> Users should never had the power to block what we did in the first place.

-- Some prominent ad company which happens to run a search engine as a side business and build a web browser to make ad-targeting better for their customers.

Its like they want their own web crawlers to be slow as hell

They'll carve out exceptions for themselves don't worry. They tried with Web Environment Integrity, it'll be back with a different name.

They do, it prevents any upstart competitors who can't afford that cost.

I think power users are the type of users who can be bothered to install a browser that supports the features that they want (and doesn't implement the misfeatures that they don't want) ;)

This requires a proper alternative to continue to exist. Firefox users already have to make a lot of concessions(i know, i'm one of them). With how Mozilla management is running, we're at risk of the only real alternative being mismanaged into oblivion.

I am cautiously optimistic for ladybird. But itll take quite a bit longer to become viable, sadly.

I hope they change the name of the browser at some point, it sounds vaguely promiscuous (maybe because "ladyboy" is the closest word to it). One reason Chrome started taking off in popularity is because tech enthusiasts appreciated its speed and made their friends/relatives download it. Harder to imagine telling my parents to download something called "Ladybird"...

What do you call small beetles which eat aphids?[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccinellidae

I don't share GP's word association but a possible answer to your question is in your own URL: Coccinella.

Yes, but there seems to be a growing hiatus between the tools used by power users and normal ones. Fifteen years ago everyone had a PC with Firefox, now this browser has a marginal market share, and even personal computers are starting to be a second-class platform, the focus being phones. And products used by a minority tend to be less supported – as shown by the increasing number of sites that don't support Firefox.

Until sites block them completely, which will be easier with attestation

It's already been trivial. There's a few sites showing you a special message or denying access if you block ads. uBlock doesn't really help here that much and if they tried, the issue is very asymmetric - it's much easier to update the site than to patch it again.

So far, most of these sites that try to exclude adblocker users don't detect uBO on Firefox.

Most anti-adblock also fails on Brave. Those that don't can generally be sidestepped with literally two clicks to disable scripts. The remaining few require substantially more tweaking (generally disabling a specific script while allowing others to run) which is outside the domain of most people, but still viable.

Marketshare. People don't care that much.

You may have heard G. Michael Hopf's famous quote: Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

I think we may be advancing to another step in that cycle with software development. Strong, principled software companies created good times in the late 2000s and 2010s, now good times have created software company leaders who are less principled, and the hard times are beginning. And eventually, after the hard times have gone on for long enough, principled leaders will hopefully emerge and create good times again.

That being said:

- I really admire the thinking and moral aptitude that resulted in the Oxide Principles page[0]. Oxide and 37signals[1] are two examples of very principled companies that are keeping good times rolling in their respective fields, and both of them do a ton to support open source software.

- And, there is nothing like ad revenue to accelerate corruption of good principles in software companies that handle user data -- to the extent that I wonder if it's in the same moral category as government officials accepting bribes.

[0] https://oxide.computer/principles

[1] https://37signals.com/

Exogenous factors! <https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/strong-3>

The trouble is, it's hard to say how long the "bad times" arc will last.

Many users don't notice any difference after switching to a Manifest v3 ad blocker. I'll reserve judgment until it actually happens.

What you said is true: I indeed cannot tell the difference between a v2 and v3 ad blocker. But that doesn't change OP's perspective that a v2 ad blocker is a symbol of the power user era. Power users often want customizability to an extreme level. Normal users who block ads simply install the extension and be done with it: they don't write custom rules or adjust the filters.

Not at first perhaps but they will notice when ad networks shift to take advantage of techniques that can no longer be blocked in Chrome.

This isn't the end of uBlock Origin. Just the end of it on Chromium-based browsers.

If you are a power-user you may well benefit from using Firefox where uBlock Origin has always claimed to work best.

By switching you will also be removing power from an ad-funded near-monopoly that feels (correctly) that they can do whatever they want even if it is universally despised by users because the other choices are quickly going away. Every using using another browser weakens that grip, every user using a Chromium derivative allows them to keep trying to wedge new features that no other browser wants to implement for user privacy reasons and creates website incompatibility.

I run multiple brands of browsers including firefox, but all of them use ublock origin. The day chrome hard bans it will be the day I uninstall it.