"Extensions act on behalf of users, they add capabilities to a user agent, and deprecating the blocking ability of the webRequest API will essentially decrease the level of user agency in Chromium, to the benefit of web sites which obviously would be happy to have the last word in what resources their pages can fetch/execute/render."
>Extensions act on behalf of users, they add capabilities to a user agent, and deprecating the blocking ability of the webRequest API will essentially decrease the level of user agency in Chromium
This is off-topic, but I felt the same way about most data privacy problems. It was my own browser that was giving out the information and I would still like to see better control over it by default. Data privacy laws are simply a bandaid that don't help at all against malicious actors.
I already leave websites that become unusable with adblock on, or without it on. It will just trim down on the amount of sites I go on.
If it's something I'm particularly interested in, I look for a cache, snapshot or whatever.
Edit: Or just read HN comments.
All sites which are on Google Amp. Google, whenever it can, "helpfully" gives me the amp site and then I have to find and click the link to the actual site to get to the "readable" version.
In other words, if your "solution" to the problem as outlined in the OP involves google, you already lost.
My money is on news sites and other paywall sites doing that first. How long before they stop letting us "open in new private window"? Washington Post doesn't even allow that anymore -- a shame too, since I haven't read a single one of their articles since then.
That said, we should all fight for changes that let extensions like uBlock maintain feature parity.
Disclaimer: I'm both a Chromium developer and a uBlock Origin user and speak only for myself.
If they have something working with one API, they have to have a good reason to re-implement it with a new API. It may be 'fast enough' and reliable, so why go through all that pain?
Or, it's just the long tail of API consumers (e.g. site on the web). Some things aren't maintained and updated, but they don't go away.
Once the browser reaches its natural Borg-self, transparent user-level tools will be all that provide a semblance of control. Well that, and Firefox.
Blocking at the network layer will leave the iframe blank, but the modal will still be present. It's not such a good user experience, especially for less savvy users who might be confused by a mysterious blank modal.
On the other hand Chromium is relatively simple to adapt with many real world examples to learn from.
(Personally I think they should stick with EdgeHtml but it seems that ship has sailed).
However, this does provide an opening for MS edge, if MS forks Chromium for Edge and excludes user hostile “features” such as this.
There is a quite a bit of adware which uses unsigned Chromium to push their wares.
That is the malware installs a modified Chromium with all the "extras".
So anecdotally, when I see Chromium on a users computer I assume the worst (that I have a cleanup task ahead).
On the flip side Chrome's profiles are nice and I wish macOS supported more of it.