Google’s War on Ad Blockers and Privacy Tools: How To Pivot To Avoid Surveillance

Google Chrome's global browser market share, said to be north of 65% in 2024, dwarfs that of its competition.

And this might be one of the key reasons, apart from Google's obvious general business model as a company squarely based on advertising, behind a series of missteps from the user point of view - but that makes all the sense in the world for the giant.

One of them is the deprecation of the Manifest V2 extension framework, which took out a number of privacy and security-enhancing add-ons. But competing browsers hope Google's is a false sense of security, which is at this point that, regardless of what Chrome serves to its army of users, they will accept it.

In 2020, Google announced its big plan to "improve" Chrome extensions, rolling out Manifest V3 with promises of better performance, privacy, and security. Who could argue with those high ideals, right? But as it often goes, the devil's in the details. The shift from Manifest V2 to V3 was a significant one, and while Google says it's about protecting users, critics aren’t buying it. The most notable change? It’s made ad-blocking a whole lot harder—whether by design or “accident” depending on who you ask.

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