> But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does.

Not at first. Yet over time the work increases as one must differ more and more from Chrome. I believe that's why so many forks are giving up on Manifest V2.

Differentiating isn’t as important as not engaging in Google‘s heinous practices

Forks are giving up on mv2 because it's not as important as the people online say it is. If mv2 was what would cause a browser to gain market share they would keep maintaining it, but if the market is not rewarding browsers with mv2 then it does not make sense to maintain.

Seriously. The average person in real life has no idea what MV2 or MV3 is. And despite what people here would have you believe uBlock Origin Lite works nearly as good as uBO and is generally indistinguishable from its MV2 counterpart. A casual user wold not be able to tell the difference, nor do they care.

Indistinguishable because ad blocking still works at the visible end of the spectrum.

Under the hood, what the MV2 uBlock can do and Lite can't is at the least stripping tracking parameters from links and block 3rd party trackers that are cloaked in a subdomain of the originating site.

You’re right it doesn’t impact most people’s decisions but m2 and m3’s differences are quite substantial and meaningful.

That’s overly simplistic and glosses over the actual objections to mv3.

Chrome attained its user base not by merit but by paying third party Windows installers to bundle it.

Forcing it down users’ throats at the world’s most popular website might have helped. Slightly.

Yep. Google has been incredibly aggressive in promoting Chrome over the years, including practices similar to those Microsoft gets lampooned for doing the same with Edge.

The thing is that most of this is invisible to people who already live within Google’s bubble which is probably why they don’t get called out for it. The promotion is visible mostly to those of us who don’t, and it gets irritating.

This is complete nonsense, it's a post hoc copium where you're trying to dishonestly rewrite history from your personal hatered.

Chrome was better than competition pretty much all its lifetime and there's plenty of historic articles to prove it, no matter how much your emotions refuse to accept the history.

You can argue the merits of a product without personally attacking people.

The only personal insult to everyone here is such blatant lying and rewriting of history. And it's telling about the bottom barrel culture of the internet that you're angrier about having someone called out as a liar they are instead of actual lies.

We were there and we didn't install Chrome via some made up toolbar installer, but because it was significantly better than what Mozilla and Internet Explorer offered.

I am plenty calm, I do not know what gives you the impression I am angry. You, however, absolutely need to ease off the gas. You can’t talk to people like this here. You are being needlessly hostile and taking swipes at people. Treat people with respect or just don’t bother commenting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You are incorrect. Chrome was widely bundled with third party installers for much of its history.

https://www.osnews.com/story/25184/adobe-tricks-users-into-d...

https://www.labnol.org/software/chrome-with-adobe-reader/201...

https://forum.filezilla-project.org/viewtopic.php?style=246&...

> nearly 10 % of the installers came with a third-party browser (e.g. Chrome)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016740481...