Apple/Safari adopted pretty much the same architecture on Ad Blockers. Maybe just maybe the conspiracy theories are all wrong, and there was actually a legitimate, technical reason for choosing a restricted API.
If this rolls out, I'm going to very loudly tell my friends to use Fox, and not stop.
I feel sad that each time this comes up even on HN it's always "Google, ad company, bad". There's a mention elsewhere about 30k limit being limiting. Why aren't we discussing alternative enforcement metrics, and request for inclusion?
Without any further explanation that sounds rather unlikely.
The change is very publicly criticized and keeping legitimate reasons that could've increased support secret is a really counter intuitive strategy.
Apart from that I think it's not far-fetched or particularly conspiratorial to assume that an ad-company might have an interest in restricting ad-blocking.
"When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras."
What kind of freedom do Chrome users get?
I'm not sure if this is possible in Chrome's proposal though.
Maybe this change will finally get people to prune Easylist which had 30% outdated cosmetic-filter cruft when I last sampled it along with hobby horse websites <0.00001% people would ever visit. Right now it's basically like an append-only legacy CSS file.
1) avoid being locked out of platforms by not controlling the default search. Apple and Microsoft could either extract a high toll, or crush search engines by controlling what search engines people see by default. On iOS, Apple does extract a toll to be the default, but MS was denied this, by Chrome beating out Windows Mobile and Edge/IE. If your company is wholly a web company, and someone else controls the key onramps to the web, you're potentially in trouble.
2) If the Web becomes a toxic wasteland (which was happening prior to Chrome when IE6 ruled), users flee more towards silo'ed platforms and apps. A healthy web is as beneficial to Google as a healthy forest is to a timber company.
It's like saying "The New York times is an advertising company, not a news company, so why would they invest in journalism schools if the point is to sell classified ads?"
And then there's just plain old interest in technology. Lots of projects at Google start from 20% engineers time, and grow to large successful projects, without any business model, they're just costs. You've got more than a thousand open source projects I bet being run by Google engineers, the majority of which exist because someone wanted to scratch an itch. Go, Angular, Tensorflow, Guava, et al, don't make money and aren't intended to.
I disagree that Google is a web company proper. It might have been years ago, but nowadays Google is capable of bending the very rules of the web and internet at their liking. As a result it can now essentially define what the web (okay, the modernish web) is, and that makes your points moot. Also Google's open-source projects are irrelevant to this discussion, much like that using React doesn't void your rights to criticize Facebook.