Clearly, Google is serious about trying to oust ad blockers from its browser, or at least those extensions with fuller (V2) levels of functionality. One of the crucial twists with V3 is that it prevents the use of remotely hosted code – as a security measure – but this also means ad blockers can’t update their filter lists without going through Google’s review process. What does that mean? Way slower updates for said filters, which hampers the ability of the ad-blocking extension to keep up with the necessary changes to stay effective.
(This isn’t just about browsers, either, as the war on advert dodgers extends to YouTube, too, as we’ve seen in recent months).
At any rate, Google is playing with fire here somewhat – or Firefox, perhaps we should say – as this may be the shove some folks need to get them considering another of the best web browsers out there aside from Chrome. Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has vowed to maintain support for V2 extensions, while introducing support for V3 alongside to give folks a choice (now there’s a radical idea).
I have a similar issue at my school as well. Chrome is the only allowed browser, and each of us have to use our own school email as our login session in chrome, so we get that much of user space, and that actually works quite decently. I had ublock installed on my user account so far, but if it breaks, I’ll just have to suffer. Although, the real problem is that the school I work in uses some digital books that only work 100% in Chrome, and all show some form of weird behaviour in non-chromiun based browsers. And there’s a 0 chance they are changing it.