"I think they've been trying to give the impression that they’re working with the developer community, when in fact they’re pretty entrenched in what they want to do," says Jeremy Tillman, president of the privacy and security-focused ad blocker Ghostery. And the company now blocks about 1,800 malicious uploads a month, before they are ever offered to users.Īd blocker developers say that while they are frustrated by the extra costs to accommodate the API change, their real concern is that the changes may not serve users in the way Google says. The company adds that the rate of malicious Chrome extension installations is down 89 percent since early 2018. Though there may be an adjustment period for the new API, Google says the changes it has been making to Chrome extensions overall have resulted in meaningful and important improvements in user security and privacy. Instead, we want to help developers, including content blockers, write extensions in a way that protects users’ privacy." "We are not preventing the development of ad blockers or stopping users from blocking ads. "This has been a controversial change since the Web Request API is used by many popular extensions, including ad blockers," Google wrote in a blog post shared with WIRED on Wednesday. But ad blocker developers argue the new arrangement will hinder their ability to quickly and correctly identify ads, without necessarily providing the benefits touted by Google. Its new iteration, the company says, will better protects users' data and help ad blockers work more more efficiently. Ad blockers rely on that API to comb your browsing data and look for ads.
And the pending transition has set up a showdown between Google, makers of ad blocking software, and even other browsers.Īt the heart of the debate is a new application programing interface, known as the Declarative Net Request API, that Google will offer in place of an existing mechanism called the Web Request API. But one proposed change related to this effort threatens to hobble ad blocking extensions. Over the past 18 months, Google has pushed to improve Chrome extension security-a welcome goal given the sketchy morass of extensions that have been out there for years.
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