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Comment by LordDragonfang | Hacker News Reader

There was a huge wave of anti-chrome propaganda about how manifest v3 would prevent all ad-blocking* on Reddit and Tumblr (and probably tiktok) and such. Even if none of them read the actual announcements, the low-info folks still learn about it from the outrage machine.

*Which isn't actually true; "cosmetic" blocking (altering the DOM), the original type and the one most users actually care about, will still work just fine. It's only privacy tracking which is going to be totally broken, and frankly, outside of the unreality bubble of HN, most users care much less about "privacy" than you'd think.

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Just because people don't care doesn't mean it's unimportant.

So these limitations of manifest V3 don't exist?:

>One of the main issues with Manifest V3 is its limitation to filter lists: an extension can only include up to 50 static lists, and only 10 of them can be active at the same time.

>There are also limitations to the number of filter rules inside these lists: installed extensions cannot collectively exceed 300,000 static filters and it is no longer possible to update

I never said it wasn't important, but it is misinformation. Case and point: to answer your question, no, those aren't limitations on DOM-manipulation ad removal; those are limitations on the new declarativeNetRequest API, and they ONLY apply to blocked web requests.

Also, even that part isn't as catastrophic as you'd think; ad blocking, like most things on the internet, roughly follows the 90-10 rule: 90% of the ads are blocked by 10% of the rules. So even with a tenfold reduction, you should still see the vast majority of the ads blocked by even the intentionally-gimped declarativeNetRequest API.

Yes, it's going to make ad blockers slightly less effective and make your page loads slightly slower. But that doesn't get as many clicks as "Chrome is banning adblockers!!1". And it's important to note the difference because when v3 rolls around, all those users that were lied to are going to see that their ad blockers still mostly work, and lose even more trust in whistle blowing.

>Chrome is banning adblockers

You forgot the part where Google postponed the original timetable for the deprecation of manifest v2. Without that postponement, developers would not have had enough time to change the extension so that there would have been a time when adblockers were banned. The outcry prevented that.

> It's only privacy tracking which is going to be totally broken, and frankly, outside of the unreality bubble of HN, most users care much less about "privacy" than you'd think.

explaining this distinction is actually enough to drive me to switch thanks

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I agree, I myself was waiting for ublock to stop working before I migrated to Firefox but now that I’m hearing it will still mostly work… I just don’t care that much. So they collect all this info on me… as long as I don’t see ads I just don’t care

If that's their takeaway about Chrome, good.

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