Reminder to switch browsers if you haven’t already!
- Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
- The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
- Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.
I don’t think that’s going to be the case. People will find workarounds. The whole point of these alternative browsers is to use the web in whatever way the developers think their user base wants to use it. If the web is inaccessible to non-chromium browsers then people will spoof their browser to the site to look like a chromium browser.
That isn’t necessarily going to be possible. There are many diverse fingerprinting techniques, I really don’t think it would be trivial to spoof them all. User agent is easy but stuff like TLS fingerprinting is much harder to spoof.
If we get to the point where the corporatocracy can force us into a limited set of compliant browsers then the web as we know it has ended. I don’t think they’ll go that far unless they decide to go whole hog. That level of control will likely look to wipe out any useful plugins like ad-blockers or other privacy features. I didn’t want to go down the slippery slope argument, but that’s pretty much what will happen if they go that direction.
We’re kind of already there - there’s Chromium, Webkit and Gecko and that’s about it, two of which are controlled by the biggest ad companies in the world, and the third is heavily subsidised by the first. Mozilla was effectively forced into implementing DRM into the browser already, and there’s plenty of other “””standards””” published and approved by Google that Mozilla is pressured into implementing but doesn’t want to for security and privacy reasons.
I definitely expect it’ll get worse.
But most of those only give you a few bits of data. Like if there’s only one technique that succeeded, you might have the same fingerprint as everyone with your exact phone with the rest randomized