The problem is I see a ton of people in the comments assuming this is a change made with the intent of disabling/breaking ublock. Clearly it's not, and it will affect more extensions than just that.

We should demand a LOT more evidence before claiming that Google intends to break adblockers before accusing them of that. If they are doing that, I want to be the first one raging against them, and I don't feel comfortable raging on something that deserves the benefit of the doubt.

I don't think companies should ever get the benefit of the doubt. If they are doing something people think it's bad, they are bad until they have their defense. That's why big companies have PR people. People may have the benefit, but companies shouldn't.

But I'm not advocating people treat this as any less important/urgent. The consequences of this change are clear: uBlock/uMatrix would break, this is bad, and it needs to be fixed. However at this point in time, it's an open issue, on an open bug tracker, and Google should be given space to adjust before we can actually declare they're doing this on purpose.

If the change goes through despite the issue being known, that is bad, and that will be a clear sign they don't care that adblockers are getting shut out. Still won't be proof it was intended to do that, but at least there's a different level of outrage you can apply to it.

This is not about who does or doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. It's about not having knee-jerk reactions to headlines. In the current political climate, that should be given some serious thought.

Edit: In fact, so far the only thing this thread has achieved is having people go in the issue tracker and leave their comment. You can guess what will happen next: Outrage and abuse in the comment section, followed by a lock, because of fucking course they should lock when there's abuse. This happens every damn time there's a github issue being linked on HN.

What this behaviour does is it prevents an actual discussion from happening.

It's still very suspicious though that such changes happen right after Google implemented their own native adblocker. If tomorrow 3rd party adblockers stop working, Google can now point out that people can rely on their own solution.

Paranoid? Probably. But Google's revenues are from ads, so this kind of attitude is very much warranted in this case.

This seems very similar to the changes Safari made a while ago for their content blocking API, so there may be more to it than "Google wants to break adblockers".

I've explained the logic in the post you're replying to. I'll rephrase it:

There is no evidence the change is being made with the intent of getting rid of adblockers; it is so far only a side-effect. We should demand such evidence before implying that this is the intended outcome.

If such is the goal, have at it with the headlines. They write themselves. "Advertising Giant Google Forcefully Breaks Ad-blockers in Chrome Update".

But until the evidence is there, we should be responsible about this.

I've reviewed the design doc and and the spec for the new API. I agree that there doesn't seem to be an intent to "[get] rid of adblockers". Nonetheless, the proposed changes will disable core functionality in uBlock and uMatrix, which is what the title states.

>There is no evidence the change is being made with the intent of getting rid of adblockers; it is so far only a side-effect.

Yes, but what's the point of this change, if it is only a side effect? I've read this thread and I haven't seen clear explanation what this change strives to achieve, other than breaking some popular anti-tracking/ad-blocking extensions.

My understanding of the changes is that they make sense for most extensions, but gorhill's addons are being negatively impacted by them because of the way they were implemented. You'll note it's still possible to implement content blocking in the new system.

As others have pointed out the blacklist capabilities are severely inhibited in the new system. Could you elaborate on how the changes make sense? It feels like their messaging behind this is off if their intent truly is benign.