A few months ago I wrote a (rather poorly written) post about why you shouldn’t use Google Chrome. In that article, I tried explaining how a Google monopoly of the web will lead to catastrophic consequences for everyone; the death of ad blocking, increased surveillance and tracking, and anti-competitive strategies that intentionally cripple competing browsers which lead to stagnation and Google’s abuse of their power. Turns out, the death of ad blockers may come very soon.
Google’s monopoly
Google is rolling out something called ‘Manifest v3’ for their browsers. This impacts what browser extensions can do, among other things. Google is making changes from the current version, Manifest v2, that will limit ad blocker functionality. The changes also affect many non-trivial browser extensions, causing them to be completely rewritten and breaking cross-browser compatibility.
As a side note, Ublock Origin is the only ad blocker you should use. Some of the other popular ad blockers, like Adblock Plus, intentionally do not block everything because of corporate payments behind the scenes. These “ad blockers” may still function after Manifest v3 is implemented, but that’s because Google is pulling a PR stunt while killing off all the good ones.
Hey, we still have ad blockers! Look at ABP, Manifest v3 hasn’t done anything bad!
ABP is legitimately worse than Ublock Origin, I forced a friend to install UO after becoming seeing persistent ads while using ABP. Immediately after installing UO, all the ads disappeared.
Google’s public statements, of course, try to explain how these changes will benefit user privacy and security. They aren’t completely wrong, some flaws in Manifest v2 allow for malicious browser extensions to exist. Manifest v3 would improve some aspects of security, with the convenient side effect of killing ad blockers. It’s the equivalent of every building having security cameras to catch criminals more effectively, even in private areas like washrooms. Sure, it’ll catch more criminals, but it comes at a steep price of everyone living closer to 1984 than ever before; something that governments and security agencies would absolutely love to do.
The reason for the Manifest change is quite simple; Google makes most of their money from ads and selling your data. An ad blocker will prevent you from clicking on targeted ads, reducing an advertiser’s, Google’s, and websites’ revenues. Therefore, it makes sense for Google to attempt making the internet more surveilled and infested with ads.
Google can get away with making these destructive changes because they own everything. Chrome itself already has over half the browser market share, but it is also the underlying browser for a bunch of other browsers like Edge or Brave. Really reminds me of the old IE monopoly days when Microsoft held the market instead of Google. The difference is that Google is a lot smarter than Microsoft; I don’t see Google becoming incompetent and repeating history.
Google has already pulled off similar compatibility breaking tactics before. For instance, calls on the Facebook Messenger website don’t work in Firefox and only work in Chrome-like browsers. The funny part is, these web apps can function just fine on Firefox; you just need to trick the website to think that your browser is Chrome and everything works again. Web apps are intentionally gimped to not work on non-Chrome browsers, a part of Google’s efforts to sabotage the internet for their desires.
The solution
The only way to resist Manifest v3 and continue using ad blockers is to abandon Chrome-like browsers. Like any market, competition is needed for the space to be healthy. A monopoly in a market as critical as web browsers will be a nightmare for everyone. You want to avoid browsers that rely on Chromium such as Chrome itself, Edge, Opera, Brave, and most popular browsers out there. Firefox-based and Safari-like browsers are the true alternatives, since they are developed independently of Chromium. Out of the two families, I recommend Firefox.
Firefox has no intent to implement Manifest v3 for the near future since they care more about their users than Google. Once the Manifest difference exists, it’s likely there will be incompatible browser add-ons and websites between Chrome and non-Chrome browsers.
The last thing humanity wants is Google holding absolute control over the internet. They’re close to, but there’s still a bit of space until they completely hold everything. It’s important that something changes for the better before the browser space is completely doomed, or at least an alternative solution is always available.
By now, my arguments have essentially become rehashes from the previous article’s. That doesn’t make it lose any importance, a move away from Chrome (and Google in general) is absolutely needed. If you read this and use Chrome or any similar browsers, I really urge you to migrate away. It benefits everyone on the planet, not just you.
Futile resistance?
In all honesty, Google will likely win. The average person just cares so little about technology beyond the surface level that Google likely won’t face challenging resistance. Not to mention the overall technological illiteracy plaguing the masses means tech giants have an easy time achieving goals. It’ll just be a vocal minority like me that complains and avoids Google. As long as today’s social media and tech giants flourish, the future likely won’t change for the better; just look at the evolution of the internet and mainstream adoption of technology. Once Google achieves their goal of technological dominance in the near future, it’ll be a fun and bleak future to watch. We may live in the Metaverse and breathe Google, and we will be happy.