Google claims that Chrome is making ad blockers safer

Recently, Google Chrome was in news for restricting ad blockers. Last year, the company said that the Manifest V 3 standard has been designed to replace the Web Request API with Declarative Net Request API. This move was said to limit the ad blocking capabilities of the browser extensions. However, the company has now written a detailed blog that says that it does not intend to kill ad blockers, but instead, just to make them safer and provide users with a faster web browsing experience.

The company has stated that the Web Request API need the Chrome browser to send all the data in network request to the extension, including sensitive data such as photos and emails. This has led to malware activities on the Web. Since January last year, 42 percent of malicious extensions have used the Web Request API.

In a formal public statement in October 2018, the company revealed the arrival of its Manifest V3 that appeared in January to set the pitch for the Declarative Net Request API. The company faced a lot of criticism for putting a limit on ad blockers through its new API. Last month, it again announced that it will continue to support full ad blocking features for enterprise users. Google announced major changes to the Chrome extensions ecosystem.

Lately Google’s Simeon Vincent also responded to its critics that the new API doesn’t enable extensions to access any sensitive data from Chrome. The latest execution provides extensions the ability to perform content blocking without requiring access to all the user information from a webpage.

Google also revealed instead of killing ad blockers on Chrome, the adoption of the new extension API will make them safer for users. The company also asserts that earlier used Web Request API enables extensions to have access to read and manipulate “everything a user does” on the browser, but through the Declarative Net Request API limits the access of user information.

Developer Advocate for Chrome Extensions Simeon Vincent further said that Chrome does not need to expose any sensitive data to the extension. He also wrote that “The browser can perform the action requested by the extension without sending it all the data associated with the network request, because the extension already specified the conditions under which different actions are taken.”

Since January, Google has been collaborating with outside developers and incorporating their feedback. However, the technology giant has not confirmed yet that when the new rules will take effect.

Google also insisted that the changes are being made just to protect the privacy of its users.

Earlier the Web Request API allowed developers to stop a page from loading in the mean time as per their wish blocked and modified the page’s content ads or other content

Declarative Net Request API is a new technology which would work exactly opposite to the older API. The extension sets up “rules” that the browser reads and applies to each web page before it loads Instead of an extension stopping web requests and searching all the pages’ content, ads and other contents.

The extensions will never receive page data, and the browser will make all the modifications to the page.

This will ensure the entire user’s data such as emails, photos; passwords, etc. will remain at the safe, and are never passed to the extensions.

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