Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/06/chrome_mv3_no_harm_ad_blocking/

by Brajeshwar • 6 months ago

26 14 6 months ago

"The research by Lukic and Papadopoulos, independently funded and unaffiliated with Google or vendors of privacy tools, found not only that MV3 and MV2 ad blocking and anti-tracking extensions are equally effective, but that MV3 improved anti-tracking by blocking 1.8 more tracking scripts per website on average than the MV2 extensions."

Turns out it's hard to prevent users from customizing how they interact with your website unless you go pure image rendering.

kgwxd• 6 months ago

If I were Google, I'd pay someone to release this "research". Oh geez, you got us power users. You really stuck it to us.

bitpush• 6 months ago

Is it possible that the breathless reporting of MV3 is gonna kill adblocking, was .. incorrect?

wolvoleo3• 6 months ago

Not really. There's still stuff it can't do. Apparently YouTube ads are harder to block in chrome now. And really everything a MV3 blocker can do a MV2 can too. Additionally, someone can make a MV3 and reinstate the API that Google dropped from it.

Besides, I use ublock origin also for my own personal block list. I don't just block ads but also the sites' own big image highlight blocks, videos and other crap. So the sites I visit all pretty much look like the hacker news front page, just text and none of the marketing crap.

I don't think this can be done in MV3 blockers because they include the lists.

jmercouris• 6 months ago

MV3 has made it significantly harder. Good luck blocking YouTube ads, for example.

thisislife2• 6 months ago

Call me cynical, but from the comments online, I think this research is being used for propaganda marketing to push for MV3 adoption - to assuage the lay users that all the hue and cry is for nothing and they shouldn't abandon Chrome, and to provide an excuse for other browsers holding out to embrace MV3 completely. (Don't be surprised if Firefox suddenly changes its mind and decides to fully embrace MV3 and drop MV2).

Here is the actual research - Privacy vs. Profit: The Impact of Google's Manifest Version 3 (MV3) Update on Ad Blocker Effectiveness - https://arxiv.org/html/2503.01000v2

This study comes with several limitations ... this study faces limitations related to the dynamic behavior of websites and extensions ... Second, consistent with previous research, the automated browser-based experiment does not replicate all aspects of user interactions, such as visiting sub-pages of a website’s homepage, which introduce different trackers than the website’s homepage ... Third, the study explores ad blocker effectiveness using a European IP address and default ad blocker settings on a select sample of websites, focusing on display ads. As a result, the web’s long tail is under-represented. Consequently, we cannot rule out that MV3’s 30,000-rule limit could disproportionately affect less popular websites that rely on rarely used rule ... Because EU traffic often involves GDPR-driven website changes that reduce third-party activity irrespective of consent, baseline ad and tracker counts are lower ... Fourth, our study cannot exclude that any future changes to the Chrome extension ecosystem might hinder ad blocker effectiveness, as feared by some ad blocker providers ...

Note that the intent of this study was to determine if MV3 ad-blockers are as effective as MV2 based ad-blockers. Nobody has said that MV3 cannot be used to block ads or trackers. What they have always criticised is that it makes it harder to do so than MV2, and the difficulty of implementing dynamic filtering with it gives the advertisers an upper hand over adblockers.

When the ad-block extension developers tell you that MV3 cripples their extension and makes it harder to block ads and trackers in your browser, who are you going to believe - the experts at blocking ads and trackers or a corporate who makes its money from data harvesting and online advertising and has a real incentive to cripple ad-blocking on browsers?

blibble• 6 months ago

What they have always criticised is that it makes it harder to do so than MV2, and the difficulty of implementing dynamic filtering with it gives the advertisers an upper hand over adblockers.

it's more than this

the filter list is now bundled in extension, which has to be approved by Google

so they're now the gatekeepers of the filter list updates

so to stop youtube adblockers, all they have to do is:

    - design a countermeasure
    - deploy it
    - don't approve updates until the next countermeasure is ready

and repeat

you'd never be able to block a youtube ad again

wolvoleo3• 6 months ago

Don't be surprised if Firefox suddenly changes its mind and decides to fully embrace MV3 and drop MV2

Firefox could also deploy MV3 with the new restrictions removed of course.

But Firefox is a bit of an unknown now that they're cuddling up to the ad industry and coming up with their privacy preserving attribution stuff. This is a problem for me because privacy isn't the only issue with ads. I don't believe in a win-win for the ad sponsored web.

avallach• 6 months ago

If I wanted to make ad blocking hard, I'd first keep serving an easily blockable ad system while getting everyone used to extension API which only can block such simple systems. Only once it is fully adopted, I could switch to hard to block system.

Doing that in the opposite order would obviously harm adoption of my crippled extension API and push users to competing browsers which kept supporting the advanced API.

general1465• 6 months ago

But that assumes that you are controlling API and ad system as well or you are able to coordinate those two. I am not sure if even Google is able to do that despite owning both.

BatFastard• 6 months ago

anyone have a suggestion for a good ad blocker for chrome?

tim333• 6 months ago

uBlock origin lite seems to work ok for me.

I also use SponsorBlock https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo...

Legend2440• 6 months ago

This is my experience as well. I just switched to the new version of uBlock and still don't see any ads. Big nothingburger IMO.

wolvoleo3• 6 months ago

Ads would be pretty hard to block if sites just served them from their own domain. But there's two greed related reasons why that won't happen: the adsellers lose their metrics in terms of impression rate so they have to trust the sites. And the other one is that cross site tracking would stop working so they'd lose a lot of surveillance data to sell.

So really the industry gets what it wants. They want their cake and eat it. That means they leave the Achilles heel open.

And those of us really serious about adblocking can use a real browser like Firefox with the real ublock. It's fine like this for me. I consider paywalls a bigger problem now. Especially because addons like bypass-paywalls-clean have moved to really obscure sites due to dcma takedown crap.

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

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