Chrome’s next weapon in the War on Ad Blockers: Slower extension updates

Ron Amadeo writing for Ars Technica

Google’s first attack on ad blockers is blowing up the “WebRequest API”—the primary API that ad blockers use—and replacing it with a more limited filtering API that Google has more control over. The new declarativeNetRequest API now has extensions ask Chrome to block a network request on their behalf, features arbitrary limits on the number of filtering rules, and puts limits on how effective individual rules can be.

I always thought it was weird how many people are willing to use a browser from an advertising company. This change probably won’t change much.

Adblockers are immensely useful though. Put aside the fact that most ads are garbage, adblockers can save you bandwidth and battery, and have been proven to block malware that is increasingly being served by various ad networks, including Google’s.

On the Mac/iOS I use Safari for my web browsing and if you can, I’d recommend that you do too. For those on Windows, or those that need a Chrome compatible browser, I’d recommend Vivaldi who has said they’ll continue to support adblocking to the extent that they can.