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Friday Fun Thread for October 27, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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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.