The New Ad Blocking Era Begins

uBlock Origin has been a beloved tool amongst the ad blocking crowd for 10 years — lightning fast, ruthlessly effective, and vehemently grass roots.

Out of the box, it seems to block just about anything an average user might find annoying — for free. Its anti-commercial approach, comprehensiveness, and brutal efficiency is something of a combined rarity amongst the consumer-oriented ad blocking solutions out there.

For example, ad blockers don’t just block ads, they also block tracking (data collection) scripts, on-site analytics, promotional pop-ups, “turn off your ad blocker” walls, cookie consent prompts, and other “annoyances” (as its users define them).

• Whereas many other ad blockers require extensive user customisation or payment to provide these full range of services, uBlock Origin does not.

• Whereas many ad blockers struggle to block YouTube’s pre-roll and mid-roll video ads, uBlock Origin works.

• While popular ad blockers decided to serve advertising to its users, uBlock Origin abstained.

For these reasons, it is widely regarded as the most capable ad blocking extension software available. Particularly by enthusiasts.

The fact it is built by a sole developer — Raymond Hill — and not a for-profit company also resonates with its devout users, who romanticise the idea of grass-roots activism. Over the years, companies have tried to persuade him to sell out, to no avail.

Put another way: uBlock Origin represents more than just a technical tool — it’s a rebellion. One man, sticking it to the trillion-dollar advertising industrial machine.

During its first few years, it was a fringe offering compared to mainstream ad blockers. Early adopters were privacy paranoid techies and ad-hating programmers.

As word spread of how good it was versus the then-dominant ad blockers (AdBlock and Adblock Plus), it moved into the mainstream. Its average user today is no longer privacy conscious tech bros, but instead more the likes of students and white collar folks. These users aren’t fanatical or ideological, they just love how uBlock Origin cleans up and speeds up their web browsing experience.

In recent years it has been downloaded roughly 70m times: 40m on Chrome, 10m on Edge, 8.6m on Firefox, and 11.2m in Opera.

Adtech industry commentators have refered to it as a “scorched earth” ad blocker, because of its uncompromising effectiveness. Why?

Unlike other ad blockers, who allow some forms of advertising, tracking, and dialogue with its users, uBlock Origin does not. It’s the digital equivalent of taking a flame thrower to all of the ads, cameras, and distractions of Times Square.

What scares people who are both in the know and rely upon digital advertising for their business model, is that uBlock Origin is not alone. It led a wave of “scorched earth” inspired ad blockers, contributing to their widespread adoption — with 700m+ users globally.

uBlock Origin is so proficient that if it were a sci-fi character it would be the Terminator. The only way to stop it is to turn it off, by turning the place upside down or burning it to the ground.

Well, that’s basically what is happening right now.

Deprecation (By Google) Begins

This June, Google began to role out Manifest V3. It’s a huge update and a major overhaul to Chromium’s extension framework, so the process is taking months. To put this into perspective, it’s the biggest change since 2012, when its predecessor Manifest V2 was launched.

It affects all browsers built with Chromium to some degree (e.g. Chrome, Edge, Samsung Internet, Firefox). The most notable — and controversial — outcome of this overhaul is the new restrictions placed on ad blockers. In short, they are losing critical browser functionality in favour of new, inferior alternatives.

Under this revised set of conditions, uBlock Origin isn’t compatible. So, unless things change, it will get deprecated by Google when the sun finally sets on Manifest V2.

Spoiler: that won’t be happening. Its developer owner, Raymond Hill, has refused to modify it to meet the new Manifest V3 spec (to prove a point that it’s inferior to the Manifest V2 version). Its newfound destiny: martyrdom.

Consequently, for sometime, the ad blocking community has been waiting — very nervously — for its impending demise. As if sitting on death row, awaiting an executioner.

Over the summer, we witnessed an early hint of its impending deprecation. When accessing uBlock Origin’s Chrome Web Store page with the extension installed, visitors were presented with a message that said: "This extension may soon no longer be supported because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.”

As of 12th October 2024, that is now starting to change.

Reports have surfaced that there is a new message advising that it’s no longer downloadable at all: “This extension is no longer available because it doesn’t follow best practices for Chrome extensions.”

Further, on 14th October, it was reported that Chrome had begun automatically de-activating uBlock Origin.

There you have it. The axe is coming down to sever its connection with Chrome.

Both of these changes are not currently live and active for all Chrome users. They are just live for some. As the Manifest V3 update continues to roll out, they will gradually take effect for everybody, likely completing by Q1 2025.

For a period of time it is possible to re-enable uBlock Origin through a toggle in Chrome. However, it is looking like this will be a short window, since Google is already testing the removal of this feature in Chrome Canary (an experimental, early release version of Chrome).

The significance

The real significance of this is not what it is, but what it means.

What it means for content creators, advertisers, adtech companies, and consumers — everyone in the ecosystem.

The rise of Manifest V3 and the fall of uBlock Origin is a new era in ad blocking. It’s a paradigm-shift. It’s something we have not seen since the deployment of Manifest V2, after which the ad blocking movement went mainstream — jumping from millions of users to hundreds of millions in a few years.

Google has changed the foundations of the ecosystem, by changing the rules to which ad blockers can function in Chromium-based browsers that collectively represent 75%+ of the browser market share by usage. Things will be fundamentally different going forward (which I will cover in detail later).

uBlock Origin’s physical removal from Chrome marks the beginning of this new era.

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