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0 pointsPikamander21y ago0 comments

On the off chance that Google is truly benevolent and was just worried about users' security, then they could have easily hidden the required network-reading functionality behind a flag or "developer mode", or only allowed it for a small set of manually-audited extensions like uBlock Origin.

The fact that they provided absolutely none of these alternatives isn't a coincidence. Google is a for-profit company with 300+ billion of annual revenue, a giant chunk of which comes from their advertisement services. It's a blatant conflict of interest and there's no good reason to believe that they're acting in good faith here.

0 comments

ehsankia1y ago

> then they could have easily hidden the required network-reading functionality behind a flag or "developer mode"

For all intents and purposes, that's basically equivalent to deleting uBlock Origin for 99.9% of the 29M users it currently has.

> only allowed it for a small set of manually-audited extensions like uBlock Origin

That would most definitely lead to accusation of favoritism. That would be just as annoying of a pipeline to maintain.

> The fact that they provided absolutely none of these alternatives isn't a coincidence

They delayed the release 3 times, it was first announced in 2020. The whole time, they were taking feedback and making changes. They made a ton of changes that made MV3 adblockers possible.

pmdr1y ago

If they really were concerned about user security, they'd do a better job blocking scammy & misleading ads instead. uBO basically _saves_ users from installing dubious Chrome extensions and other malware only because they show up as ads or other annoyances.

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