The situation with Chrome is actually even more misconstrued than that, since ad-blocking performance isn't the only, or even the most important, issue Chromium is dealing with in Manifest v3. Chrome extension security has become one of the biggest time sucks in corpsec/IT security, and that team had been planning for years to address it. But people have a rooting interest in uBO, so none of that gets out.
Google are between a rock and hard place, for sure!
As someone who isn't a corpsec/IT practitioner, though, breaking uBO is literally the most important impact of Chrome's Manifest v3 for me.
I wouldn't mind if Google incorporated uBO as a first-party component in Chromium while applying the restricted policy to all other extensions! Most purported adblockers are crap, if not malware. Pick the best one and restrict the rest.
Unfortunately, I doubt an advertising company is going to incorporate uBO in the browser they provide for free.
I totally buy that breaking uBO isn't Google's goal for Manifest v3! It just happens as a beneficial side effect.
The actual right fix here is for Google to give a blanket exemption to uBO and to nothing else. That's what security people want them to do. Because the underappreciated problem here is that while uBO is fine, ad blockers in general are security tire fires.
Totally agree that's the right engineering fix! I just don't see it happening for dollar and cent reasons:
> The moral dilemma here seems to be that Google is unwilling to privilege a good-citizen adblocker like uBO over other extensions; they're an ad company and any explicit step towards promoting an adblocker probably is hard to explain at shareholder meetings
It might not be the most important issue in the whole Manifest v3, but it's the only issue mentioned for deprecating the particular API that uBO uses to block requests.
