Google Chrome plans to cripple ad blockers, crypto-enabled Brave and Opera unyielding

Proposed changes to Google Chrome, the browser of choice for 63 percent of devices, would cripple ad blockers and other privacy-enhancing extensions.

Brave and Opera may deviate from Chrome to retain the functionality of these extensions.

In October, Google proposed changes to the Chromium codebase that would introduce a new set extension standards that would cripple dozens of popular ad blocking and privacy-enhancing browser extensions.

"Manifest v3 will entail additional platform changes that aim to create stronger security, privacy, and performance guarantees. We want to help all developers fall into the pit of success," said Google on its blog.

Raymond Hill, the original author of ad blockers uBlock Origin and uMatrix, said the changes would mean his extensions could "No longer exist." Tens of other extension owners and developers piled on to the comment, saying the change would also hinder the capabilities of their extensions-ultimately limiting the choices offered to users.

Brendan Eich, the CEO and founder of Brave and its associated Basic Attention Token, said that Brave browser plans to support the old extension technology if Google goes ahead with the changes, as said in an email to ZDNet.

Since both Brave and Opera come with built-in ad blockers, users who choose to use the default ad blockers would be unaffected by the update.

"We've already seen more and more people express their discontent with annoying ads by installing ad blockers, but blocking all ads can hurt sites or advertisers who aren't doing anything disruptive," writes Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, vice president of Chrome.

Google denied the accusations when asked directly whether Manifest v3 was motivated by ad revenue and iterated that the proposed changes are subject to revision and community feedback.

Some developers at Google even expressed their own concerns about the changes.