583 karma · joined October 7, 2019
[Verifying my OpenPGP key: openpgp4fpr:4BCF3BA4BE9FC8194C6FF7BC0A6BE3C9CD4A46F4]
No, the worry about adblock was that Google could now just remove the ability for that work in chrome and there would be nothing you could do, because your forked chromium wouldn't pass the attestation check (cause it would never be blessed by Google). This concern extends to other browsers as well. Because Google is making themselves the signing authority here, they can choose which browsers are allowed and which aren't, letting them force other browsers to add or drop certain features if they want to be granted attestation.
The editor they shipped had some neat features for the time like Intelisense and built-in docs, it even had support for third-party libraries with DLLs. One really neat feature I also remember was that you could turn a SB project into VB with a click of a button, it would create the VS solution and vbproj for you. I'm not quite sure how it worked with the language itself cause VB looks quite a bit different and it wouldn't change your code (no transpiling or stuff like that, just a wrapper).
Funnily enough, I didn't actually move to VB from that, I went to C# (which I have since forgotten). But it definitely got me quite a bit further in my developer journey (now I work with Go at a small org).
My understanding of the situation is more that the right has had many laws shot down consistently by the left leaning Israeli high court (equivalent to the supreme court in the US, except they choose their own judges, not the elected government). Recently, the right has come into a much stronger coalition (after numerous rounds of election over the past four years) and is now using the fact that they are unified enough to finally remove some (most?) of the power the court holds over the Knesset (parliament).
Also, interesting fun fact indeed.