Google postpones Chrome changes that could have big impact on ad blocking extensions

Google no longer plans to begin turning off the Chrome browser’s old extensions standard in January, the company’s developer advocate for Chrome Extensions Simeon Vincent has announced (via 9to5Google). The company is currently in the process of transitioning from the Manifest V2 (MV2) extension standard to Manifest V3 (MV3), which Google says will improve the security and performance of its browser. Critics, however, have claimed MV3 will make it harder for ad blocking extensions to work.

My former colleague Corin Faife wrote an excellent explainer on the controversy earlier this year. But the TL;DR is that MV3 swaps out a powerful API used by ad-blocking extensions called Web Request, for another called Declarative Net Request. The...

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