Again, we really need to separate "MV3 - the theoretical idea" and "MV3 - the actual implementation which ships with Chrome". It's two confusingly different worlds.

Nobody should be swaying you to prefer DNR over webRequest (or vice versa) when other browsers show both can be available options for the extensions you use as makes sense for what they try to do/what type you'd like to install. Continuing to support MV2 power levels of functionality does not mean uBO Lite type extensions would need to stop working the way they do, it means uBO type extensions would continue to work the way they do. I.e. the biggest failure of MV3 is not in lacking anything new whatsoever, it's in forcing the removal of a lot of API options which were useful in the name of ulterior motives.

> You can definitely do anything that DNR can do with webRequest, nobody can dispute that. The point is that there are things you can do with uBO lite that you can't do with uBO (and vice versa!). It's not a straight downgrade, there are powerful new features.

It's like you sold your house for a mobile home but tell the neighbor it's not a straight downgrade because it's red. Great, but why are we praising that instead of painting the house red?

Funnily enough, this morning I ran across another feature I didn't realize was missing in MV3 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/discussions/369. Perhaps keeping the functionality to know what was actually blocked to the extension was too powerful.

> the biggest failure of MV3 is not in lacking anything new whatsoever, it's in forcing the removal of a lot of API options which were useful in the name of ulterior motives.

What was the ulterior motive? If it was to break ad blocking, it seems like they did a really terrible job, as MV3 ad blockers work great. That's not me saying that, here is a paper from researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt who tested it:

> Moreover, cross-browser experiments yield comparable outcomes, and visual inspection confirms that MV3 ad blockers work effectively without significant ad flickering or loss of functionality

From: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01000

> Funnily enough, this morning I ran across another feature I didn't realize was missing in MV3

I think you could accomplish this by redirecting instead of blocking, then increment a counter in a webRequest callback. There would obviously be a performance cost, as blocking is so cheap and callbacks are expensive...

Regardless, I think it's jarring hearing you call custom DNR rules "painting the house red", a legitimately powerful feature... and then point to a missing counter in the UI as evidence of lacking features!

Anyway, let's leave it there!