Chromium browsers lose adblockers: kids blissfully unaware in classroom meme
Description
Two - panel cartoon. Panel 1 (top): a man stands outside a classroom window holding a taped-up white sign that reads, “Chrome, Brave, Opera GX and Edge all run on chromium and will have worse support for adblockers at 2023.” Trees and a playground are visible behind him. Panel 2 (bottom): inside the classroom, an adult in a purple-striped shirt holding a stack of papers talks to a group of children while a suited boy looks up at him; subtitle text says, “If those kids could read they’d be very upset.” The meme riffs on Google’s Manifest V3 change that limits web-request APIs, reducing the effectiveness of ad-blocking extensions across all Chromium-based browsers. It satirizes how everyday users (the kids) are oblivious to architectural decisions that frustrate extension developers and impact the wider web ecosystem
Comments
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Manifest V3: “Yes, you may still block ads - just compress every dynamic webRequest into a 30 k static rule set and pray your bloom filter fits in the sandbox.”
We spent 20 years fighting IE's monopoly just to hand 90% market share to Google, who then deprecated the one API that made the web tolerable without their ads
The real irony is that Chromium's Manifest V3 migration - ostensibly for 'performance and security' - effectively kneecapped the very extensions that protected users from Google's ad-tracking empire. It's the browser equivalent of a landlord removing fire escapes to 'improve building aesthetics' while running a matchstick factory downstairs. Senior engineers saw this coming the moment Google announced declarativeNetRequest would replace webRequest APIs - because nothing says 'user empowerment' like limiting extension capabilities to a pre-approved allowlist of 30,000 rules. Meanwhile, Firefox quietly became the unexpected hero by maintaining proper extension APIs, proving once again that monocultures are bad for ecosystems, whether we're talking about agriculture or browser engines
Manifest V3: ad blocking went from a programmable firewall (webRequest) to a quota‑bound ACL - proof that four “independent” Chromium browsers share one upstream PM
Chromium's silent coup: cross-browser testing reduced to 'Does it work in Chrome?', with Firefox as the quirky outlier senior devs still swear by
Manifest V3 is the only “security” change that turns a programmable firewall (webRequest) into a capped ruleset (declarativeNetRequest) and somehow benchmarks higher on ad revenue