With the advent of Google Chrome's v3 extension manifest which will stop Ublock Origin from working in its current state, I was wondering if its possible to create a desktop adblocker program that hooks deeply into Google Chrome to provide similar functionality? It would be great if people deeply familiar with desktop development could share their feedback on the matter.

To clarify, I know we can use hosts file (and pi-hole) to block ads. However its too blunt of a tool. I think the key feature of adblocker browser extensions is the ability to allow ads/trackers on certain domains and block it completely on others. This is necessary because there's a lot of poorly coded websites (banks, phone carriers, brokerages) that simply break if say, a facebook tracker is blocked, meanwhile its perfectly fine to block it on a random blog website.

To narrow my question further, can a desktop application that hooks into Google Chrome be notified:

1. When a new tab is created 2. What URL is a tab pointed towards 3. Be able to identify all network requests of a given tab 4. Manipulate the network requests

It would basically be a firewall software program that is focused specifically towards the browser, with the options provided by existing adblock browser extensions (e.g., block trackers from a given domain).

There are a couple of benefits to this approach: 1. Since its NOT in the Chrome Web Store, its not subject to Google's nonsense. 2. Because it's a desktop application, it would be much faster as compared to javascript-based adblocker extensions.

I think this would be a great open source project.