Most people on the internet use the Chrome browser, and most Americans are using ad blockers. And even though advertising puts food on my table, I can’t blame them — because I block ads, too.
Google, as the world’s biggest advertising company, doesn’t appreciate that. That’s why recent policy changes in Chrome are going to impact one of the browser’s most popular ad blockers.
A change in Chrome’s extension support — from the Manifest V2 framework to the newer V3 — is being billed as a way to make browser add-ons safer, more efficient, and compliant with modern APIs. But it’s also deprecating features that complex extensions reply upon.
One of those extensions is uBlock Origin, an ad-blocking tool with over 30 million users according to its Chrome Web Store page (and presumably many more users across other browsers).
uBlock Origin still works as of this writing, but it will soon be automatically disabled by Chrome updates. Users will …