Vivaldi promises to restore third-party ad-blocking to Chromium

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BROWSER BUILDER Vivaldi has laid down the gauntlet to Google Chrome over changes to its ad blocking API.

After Google announced that it was to deprecate the WebRequest API, effectively killing third-party ad-blockers, there was a fair amount of disgruntlement. Despite this, Google has confirmed it won't be shifting its decision.

Fortunately, being an open source platform, individual browser vendors can make their own changes, and Vivaldi has confirmed that it will reinstate the abandoned API in its own Chromium variant.

In a blog post, the company explains: "This decision by Google goes to the heart of how we use the web today. On the one hand, there's Google who track us, serve us ads and monetise on us (to fit their business model).

"On the other - the users who want to get away from the intrusiveness, the profiling and the excessive load times ads can cause."

The company goes on to acknowledge the importance of ads as a revenue stream (a matter close to our hearts). That's the reason that unlike, say, Opera, there isn't a built-in ad-blocker.

"But Vivaldi is also all about giving you the choice. We want you to browse the web the way you want." it continues, explaining that it will continue to support third-party extensions that will do the job.

All we'd say about that is, please, please, whitelist us - we're one of the few websites that don't take paid content on the main site, and our team of journalists are experts in the field. To keep that quality costs money, and ads are our main source of income, so please choose wisely.

The blog concludes: "The good news is that whatever restrictions Google adds, at the end we can remove them. Our mission will always be to ensure that you have the choice."

The privacy-centric browser is built on the open-source Chromium engine, which is ‘owned' by Google and any decisions made for Chrome have direct repercussions for any other Chromium-based browser like Vivaldi, Opera or even the newly revamped Microsoft Edge. μ