But, when Google tried to implement an ad blocking architecture that wouldn’t allow third parties access to your browsing history similar to that of Safari, geeks were up in arms.

I’m not going to defend Google’s overall business practices, but from what I understand, it’s the same type of architecture that Apple has had for four years and no one said Apple’s intentions were nefarious.

So, no -- Google's method is not sufficient.

I am also a developer. I would like to continue to have the right to code such extensions for myself.

There is arms race and you want adblockers (good guys) to give up any improvements in perpetuity, that is a recipe for losing.

Me installing uBlock for parents has improved their browser experience and security. I'd rather risk uBlock being compromised and having to phone them to uninstall it than have them being at the mercy of adtech, spyware, and scammers companies in 5 years.

A personal computer has always been very complicated and using it has always been a risk in itself. I remember a time when a virus could damage the computer's hardware, and someone who knew how to program in BASIC (edit: or LOGO) was not considered as a "minority".

My point of view is that we need to make users aware of the risks and make them more responsible because things will not get any easier.

No need to optimize, I switched to Firefox, the browser for the minorities ;). I really liked Chrome though.

How has that been working for the last 30 years? Why would it start now?

Computers have been mainstream consumer appliances since the “multimedia PCs” were a thing in the mid 90s. Most people no more want to program computers than they want to fix their own cars.

I think a lot of people would say that Google is a pretty evil company in many respects, whereas Apple isn't exactly 100% saintly, but at least their profit and business goals align more closely with what is generally considered to be good for customers.

The proposed change that would have made ad blocking impossible still allowed non blocking request interception, it would have absolutely 0 impact on people trying to sell your browsing data via an extension, and a huge net increase in people selling your browsing data by people selling your browsing data by website embedded trackers.

So now, when safari comes in with these changes that only add value compared to their previous offering (which again was substantially behind the competitors), users respond positively because the only users that remain don't know the difference between blocking the rendering of an ad and blocking the request to the ad server. So, when they hear "Ads are blocked", they don't understand the nuances that reveal to you that ads are not really blocked at all from a privacy perspective.

The reason Chrome didn't have a similar response is because the people who cared about these changes were already using chrome. So, when chrome announced an update that removes these privacy-protecting features, the users were knowledgeable enough to realize what the changes actually meant from a privacy perspective, and so responded poorly.

And even if the users were the same, safari added a feature (you can now kind of block ads in safari, compared to the zero adblocking you could do before), whereas chrome is removing a feature (you can no longer block requests to ad servers, something you could do for years). So of course the reaction to safari will be at worst lukewarm, because compared to the previous editions of safari it was an improvement.

But speaking of “closed”, where is the ad blocking extension for Chrome on Android and embedded web views?