security concerns surrounding Google Chrome
In: 5
(The other answer is awesome. This is just a little more ELI5 for those that are not sure how the things fit together.)
Imagine Chrome is a car.
Under the car is an engine, and a lot of mechanical things that makes the car to brrr. That’s chromium.
Many browsers use chromium, but build different cars on top, such as edge, vivaldi, opera and brave. (Not Firefox and safari though.)
All of these browsers can use many of the same plugins, since the “attachment points” (an API called “manifest v2”)
Google is about to update the “attachment points” on chromium, saying that it makes browsers more secure. That’s not entirely untrue, but it also removes most of the freedom plugins have. By some strange “coincidence”, Google, the biggest ad provider in the world, just so happened to remove the ability to create ad-blockers with their new “manifest v3”.
This means, that if brave, edge, vivaldi, opera, etc, wants their browser to piggyback on the feature and security work done by Google, they also need to allow ads in their browsers. They could start creating their own engine (called a “fork” if they start with an old version of chromium) but that’s very expensive, or they could switch to Firefox as their “engine”. Neither is a cheap or fast solution.
Our they can allow their browser to become outdated, which is a security issue at first, and a feature issue later down the road.
The entire problem is that one company currently dictates how the internet works. And that company is also the biggest ad company on the internet.
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