[jerf]

I understand Google's motivation for nuking ad blockers, as well as their motivations for denying every which way that that is what they want to do under whatever security justifications they can bring up, even true ones.

I don't see Mozilla's motivation to remove that at the moment.

I mean, speaking for myself, I'd drop them both and follow a fork of the browser that lets uMatrix work, and that's not something I've considered very many times in the past 20 years. Control over what my browser actually connects to has become a top-3 feature concern for me. I was going to say "I suppose 'working' is technically more important to me", but then I mentally wargamed out whether I'd be willing to use a slightly nonfunctional browser to have uMatrix and noticed that I actually already put up with a slightly nonfunctional browser to use it, because uMatrix already breaks a number of sites until I do some whitelisting.

Even if there's a security impact to extensions having too much access to the web request cycle, there's a security impact to them not having enough access to the web request, too.

[dannyw]

The majority of funding Mozilla’s comes from Google, including receiving a portion of all ad revenue through google search.

A “adopt manifest v3 or we cut your funding in half” could be behind the scenes.

[diablerouge]

I think that's an important thing to remember - we can always fork it and move on if they choose to remove the blocking webrequest API.

However, how long that fork can persist, remain secure and retain feature parity is an open question. Should Mozilla cave and the community fork be unpopular, Google will definitely have a monopoly on the browser space.