PCWorld reports that Google's Manifest V3 update will permanently disable popular ad blockers like uBlock Origin in Chrome by late June. This transition from Manifest V2 aims to enhance Chrome's security and speed, but inadvertently limits ad blocker functionality as a side effect. Chrome 150 or 151 will likely remove all workarounds, forcing users to seek alternative browsers or accept reduced ad-blocking capabilities. Google has been working for some time on a way to block old browser extensions in Google Chrome. This goes hand in hand with the switch from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3, a newer and presumably more secure architecture for the popular browser. As early as March 2025, this rendered some extensions--including popular ad blockers such as uBlock Origin--suddenly unusable, even though it was still possible to access them with a workaround.

Current content filtering and blocking methods are susceptible to various circumvention techniques and are relatively slow in dealing with new threats. This is due to these methods using shallow pattern recognition that is based on regular expression rules found in crowdsourced block lists. We propose a novel system that aims to remedy the aforementioned issues by examining deep textual patterns of network-oriented content relating to the domain being interacted with. Moreover, we propose to use federated learning that allows users to take advantage of each other's localized knowledge/experience regarding what should or should not be blocked on a network without compromising privacy. Our experiments show the promise of our proposed approach in real world settings. We also provide data-driven recommendations on how to best implement the proposed system.

There is no question that 2020 has been a pivotal year in history, but how it will affect the future largely remains to be seen. In digital marketing, we are noticing the continuation and acceleration of many trends. Marketing professionals believe that the digital transformation boost represents the biggest opportunity born of the current situation, giving us an indication of what the future might look like. Which trends are changing the face of the marketing industry? This question is no less relevant in 2021 – especially now that the pace of digitalization has accelerated in many sectors as a result of COVID-19.

Online advertising has been a long-standing concern for user privacy and overall web experience. Several techniques have been proposed to block ads, mostly based on filter-lists and manually-written rules. While a typical ad blocker relies on manually-curated block lists, these inevitably get out-of-date, thus compromising the ultimate utility of this ad blocking approach. In this paper we present Percival, a browser-embedded, lightweight, deep learning-powered ad blocker. Percival embeds itself within the browser's image rendering pipeline, which makes it possible to intercept every image obtained during page execution and to perform blocking based on applying machine learning for image classification to flag potential ads. Our implementation inside both Chromium and Brave browsers shows only a minor rendering performance overhead of 4.55%, demonstrating the feasibility of deploying traditionally heavy models (i.e. deep neural networks) inside the critical path of the rendering engine of a browser. We show that our image-based ad blocker can replicate EasyList rules with an accuracy of 96.76%. To show the versatility of the Percival's approach we present case studies that demonstrate that Percival 1) does surprisingly well on ads in languages other than English; 2) Percival also performs well on blocking first-party Facebook ads, which have presented issues for other ad blockers. Percival proves that image-based perceptual ad blocking is an attractive complement to today's dominant approach of block lists

Brave has developed AI technology called AdGraph that outperforms conventional ad-blocking technology, the browser startup said Friday. "We can train supervised machine learning models to automatically block ads and trackers," researchers from Brave and four universities said in a research paper. "We found that AdGraph replicates the behavior of popular crowdsourced filter lists with an 97.7 percent accuracy. In addition, AdGraph is able to detect a significant number of ads and tracker which are missed by popular crowdsourced filter lists." Ad-blocking browser extensions like Adblock Plus today typically use manually maintained filter lists such as Easylist to determine what's an ad and what's not.

In privacy-focused, anti-establishment corners of the internet, going open source can earn you a certain amount of street cred. It signals that you not only have nothing to hide, but also welcome the rest of the world to help make your project better. For Ghostery though, the company that makes Edward Snowden's recommended ad blocker, publishing all its code on GitHub Thursday also means clearing up some confusion about its past. Before Ghostery was acquired last year by Cliqz, a privacy-focused web browser, the company's revenue scheme invited some skepticism. Ghostery made money when users opted-in to share data about what kinds of ad trackers they encountered across on the web.

Another year older and wiser, and the digital advertising industry shows few signs of slowing down. To understand the current landscape and get a sense of what lies ahead, we dug deep into industry data as well as the Marin Advertising Index--which represents billions of dollars of annual ad spend on the Marin platform. I hope you enjoy the result--our list of 10 digital advertising trends that promise increasing opportunities and unique challenges for global advertisers. By the end of 2017, Google and Facebook owned 63 percent of the U.S. digital ad market and 54 percent of digital ad revenue worldwide, according to eMarketer. Nationally, Microsoft grew but remained a distant third place, claiming four percent of the total U.S. revenue share.

Most ad blockers--and there are so, so many of them now--operate roughly the same way, comparing the scripts they encounter on a given site to their whitelist and block list letting the former run and stopping the others. This means they largely share the same drawback, as well; they can't block what they've never seen before. With its latest release, popular ad blocker Ghostery attempts to solve that common dilemma, with a fashionable solution: artificial intelligence. With Ghostery 8, available Wednesday as an extension for all the major browsers, the popular ad-blocker introduces not only AI-powered anti-tracking technology, but also a new "Smart Mode" that adjusts settings for you, rather than expecting novices to know which trackers to toggle. In doing so, the Edward Snowden-endorsed service has become both more accessible to the average user, and better able to preemptively protect them. The power-up comes at an auspicious time.

Researchers at Princeton and Stanford believe they have shown how to end the escalating blocker/anti-blocker battle as a result of that crucial point, and in favor of user choice. While a "war to win our eyeballs" sounds like the theme of a Guillermo del Toro film, it describes the interplay between advertisers (and ad-technology companies) and the visitors who reject the panoply of tracking techniques and page bloat that come with current online ads. Some sites go beyond just trying to route around blocking techniques used by Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, and others by showing a scolding message when they detect blocking action in use. A visitor often has to disable an ad blocker or add a rules exception to proceed to a site. But Princeton and Stanford's academics have determined it's possible to identify ads with an extremely high degree of reliability without using any of the current ad-blocking tricks of identifying underlying page elements, domains, and the like, and also block counter-defenses from sites and adtech companies.

Technology is always evolving, and marketers must evolve with it in order to ensure brand success. While there are many factors that affect marketers on a day-to-day basis such as social media, budgeting and reaching audiences on an emotional level, here are six of the top technologies are impacting marketing the most. Gartner analysts predict that by 2020, 30 percent of web browsing sessions will be conducted without a screen. With the rise of voice-activated technology like Google Home and Amazon Echo, consumers will not be limited to traditional screen-based browsing, Gartner predicts, especially since web browsing will be extended to other areas of daily activities such as driving and exercising. Artificial intelligence (AI) means more than another way to shop--it can help marketers make smart decisions.