For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
That’s the crazy thing.
You want to show me an image, maybe an animated gif, and link it to your website where you’re selling shit? Fine. Annoying, but fine.
But I don’t care how many crocodile tears they shed about ‘but websites depend on ad income’ – I am not letting random, unvetted advertisers run arbitrary code on my computer. I don’t care if it’s in a sandbox inside a sandbox. Exploits may be found, sandboxes may be escaped. And there’s plenty of trouble they can get into even within their little sandbox, like running a fucking crypto miner or something.
So, yeah. Adblock and noscript everywhere and always.
Yes, they can host a GIF on their server & show it to me with a non-personalized link, & promote it where they believe the average reader might be interested in it. Or some reader(s).
Just show me the ads you’re showing everybody else, and make money from sales of useful things & services.
It’s not even that hard to have targeted ads while still respecting privacy – just base the targeting on the other content on the page, rather than on the user.