Excellent. I hope they continue making Chrome worse on purpose. More reasons for users to switch to Firefox is always good.
Changes in the extensions must be reviewed so advertisers can break blockers for some days until the blockers are fixed and then some more days until Mozilla reviews the changes. Then they'll have another trick ready to break blockers again.
Google is punching WAY above its class. It does not own the Web, or the Internet, and there's a huge number of people willing to prove it.
The mechanism is actually very simple if the content is served using JavaScript, as is the case with videos: make the code that shows the ads create some token and then the media player will check if it's present, refusing to play otherwise.
You can circumvent it with code, but new code triggers new review and, when it's approved, the token is changed and back to square one. In the case of Firefox it might be faster, but I don't think extension maintainers and reviewers can be 24x7 available to play that cat & mouse game.
In Firefox you need to sign extensions to install them or go through the debug menu. Both methods are not easy for the regular user. At the end of the day, either blocking turns to be only for power users/programmers, or a new trust model for browsers is adopted.
Chromium and Firefox are both open source but how many % of their users have actually compiled them from sources? I haven't. Last time I checked, Chromium recommended a minimum 0.5 TB free space. And Firefox now requires two programming languages.
I used to compile my own Firefox because I'm picky, but yeah, not everyone has time and patience for a 30-45 minute compile on 12 year old hardware. The RAM requirements for both Firefox and Chrome are ridiculous.
It wasn't this bad before we wanted to cram everything into JS and the DOM.
Chrome's manifest v3 requires extensions to ship static blocklists.
How can they enforce that? Are they also disabling manual install of extensions from outside the extension “store”?
What about me just pasting in a new filter list myself?
This has already been the case for years unless you enable developer mode and load the extension as an unpacked extension (directory full of files rather than normal extension file) in which case chrome will complain every time you start it.