It's worked well on safari because most of its users are people who don't care about those limits. Traditionally safari has been a relatively closed ecosystem (I haven't used it in a long time but I remember an entire lack of support for extensions at one point), so the people who would care about these changes never used it to begin with.

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.

Safari had plugins from day one. As far as I know. Here is an early plug in from 2010 ( https://www.cultofmac.com/47232/macheist-tweaks-gruber-with-...)

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

It's nowhere, which is the point. I bet if they were to add manifest V3 (the thing people are upset about) to chrome for Android, it would be received much more positively than this.

This is what I meant. The content blocking framework that works with both Safari on iOS and the newer web view has been around for four years.