Time to switch? Google plans ad blocking restrictions

Google Chrome's market share is close to 70%, but the times of an ad-free browsing experience may only be available to enterprise Chrome users in the future according to Google itself. Why? Because ad serving is part of the core of the Google business.

Blocking the ad blockers in Chrome

In a recent update, Google decided to limit Chrome's ad-blocking capabilities. But also announced that paid G Suite Enterprise subscribers may still use ad blocking in the future.

Even though an announcement by Google has been widely criticized, Google is still ready to move on to stop certain ad blockers with letting enterprise users exclusively use ad blockers following these changes.

As outlined in the so-called Manifest V3 users will see changes to Chrome extensions and the permissions system. Some ad blockers will simply not work anymore. And not all ad blockers will be affected by the changes. At the moment it is just unclear which ones will keep working. in the future.

Also interesting is a response to the user community where Google stated that "blocking will still be available to enterprise deployments”.

Time to switch browsers?

With this move Google creates an incentive to use other browsers such as Firefox, because there are many users who will not use Chrome without an ad blocker.

Firefox is always an alternative. It works on all platforms and keeps supporting ad blocking browser extensions also on Android.

Another alternative is Brave. It is based on Chromium and all Chrome plugins plus themes work with it.