The Impact of Google's Manifest Version 3 Update on Ad Blocker Effectiveness
16 points by wonk
16 points by wonk
I learned about this paper via @lake’s comment and was really surprised to see their key findings, as documented from their repo, which stated:
- No significant effectiveness reduction: MV3 ad blockers perform comparably to MV2 versions
- Improved tracker blocking: Some MV3 versions showed enhanced anti-tracking capabilities
- Successful adaptation: Ad blocker developers effectively adapted to new API constraints
The uBlock Origin wiki has a page about why it works much better on Firefox than on Chromium-based browsers: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox
I was surprised to see that Manifest v3 isn't mentioned at all on there. I wonder if it's just that the page is relatively old? But you can see that focusing on Manifest v3 appears to not give you the whole story.
Anecdotally this matches my experience. After switching from uBlock Origin to uBlock Origin Lite a year or two ago I haven't noticed any increase in the amount of visible ads. There was a period where YouTube was able to detect the presence of an ad blocker and refused to play videos, which was solved by not watching YouTube until the situation was fixed.
The only feature I miss is custom persistent element-zapper configuration, which I used to remove non-advertising elements from some domains. The uBOL FAQ says this feature is possible in MV3 but was removed due to the "Lite" extension's focus on efficiency[0] , which is frustrating, because it implies it would be possible to have migrated the non-"Lite" extension to MV3 and then we wouldn't have had to go through all this rigamarole.
Maybe the solution is a separate extension, focused exclusively on "I want to zap chunks of web pages even if it's slow". There used to be an extension named Stylish that did this (and more), but it was purchased by a spyware company, became spyware, and was removed from the Chrome extension registry.