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They're still trying in the background; Google's still pushing [Chrome Extension] Manifest V3 whose main purpose is to permanently cripple adblockers moving forward. Sure, they met resistance, but there's literally nothing stopping them from just going ahead and having 85% of all browsers (i.e. everything that isn't Safari or Firefox) instantly helpless to block Google's ads.
Sure, they'd lose some marketshare by doing that since Firefox will continue to work and people will start dusting off their old installs, but they'll still have complete capture of the intersection of the "I clicked the Install Chrome ad on Google because I click on everything I see/I just use Edge because it's literally the same thing" and the "my technical relative/acquaintance suggested I use uBlock Origin but if it changed I'd be screwed" crowd.
One of the internal websites at my company only supports Chrome. Not "Chromium-based browsers" like Edge, just Chrome. IIRC, it was an effort to reduce development challenges, and getting 100% of employees to install a program is easier than building something with compatibility in mind.
Given the fact that User Agent switcher addons exist, I suspect that that practice has been increasing and will continue to increase in the future. There's not much point in having multiple browser engines competing if only one is allowed to access the websites you want without (the mildest forms of) "hacking".
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What about all the other Chromium browsers? I doubt they're obligated to adopt it.
They're obligated to adopt it if they don't want to spend developer time patching it out. Which they don't want to afford; after all, that is why they threw out their own browser engines in favor of Chromium in the first place.
And really, what business purpose does permitting adblock in Edge serve? MS runs ads too- even in the fucking Start menu- so they have an incentive to just adopt it wholesale.
It arguably makes sense for Brave (obviously- if they can afford it, of course) and Opera to spend time patching it out, but Google can make that very difficult if they so choose (they've been slowly doing a good chunk of what used to be in the Android Open Source Project into Play Services). And there's really no other browser engine to replace with- Gecko/Firefox never got its Electron moment because Mozilla's leadership is pants-on-head retarded and would rather LARP and invent programming languages they'll never directly see a dime from so it's not a viable replacement.
I disagree that they wouldn't devote the dev time, or at least build off older forks that didn't have Manifest V3, I'm no expert, but I don't think Google's implementation of extensions is critical for maintaining broader compatibility with standards.
While Microsoft certainly craves ad revenue, I think there's a decent chance they don't adopt it simply because it lets them claim that their version of Chromium is superior to the gimped one in Chrome. Maybe they won't encourage ad blocking, but a wink wink towards more savvy users can't hurt. They seem willing to take an outright loss per user, via reward programs and the like, if that lets them maintain their market share or wrest more of it away.
I guess we'll find out soon enough.
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