Google to Increase Limits on Ad Blockers Next Year

In its latest move in the war against ad blockers, Google admitted to increasing its efforts to discourage users from using ad blocker extensions on its platforms.

Google announced its adblock-limiting extension plan to finally launch in June next year.

After a year of delay, the search engine platform will roll out the new "Manifest V3" extension format to replace the "Manifest V2."

The Manifest V2 is the current format for Chrome extensions. Its disappearance will purge multiple filter extensions on the platform, particularly ad blockers.

Several content-blocking developers have already discussed with Google about the migration to a new platform, "hopeful that the new unified platform will bring substantial benefits" to them.

Google Efforts Against Ad Blocks

Ahead of its Manifest V2 rollout, Google has been actively fighting content filter extensions across its platform.

The tech giant is recently providing a "suboptimal viewing" experience on YouTube, interrupting ad blocker users with pop-ups to disable the filter or subscribe to YouTube's ad-free premium.

Chrome browsers with built-in ad blockers, like Firefox, experience playback delays of up to five seconds.

The same anti-ad blocker feature, however, is also prone to false positives, triggering playback delays to Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers even without an ad blocker installed.

Google recommends that affected users just keep "refreshing their browser" to resolve the issue.

What's New with Manifest V3?

While many of Manifest V3's changes surround ad-filtering, Google will launch several additional new features on its browser update.

One of them is changes in offscreen documents to provide "DOM access for extensions to use in a variety of scenarios like audio playback."

Developers will also soon have better control over the lifetime of their extension service workers as long as they receive live events.

A new user scripts API will be introduced to secure user safety via the user script manager extensions from installed extensions.

Google has been testing Manifest V3 this year to improve its services.