> open source nature is something of a technicality

No, but maybe this highlights that it's never accurate to conflate "open source" or "free (as in speech) software" with end-users having power over the people providing resources to the project.

That's kinda true with every open source software. As soon as some branch has a sizable chunk of developers, forks are discouraged, because either you need to keep up or give up eventually. That's what makes torvalds/linux special and why people want to upstream. If the upstream doesn't accept: oh well.

I keep telling that folks shipping Chrome forks and Electron junk have helped Google turn the Web into ChromeOS Platform.

And then they complain about Safari.

Had it been today, and Google would have no issue pushing for PNaCL.

I don't think this is the case.

Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.

I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.

Brave's built in adblocker is on par to uBlock Origin for me.

Fortunately all you need is one clanker to maintain the patches. What used to be immensely expensive human work (and tedious!), is now just ”claude please re-enable manifest v2 and rebuild an installer”

Non-user hostile browsers will just build in the ad blocker. I have been using Brave Origin (the paid version of Brave that doesn't have all the extras) and the built-in ad blocking has been very good, including YouTube, etc.

Until 2023, Edge was sending every URL you visited to bingapis.com.

Microsoft's current privacy statement also says "Depending on your settings, this browsing history is sent to Microsoft"

The telemetry and ads (on start page) didn't bother you? I'm surprised there's seemingly a contingent of people who are too lazy to install any other chrome fork (eg. Brave), but are motivated enough to up sticks and switch to firefox the moment ublock is removed.

Vivaldi is about to drop support for Manifest V2 as well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1urieed/com...

I'd been using it solely for GMail / Google Drive / etc. at work, for whatever improved compatibility a Chromium browser might provide over Firefox, which I use for everything else. I got the warning that UBlock Origin won't work, and I immediately ditched Vivaldi. I'm sad about it, I think Vivaldi otherwise is a good browser.

I love Vivaldi, but it also uses Chromium. If an extension is not in the Chrome Web store Vivaldi will not be able to install it.

Firefox seems to be the only reasonably mainstream option for proper ad blocking.

Chromium being open source is not a mistake. Letting google be the sole driver and not forking it has been. People who want control over their browsers have options. It's a fight because most people don't care about these things.

There is no “browser business,” because people are - with rare exceptions - unwilling to pay for a web browser. Even Firefox is ad-supported indirectly via its default search contract with google.

Right. For example, Firefox Mobile doesn't support hitting ctrl+T to open a new tab, completely breaking flow for anyone on a tablet with a keyboard or their phone docked to a monitor.

Most laypeople I know haven't seen an ad blocker in action ever.

I don’t use adblockers. If a site has too many ads to be usable, I don’t visit it.

I use noscript instead of an ad blocker. I find it blocks the intrusive ads. I do not mind what I view as normal ads (ie: text or link), but these video and popup ads drive me crazy. I find noscript blocks the "bad" ads.

I install Firefox and uBlock on friends/family devices as often as I can.

In case your assumption here is that TFA is about Edge disabling adblockers: it's not. It's just removing ManifestV2 support. ManifestV3 is still supported. Despite what one might assume, MV3 does not seem to measurably diminish the effectiveness of adblockers; if anything, it improves it. (Source: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0027.php)

People can create the world, but they do need a lot of time. A lot of money buys you time, so nobody 'poor' can keep up. That wouldn't be a problem for web UAs, if the standards wouldn't be 'improved' at the same path as well. It's kinda like proof of work, but for standard bodies and ownership of a system.

They have control over what they distribute. Chromium and Firefox are both open source and people can (and should) use derivatives they find acceptable.

DNS based adblockers have strictly worse adblocking capabilities than manifest v3 adblockers. I mean, sure they have their uses (eg. blocking ads/telemetry in apps or whatever), but bringing them up in this context doesn't really make sense.

Some ads (e.g. I know YT ads used to be this way, haven't looked recently) can't be blocked at the network level because they are served from the same domain/servers as the content.

Rules are limited (in syntax and number) and you can only ship updated rules with updated extensions (at least you can skip the queue if you only update rulesets but it's VERY annoying to do). It's also missing a bunch of features: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... (I see here that replacing response body is possible with Firefox only, is that your use-case?). MV2 was miles better.

It always was.

Lets hope it stays that way :)

But if offered enough $, I fear it will join that no-bocker bandwagon.

Brave as well?

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