I feel like it’s less a conspiracy and more that some people will accept nothing less than no ads or tracking whatsoever, even if it makes no economic sense with regards to how sites support themselves.

Meanwhile, attempts like Mozilla’s Privacy-Preserving Attribution to allow for showing that an advertising campaign is effective without the granular, per-user tracking are rejected by the community, meaning that the situation never improves in even a small way.

I’d imagine that making it a user choice gets around some of the regulatory hurdles in some way. I can see them making a popup in the future to not use third-party cookies anymore (or partition per site them like Firefox does) but then they can say that it’s not Google making these changes, it’s the user making that choice. If you’re right that there’s few that would answer yes, then it gets them the same effective result for most users without being seen to force a change on their competitors in the ad industry.

What’s the UK CMA going to do, argue that users shouldn’t be given choices about how they are tracked or how their own browser operates?

Looking at it most favorably, if they ever want to not be dependent on Google, they need revenue to replace what they get from Google and like it or not much of the money online comes from advertising. If they can find a way to get that money without being totally invasive on privacy, that’s still better than their current position.

I’m pretty sure that people were unhappy because it was opt-out at first. Now that bridging is opt-in, I don’t think most people have a problem with it and I’ve seen a number of posts from both sides of the bridge so it seems to be working.

That’s true. I know they did increase the number of filters from the initial amount but they really should just make it effectively infinite.

As long as that extension developer can be trusted to have access to read and modify the data of any site you load and to not sell the extension (and its userbase) for a quick buck (see Hover Zoom+ for an example of how much they’re willing to offer, as recently as today).

There are definitely trade-offs between the permissions allowed in V2 versus V3. It really depends on where you think the main threat is (websites and online tracking versus extension developers).

For me it’s not boot licking but recognizing that IA made a huge unforced error that may cost us all not just that digital lending program but stuff like the Wayback Machine and all the other good projects the IA runs.

To do that they need to make sure they have adequate funding and make sure they don’t incur some huge financial liabilities somehow. The Internet Archive failed at that last part when they decided to lend out ebooks that are under copyright without many limits (and potentially with their Great 78 Project regarding music as well).

Are there any semi-popular alternative browsers still based on WebKit? I thought most of them like Brave and Vivaldi were based on Chromium’s Blink rather than WebKit.

That’s likely what they want. If you’re not viewing their ads and your third-party app is even blocking all the tracking, then you are not providing any value to them to keep you as a ‘customer’. All it does is reduce their hosting and serving costs when you’re blocked or when you eventually stop using it.

To be fair, one of the apps mentioned, [Re]Vanced, is literally just the stock app with extra features patched in and the premium features enabled for free (like no ads and downloads). It makes sense that it would be more user friendly. Allowing that modified version doesn’t get them any revenue though while still costing them to host and serve the content to those users.

At least with NewPipe it supports multiple sites and is its own app with their own code and UI.

They already do but it’s pretty restrictive in what can be changed about the experience:

https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-policies-guide#examples_3

They changed it in the article after it was originally posted: https://web.archive.org/web/20231116232800/https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23964509/google-manifest-v3-rollout-ad-blockers

They have a note about it at the bottom:

Correction November 16th, 9:41PM ET: Firefox is based on Gecko, not Chromium. We regret the error.

It’s been in there for weeks/months: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/components/privacy_sandbox

Most if not all other Chromium-based browsers have disabled it though.

They do give you that option for a lot of it: https://myadcenter.google.com/

You can set whether information like income, profession, education, etc is used, + or - different topics/brands, as well as see the ads you’ve been shown in the past.

This feature that the OP posted about however is about doing all this in the browser instead of doing the tracking on their servers and across various websites with embedded analytics/tracking code. The end goal is also to get rid of third-party cookies entirely, hopefully shutting down that method of tracking, while still being able to provide targeted advertising.