Manifest V3 will cripple or kill ad-blockers for Chrome, Edge, Opera and more. Why would Google do that?

Ad-blockers have been around for decades. They create a much better reading experience (shhh, TechRadar is listening!–Ed) as you’re not constantly bombarded by visual junk, autoplaying videos and mysterious sounds emanating from one of your 72 open tabs.

Although it may appear otherwise, adverts are not actually on the site you visit in your browser. The website provides a basic HTML document that contains instructions for formatting, locations from which to retrieve images, and how to fetch and display other resources. Adverts are one such resource and are pulled from a remote location on the server of an advertising company.

The URLs of these ad servers are generally well known and have been compiled into dozens of lists that can be downloaded by you or your PC.

When an ad-blocking extension is installed in a browser such as Google Chrome, resource requests are passed through the extension, which then retrieves the resource, which can be an image, advert or another page. If the URL is known to belong to an advertising or tracking company, the advert isn’t fetched. Simples.

Except it’s not. Browser extensions are a risky proposition at the best of times, and ones that have access to all your web traffic have the potential to be very dangerous indeed. Even if your go-to ad-blocker is ethically developed and open source, there’s no guarantee the maintainers won’t slip in some kind of malware in future, or the project won’t be taken over by an evil villain. We’re not scaremongering, it happens – perhaps most notably to the uBlock Origin fork Nano Defender, which, after it was sold, incorporated a forked connect.js file, which submitted user data and activity to remote servers. Extensions have also been used as trojans, viruses, keyloggers and other nasties.