fluid at blocking ads, they did not measure whether it loads websites faster than MV2. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that this is a photo from today and that Google has the power to modify the limitations of the API, thus modifying these results.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings