And it’s all because of an experiment, it seems

Feb 19, 2019 10:44 GMT  ·  By

If you’re running Google Chrome 72 and your ad blocker no longer seems to do anything and offer you a completely clean browsing experience, it’s all because of the search giant which has accidentally broken down some extensions.

As it turns out, Google Chrome 72 introduces a new feature called “Enable network service” which allows the browser to create background tasks for each website.

But because bugs in these service workers, the new feature available in Google Chrome makes it possible for extensions to be ignored completely, eventually leading to the features of some to be fully disabled.

This is the case of ad blockers, which reportedly leave ads on a number of websites to get through, but other extensions seem to be broken down too, including VPNs.

Issue already fixed in the next Chrome update

The problem has already been fixed in Google Chrome 73, which is the next stable release for the browser, but more surprising is that Google doesn’t want to shut down its experiment for now. Because, as the company puts it, this is key for the feature of the browser.

“At this point, if this is the only breakage in the experiment we’re not rolling back. The reason is that as a relative percentage of users of Chrome, this is still small (e.g. less than 0.1%). When launching multi-year projects that impact a large part of the codebase, it’s impossible to avoid any regressions. We have to balance making forward progress and avoiding other regressions creeping in with breaking some edge cases. The best way for extension authors to avoid this is to use dev/beta channels,” Google said.

The impact of the bug is believed to be small since the experiment is only available for a number of users. However, it’s important to keep in mind that several extensions are broken down, which means the issue could after all significantly affect the experience with the browser.

Via TechDows