The Chronicle of Foretold Death is coming to an end. When we started talking about it, it would still be years away in 2018, but from that moment we were aware of what was coming and a few months later we confirmed it. No date, because these types of changes are like palace things, but for sure, ad blockers for almost all Chromium-based browsers, barring surprises, have their days numbered.

So much has happened since then that when we make a list of major events between 2019 and 2022, it’s hard to believe that it all came together in such a short time, especially in the last three years of the list. . And yet time inexorably moved on (or we passed through it, which can also be said this way) until it brought us to the gates of the last quarter of 2022, the last months in which we can continue to use ad blockers“adblocks” as many people call them.

Everything comes from the hands changing the extension manifest file format for browsers based on Chromium, i.e. the vast majority of employees today. Manifest V2 has been in use for years, although a new version, V3, has been in the works for years, which was finally fully defined and started deploying earlier this year, around the time Chromium allowed both versions to be used in extensions.

However, this coexistence is temporary, and if we check Google’s documentation for the Manifest V3 implementation, we will see that sometime in January 2023 it will no longer be possible to update extensions using V2with very specific exceptions it stops working in browsers. And those business-related exemptions won’t last too long either, ending in June 2023.

The jump from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3 isn’t a change aimed only at killing blockers, it actually brings some interesting new features to the manifest file. We find the key Google will prevent the extension from accessing webRequest, an API that is key to the functionality of the extension. And the problem is that the alternative offered, declarativeNetRequestprevents extensions from doing filtering that now depends solely on the browser itself.

To this we must add that Manifest V3 limits the number of rules that can be specified by each extension to 30,000. And yes, 30,000 may seem like a lot at first, but it’s actually much less than the volume of rules used by ad blockers. As a result, extensions lose control over the filtering process and their ability to define rules is limited, resulting in a loss of much of their usefulness.

And why does Google do this? We should not try too hard to reach a quite logical conclusion: placing ads on websites (our own and third-party sites) is a key element in their accounts, so ad blockers are a bleeding wound to your bottom line. With this change, it can be clear to us that using a large part of Chromium-based web browsers will start to be more profitable for the search engine company.

And what alternatives do users who want to continue using ad blockers have? The most obvious option is to switch to Mozilla Firefox. It’s been a long time since those in charge made it clear that they weren’t going to limit the scope of ad blockers, and over a year ago they confirmed that they were implementing Manifest V3, but in a way that wouldn’t affect ad blockers. So outside the Chromium ecosystem seems the most obvious option.

However, it is not the only option, and there are also conscientious objectors within the Chromium ecosystem who already stated in 2019 that they would accept Manifesto V3, but not implement the changes related to ad blockers. They are especially Opera, Vivaldi and Brave And if there are no surprises, it will still be possible to bypass advertising in these browsers thanks to the measures taken by their developers.