Google has gotten a bad reputation lately for being overzealous in its fight against adblockers. It was recently discovered that it was automatically disabling the popular adblocker extension uBlock Origin for some Google Chrome users. To some extent, that makes sense: Google makes its money from ads. But with malicious ads and data trackers everywhere on the internet these days, users have legitimate reasons to want to block them. The uBlock Origin controversy is just one aspect of a debate that goes back years, and it's not an isolated incident: your favorite adblocker is likely to be next in line. Here are the best ways to keep blocking ads now that Google is cracking down on adblockers.

Google first made its ad blocker intentions clear in 2019, when it discussed how extensions would be affected by Chrome’s update to the Manifest V3 extension platform, which was due to go into full effect next year. There are a lot of technical details here, but suffice it to say, ad blocker developers were not happy. Google says that Manifest V3 is intended to make Chrome extensions more secure, and that it “does not hinder the development of ad blockers or prevent users from blocking ads.” However, the update blocks access to the Web Request API, which many ad blockers—not just uBlock Origin—rely on to outright block traffic to and from malicious pages. Web Request can be used for good or ill, but without Web Request there’s the potential for permissions nightmares as strict as requiring users to allow ad blockers on a per-site basis, which could go beyond being annoying to actually introducing more security vulnerabilities.

CEO of ad blocker company Ghostery, Jean-Paul Schmetz, explained the problem with this per-site permission structure to PCWorld: "The goal was to improve privacy, but that never happened. Because effective Manifest V3-compliant extensions must request access to every single website… users could become lax with these requests, leaving themselves more vulnerable to malicious actions."

Krzysztof Modraf, director of engineering and product at Ghostery, agreed, saying that “extensions will lose important tools and permissions that previously allowed them to quickly respond to new threats, right from the user's device.”