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. But one proposed change related to this effort threatens to hobble ad blocking extensions. And the pending transition has set up a showdown between Google, ad blocker makers, and even other browsers.
The crux 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. Ad blockers use the latter to comb your browsing data and look for ads. Google says that the new iteration better protects your data, and helps ad blockers work more more efficiently. But ad blocker developers argue that the new arrangement will hinder their ability to quickly and correctly identify ads, without necessarily providing the benefits in practice that Google claims.
"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. "We are not preventing the development of ad blockers or stopping users from blocking ads. Instead, we want to help developers, including content blockers, write extensions in a way that protects users’ privacy."
Google says it has been collaborating with outside developers and incorporating their feedback since ad blocking services first got wind of the proposed changes in January. Ad blockers use the APIs Google offers to s ..
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