Does it ultimately matter if this version is the one or not? You have to get off the Chrome pony at some point, why not today!

I've been a Chrome user since 2011. I recently switched to Firefox and I got comfortable instantly. It was the case back in the day that Chrome was super blazing fast. No more. Firefox is amazing, fast and there are few things that still annoy me but they'r minor compared to the philosophical issues I have with using Chrome. Fuck AdTech and fuck Google.

I've also completely switched from GMail after 15 years. I remember signing up for GMail when it was in beta. Now I have a free iCloud email and it works just fine. Plus, Apple is about the only company that I can even begin to trust.

I tried Firefox again, immediately encountered several crashes on youtube streaming and a few other places. Chrome it is for me.

I switched to Firefox around the Quantum release on both mobile and desktop and haven't had a crash since. Did you report your crash to Firefox?

It sends crash reports automatically.

Pragmatically, it does. I don't want to be forced to "get off the Chrome pony" right now as Chrome still is notably faster than Firefox on my computers (which are 5 and 8 years old but still do the job). If the next version of Chrome is the one that is going to break compatibility with extensions I use I'm just going to disable updates and this will give me at least a year - many people use even more outdated browsers are okay.

There are going to be multiple good options based on Chromium that will not break extension compatibility. Brave Browser being the most well-known and polished, but there will be more.

As of this month a Google post claims that the anti-adblocker stuff is still under development. I can't find any sources claiming it is in 76, so I don't think it is.

The change is going to be part of Manifest V3. As of yesterday it is still "very much in development" https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/ch... Also they're planning a transition period after which Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from the store, so you'll definitely notice when that happens.

And also it isn't anti-adblocker tech. It is pro-privacy tech which will require adblockers to reengineer how they work which has caused their authors to throw a whine fest and feed some good click bait quotes to the press.

As a veteran chrome extension developer, I'm more inclined to trust extension authors than I am to trust the chrome extension API development team, because it's a bad API with bad documentation and bad performance.

Google's claims that the new API will be faster were already shown to be a blatant lie.

Your argument is that I shouldn't trust my privacy to Raymond Hill but I should trust it to Google?

Accusing someone of astroturfing is specifically against the site guidelines (for good reason, it’s like being accused of being a witch. There is no defense against it).

Maybe edit out that paragraph?

Isn't that only in chrome, not chromium? I didn't think that was being upstreamed.

Opera, Vivaldi, Brave all said they'd change the code to keep the ad blocking capability of uBlock etc. and they build on Chromium.

No.