I'm no MS fan but in this case it's Google that's doing the 3 Es. First they bundled their own adblocker in Chrome (embrace), then they're making their own standards to dictate what 3rd party ad blockers can do, under the guise of improving performance (extend) and now they're making it harder to make efficient 3rd party adblockers (extinguish).

It's pretty clear what the plan is here, Google naturally sees ad blocking as a threat and they know that they can't outright disable ad blockers so they take the long route to take it over. Make it functional enough that most users won't bother looking for an alternative but make sure that it can't threaten your business model.

I’m no Microsoft fan, but that isn’t really a thing anymore is it? Of the tech giants, MS seems the least noxious now.

Jeez not this trope(|tripe) again. It's boring and it's tedious. It's in the past. Under different management. Sure MS are no angels, but they seem to be doing far less harm these days than Google/Facebook et al.

For Christ's sake, it's not like Microsoft-written code is just irreversibly cursed.

It's corporations in a monopolistic position that let EEE happen - you know, like what Google is doing with Chrome right now.

If Internet Explorer's engine released under GPL or MIT can break Google's monopoly without simply handing it over to Microsoft, then all the power to it.