Search the Community

Google plans on discontinuing Manifest V2 next year. Google has shared an updated timeline about Manifest V3, the latest version of its Chrome extension specification that has faced criticism for putting limits on ad blockers. After putting the update on pause last year, Google announced on Thursday it will continue the transition to Manifest V3 with some key changes. One of those changes is “improved content filtering support” for the Declarative Net Request API used by ad-blocking extensions. Google previously proposed putting restrictions on the functionality of this API for security reasons, potentially impacting the effectiveness of ad-blockers across all Chromium-based browsers including Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Developers and privacy advocates pushed back on the change, and Firefox even developed a workaround for the incoming restrictions. But now, Google will continue the deprecation of Manifest V2 and will automatically disable Manifest V2 extensions in users’ browsers in June 2024. Users also won’t be able to download Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store at that time. So far, the changes are garnering a positive response from AdGuard chief technology officer Andrey Meshkov. In a post published earlier this month, Meshkov says the changes should allow ad blockers to “offer nearly the same quality of filtering that they demonstrated with Manifest V2.” However, Alexei Miagkov, the senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells The Verge Manifest V3 still puts unnecessary limitations on developers. “These are helpful changes, but they are tweaks to a limited-by-design system,” Miagkov says. “The big problem remains the same: if extensions can’t innovate, users lose and trackers win... We now all depend on Google to keep evolving the API to keep up with advertisers and trackers.” Despite this small olive branch Google appears to be extending to ad-blockers, the company hasn’t been so friendly to those types of extensions as of late. YouTube launched a global crackdown on ad-blockers last month that prevents some users from watching videos with the extensions turned on. Correction November 16th, 9:41PM ET: Firefox is based on Gecko, not Chromium. We regret the error. Source

About a month ago, we reported that YouTube has begun testing server-side ads. Now, users are reporting that they are running into a black screen when they tried to watch videos. YouTube has been cracking down on ad blockers rather aggressively since last year, in a bid to get users to switch to YouTube Premium, which starts at $13.99 for a month's subscription. Brief recap on YouTube's war against ad blockers The streaming service allegedly began delaying the videos, creating an artificial lag on browsers other than Chrome and Edge. But, reports indicated that the problem affected users who had an ad blocker installed. The Mountain View company had revealed in April this year, that it was displaying an anti-ad block prompt for users who were blocking ads, and encouraged them to subscribe to its Premium subscription. But ad blockers came to the rescue once again, allowing users to bypass the nag screen. Less than a month later, it appeared that Google stepped up its efforts by causing videos to skip automatically if it detected an ad blocker, but it turned out to be a bug related to Adblock Plus. Firefox users have accused YouTube of deliberately offering an inferior experience on non-Chromium browsers, but it has never been proven definitively. Anyway, Google wasn't done with its shenanigans. YouTube decided to inject server-side ads into the videos, i.e. unlike ads that run separately, these new ads are embedded directly into the video stream, and are tricky to block, but it was not an impossible task for the good-old ad blockers. Seeing a black screen on YouTube? It's not just you. Mashable reports that users ran into a black screen on YouTube, and that it stayed for about 6 seconds before the video began playing. The reports indicate it affected several browsers including Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi. Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad. While that's certainly a better experience, it does waste precious seconds of our time. A simple workaround for the black screen on YouTube is to just refresh the page, hit F5 as soon as the page starts loading. uBlock Origin's filters were updated with a patch to resolve the problem, the add-on updates its filters automatically. If you are still experiencing the black screen issue, just open the extension's dashboard and manually update the filters. This tug-of-war is getting annoying, but it appears to me that Google's efforts are actively promoting the use of ad blockers, instead of attracting new subscribers. I did not run into the issue in Firefox, but that's mostly because I don't use it for YouTube anymore. However, I can confirm that FreeTube had a similar issue at about the same time. Videos were failing to load when using LocalAPI. This bug was quickly fixed in an update, and I think it is possible that the two problems could have been related to each other. And for those of you who are experiencing the auto-scrolling window issue in FreeTube, here's a workaround for the annoying bug. On a side note, Google Chrome users may notice a warning that says "These extensions may soon no longer be supported". You can learn more about it by reading Martin's article. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of June): 2,839 news posts

Despite suffering losses in a legal battle that has dragged on for years, German publishing giant Axel Springer is refusing to give up on its claim that ad blocking software illegally interferes with its business model. Thus far, Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus, has come out on top. However, with Axel Springer's reformulated claims now rooted firmly in copyright law, the stakes are high at 's highest court. A long-running lawsuit involving Sony and a cheat device may yet hold the answers. The promise that pretty much everything is available for free on the internet was one of the key driving forces behind surging uptake at the end of the century. The reality was more nuanced, of course. The marketing and framing of this utopian vision relied on the relative naivety of most internet users. None were strangers to adverts appearing on TV, radio or in print, so the concept needed no explaining. That advertising online wasn’t so passive, and over the next two decades would in some cases become an abusive, privacy-destroying nightmare, certainly wasn’t mentioned up front as part of the deal. The revelation that adverts could be blocked edged into the mainstream around 15 years ago and developed into an industry in its own right. Easy to install, the AdBlock browser extension grew in popularity along with its rivals, leading to publishers of all kinds questioning their business models and whether ‘free’ even had a future. Axel Springer Takes on Eyeo GmbH German publisher Axel Springer, owner of brands including Bild and Die Welt, eventually decided that the ad blocking problem could be solved by its legal department. The company took legal action against Eyeo GmbH, the owner of what had become the multi-platform Adblock Plus, arguing that the software interfered with its business model. After trips through regional courts and eventually ’s Supreme Court, in April 2018 Adblock Plus and Eyeo came out on top, having been found not in breach of competition law. After concluding that the solution to ad blocking must be available somewhere else in the law, Axel Springer filed a new lawsuit on new grounds. The publisher claimed that AdBlock Plus “changed the programming code of websites thus directly accessing the legally protected offer of publishers.” In layman’s terms, by meddling with the appearance of the publisher’s website in users’ browsers, AdBlock Plus breached Axel Springer’s rights under copyright law. Eyeo dismissed the claim as “almost absurd” and Springer carried on regardless. In January 2022, the Hamburg Regional Court decided that the publisher wasn’t entitled to an injunction; there was no unauthorized duplication and/or reworking of copyrighted computer programs as defined in copyright law, so neither Eyeo nor its users could be considered infringers. “No company has the right to prohibit users from setting their own browser settings,” Eyeo declared after yet another win. Axel Springer’s appeal meant that it would continue arguing to the contrary and at the Hamburg Higher Regional Court in 2023, the publisher lost and then appealed once again. Federal Court of Justice (BGH) Must Decide The case is now in the hands of the Federal Court of Justice (BGH). In advance of a hearing, the BGH summarized the matter as follows: At a hearing last week, the BGH indicated that before making a decision, it would wait for the outcome in another case, one that began before the original Adblock first started to gain traction 15 years ago. Waiting for Sony After competition law had failed to produce results, Axel Springer referenced the Sony vs. Datel/Action Replay case after switching to copyright claims several years ago. With a decision in that case a decade and a half in the making, and seemingly headed in the wrong direction for Sony, this may be the last roll of the dice. As detailed in our report early July, key questions in the Sony matter were previously referred by the BGH to the Court of Justice of the European Union for a preliminary ruling. The similarities in the cases are striking; while both Adblock Plus and Datel’s Playstation Portable cheat device interfere with the eventual output of Springer’s website and Sony’s games respectively, neither do so by circumvention of technical measures, or by copying any copyrighted material. What Would a Win Look Like? Each case offers its own complications but in the case of Adblock Plus, Springer’s arguments seem uncomfortably close to the legality of running a firewall. At the very least, the question of who gets to decide what data is allowed to pass through a network Springer doesn’t own, to a computer it doesn’t own either, seems like an important one. Yet, if Springer somehow wins and Adblock Plus is compelled to remove its ad servers from Adblock updates, it still won’t be able to prevent users from carrying out an easy DIY fix. And since its enforcement powers inside people’s homes borders on nil, in practical terms that’s just another loss to add to the list. Worse still, a win would likely serve as motivation to ensure that alternative ad blocking lists, for all kinds of systems, are not just kept up to date, but that Springer websites always receive extra special attention. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of June): 2,839 news posts

Chrome is warning users that their extension makers need to update soon. Google Chrome's long, long project to implement a new browser extension platform is seemingly going to happen, for real, after six years of cautious movement. One of the first ways people are seeing this is if they use uBlock Origin, a popular ad-blocking extension, as noted by Bleeping Computer. Recently, Chrome users have seen warnings pop up that "This extension may soon no longer be supported," with links asking the user to "Remove or replace it with similar extensions" from Chrome's Web Store. You might see a similar warning on some extensions if you head to Chrome's Extensions page (chrome://extensions). What's happening is Chrome preparing to make Manifest V3 required for extensions that want to run on its platform. First announced in 2018, the last word on Manifest V3 was that V2 extensions would start being nudged out in early June on the Beta, Dev, and Canary update channels. Users will be able to manually re-enable V2 extensions "for a short time," Google has said, "but over time, this toggle will go away as well." The shift for enterprise Chrome deployments is expected to be put off until June 2025. Google has said that its new extension platform was built for "improving the security, privacy, performance, and trustworthiness of the extension ecosystem." The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) disagrees most strongly with the security aspect, and Firefox-maker Mozilla, while intending to support V3 extensions for cross-browser compatibility, has no plans to cut off support for V2 extensions, signaling that it doesn't see the big improvement. Perhaps the biggest point of friction is with ad blockers. Google has said it "isn't killing ad blockers" but "making them safer," in an explanatory blog post. Google noted in November 2023 that Manifest V3 allowed for a greater number, and more dynamic updating, of content-blocking rules in extensions, specifically ad blockers. But one of the biggest changes is in disallowing "remotely hosted code," which includes the filtering lists that ad blockers keep regularly updated. Ad blockers that want to update their filtering lists, perhaps in response to pivots by platforms like Google's YouTube and ad servers, will have to do so through the Chrome Web Store's review process. Ad-blocking coders see it as an intentional gatekeeping and slowing. Google said before the initial May push toward V3 that 85 percent of actively maintained extensions in its store had Manifest V3 versions ready. Raymond Hill wrote on uBlock Origin's GitHub page Friday that there will not be a full version of uBlock Origin that works with Manifest V3, but instead a "Lite" version that is "a pared-down version of uBO with a best effort at converting filter lists used by uBO into a Manifest V3-compliant approach." Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of July): 3,313 news posts

Even though many websites on the internet are available for free, a large proportion of their income comes from advertisements, especially on YouTube where a lot of content creators earn income from ads within their videos. There are ad blockers out there however which prevent these adverts from displaying, denying the sites of income. Earlier this week, reports were posted to Reddit that, when attempting to play videos on YouTube a prompt was displayed that prevented playback until ad-blocking software was disabled. This was later confirmed by a YouTube employee on the YouTube subreddit. While it may be fairly clear why YouTube has decided to start testing this feature with a view to implementing it in the future, given that a large portion of income for not just YouTube but creators as well comes from the ads. However, many users in the same thread have expressed frustration at YouTube with their apparent increase in ad placement within videos on the site. Of course, the same prompt encourages users to try YouTube Premium, which includes the removal of adverts within videos, and YouTube is wanting to drive subscriptions to the platform, hoping to capture users who wish to continue not seeing adverts on the site. Even though YouTube has looked into separate tiers of Premium to just block ads with no other perks, this has not come to light and only the main tier continues to exist in individual and family plans. Source: 9to5Google YouTube confirms that it is testing out blocking ad blockers on the site