There is still hope, but it’s not as good.
Google has stepped up its campaign against ad blockers, and in this case, specifically uBlock Origin.
Per PC World, the company has made some alterations to Google Chrome’s extension support. To be precise, they’ve moved Chome’s extension support from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3, which clamps down on uBlock Origin.
Manifest V3 doesn’t have the same allowances as it’s predecessor did for remotely hosted code. And since the current version of uBlock relies on the ability to execute such code, it won’t function in Google Chrome. Google claims that remotely hosted code “presents security risks by allowing unreviewed code to be executed in extensions.” The new policy will only permit an extension to use JavaScript as part of the package.
This leaves the over 30 million uBlock users on Google Chrome in the lurch. Google is allowing some sort of grace period where the feature will still be able to be enabled. It’ll be a short time, however, before they’re as susceptible to ads as everyone else on Chrome.
The good news is that there is a new version of uBlock available: uBlock Origin Lite. The downside is that, while it does have many of the features of the old version, it isn’t quite so comprehensive (thus the “Lite” appellation). Notably missing are the dynamic filters, which allowed the blocking of scriptlet injection. Lite lacks these features due to the necessary Manifest V3 compliance.
uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill had this to say:
I consider uBO Lite to be too different from uBO to be an automatic replacement. You will have to explicitly find a replacement to uBO according to what you expect from a content blocker. uBO Lite may or may not fulfill your expectations.
Raymond Hill
Source: Windows Central
About Author
