It's not really unprecedented for them to offer up (often attractive and plausible) trojan horse reasons for why they do things that aren't the real reason. AMP, to me, is one good example. There are others.

I don't know what else they would really gain, or why else onBeforeRequest() was the most important thing to take away when extensions have so many other ways they can do harm.

Perhaps another way to look at it is not Google actively defeating adblockers, but giving a gift to their customers that pay for ads...making it easier for those customers to deal with the rising tide of adblockers, paywall end-arounds, etc.

> Perhaps another way to look at it is not Google actively defeating adblockers, but giving a gift to their customers that pay for ads...making it easier for those customers to deal with the rising tide of adblockers, paywall end-arounds, etc.

This assumes that Google's ads will start to bypass the V3 adblockers. V3 in and of itself does nothing, Google's ads are still blocked by the updated adblockers.

> I don't know what else they would really gain

Well that's what I'm asking haha I'd like to hear from them on this. Even if some people at Google are nefariously implementing V3 for some future plan to bypass adblockers, surely some people at Google believe that there are benefits to the work.

"Google's ads" is a broad category. I imagine there's many already defeating ad blockers. They wouldn't start with adsense or their ads on google search.

I'm not really familiar with more than AdSense and Youtube (I think Youtube's ads are a separate thing, I'm not sure).

Ah, there's lots. What used to be "DoubleClick" still exists under a different name, a sort of more publisher controlled private-ish instance of Adsense/Adwords. Then ad-like things..embedded google shopping results, local search, google flights, travel/hotel widgets, etc. Ads inside products like Maps, etc.

Why doesn't Chrome on Android support addons?