Google might be looking to block ADblockers in Chromium.

It seems Google might be looking to block AD blockers in Chrome. Google engineers have proposed changes to the open-source Chromium browser that will break content-blocking extensions, including ad blockers.

If the changes happen as planed, plugins like Adblock Plus that rely on basic filtering might continue to work if properly tweaked, and block ads. But the more aggressive extensions like uBlock Origin will meet a wall. The drafted changes will limit the capabilities available to extension developers, apparently for the sake of speed and safety. Chromium forms the central core of Google Chrome, and, soon, Microsoft Edge.

From the Chromium bug tracker

From the description of the declarativeNetRequest API[1], I understand that its purpose is to merely enforce Adblock Plus ("ABP")-compatible filtering capabilities[2]. It shares the same basic filtering syntax: double-pipe to anchor to hostname, single pipe to anchor to start or end of URL,  caret as a special placeholder, and so on. The described matching algorithm is exactly that of a ABP-like filtering engine.

If this (quite limited) declarativeNetRequest API ends up being the only way content blockers can accomplish their duty, this essentially means that two content blockers I have maintained for years, uBlock Origin ("uBO") and uMatrix, can no longer exist.

Beside causing uBO and uMatrix to no longer be able to exist, it's really concerning that the proposed declarativeNetRequest API will make it impossible to come up with new and novel filtering engine designs, as the declarativeNetRequest API is no more than the implementation of one specific filtering engine, and a rather limited one (the 30,000 limit is not sufficient to enforce the famous EasyList alone).

Key portions of uBlock Origin[3] and all of uMatrix[4] use a different matching algorithm than that of the declarativeNetRequest API. Block/allow rules are enforced according to their *specificity*, whereas block/allow rules can override each others with no limit. This cannot be translated into a declarativeNetRequest API (assuming a 30,000 entries limit would not be a crippling limitation in itself).

There are other features (which I understand are appreciated by many users) which can't be implemented with the declarativeNetRequest API, for examples, the blocking of media element which are larger than a set size, the disabling of JavaScript execution through the injection of CSP directives, the removal of outgoing Cookie headers, etc. -- and all of these can be set to override a less specific setting, i.e. one could choose to globally block large media elements, but allow them on a few specific sites, and so on still be able to override these rules with ever more specific rules.

Extensions act on behalf of users, they add capabilities to a *user agent*, and deprecating the blocking ability of the webRequest API will essentially decrease the level of user agency in Chromium, to the benefit of web sites which obviously would be happy to have the last word in what resources their pages can fetch/execute/render.

With such a limited declarativeNetRequest API and the deprecation of blocking ability of the webRequest API, I am skeptical "user agent" will still be a proper category to classify Chromium.