"Begin disabling installed extensions still using Manifest V2 in Chrome stable"

Hopefully this is the inflection point for Chrome. Despite all their made-up "security" reasons, everyone knows this is solely about making adblock less effective. For many users, adblock is what makes chrome bearable - and if they make it unbearable, then those users will leave. Slowly but surely.

Google seems much too sure of itself making this change. I hope their arrogance pays off just the same as Microsoft's did with IE.

> everyone knows this is solely about making adblock less effective

I thought I knew that.

Then I switched from uBlock Origin to uBlock Origin Lite in Chrome, which is compatible with Manifest v3. I was prepared for the horrible onslaught of ads, expecting at least a quarter would start getting through, ready to switch to Firefox...

...and didn't notice a single change. Not a single ad gets through.

And at the same time, loading pages feels a little faster, though I haven't measured it.

Which has now got me wondering -- what if Manifest v3 really was about security and performance all along?

Because if Google was using it to kill adblockers, they've made approximately 0% progress towards that goal as far as I can tell. If they really wanted to kill adblockers, they'd just, you know, kill adblockers. But they didn't at all.

This is just because Google was especially insidious about how they crippled ad blockers in v3.

Adblockers do multiple things:

1. Visibly block ads from the user

2. Block the user tracking that's attached to those ads

3. Protect the user from malware

4. Save bandwidth and cpu cycles by not loading all that junk

5. Allow control to users over how a webpage is displayed to them

Arguably uBlock Origin Lite can only accomplish some of #1 and a sprinkle of #2 now. And even those abilities are compromised by artificially low limits imposed by chrome in v3 that will eventually allow ad networks to overwhelm those limits and get ads through to users.

Google is 100% boiling the frog here and you/the average user is left in the pot unaware.

uBlock lite can accomplish 2, 3, 4 completely. It's only #1 and #5 that are truly affected by v3. But those two were already pretty limited in chrominum browsers compared to firefox.