My mom told me never to click "I'm feeling lucky" because she thought it had something to do with porn because it's a phrase people would say about sex.
Evil Chinese company as opposed to an evil American one?
And yet many Chromium forks are following suit and disabling Manifest v2 support. The idea that these things "don't need support" is silly when we're talking about the Herculean effort of maintaining a browser. Yes, anyone can but when the vast majority of browsers are Chromium forks instead of individually created and maintained ones, how much effort do you think those organizations have?
It's good that browsers like Brave have an alternative means of ad blocking, and Firefox even has Brave's exact same blocker built in now, but the idea that "you can just fork and block" is missing the point.
Google has effectively won. They are the de facto controller of web standards now that the majority of browsers use Chromium. When they began dropping support for Manifest v2 in 2019 it was the same year they said ad blockers were a major threat to their revenue in their publicly filed shareholder statements. This isn't some conspiracy theory either, you can literally go look that up. They dropped v2 because ad blocking was too powerful and gutted it in v3. They know that the ecosystem of browser forks they helped create depends on their dev effort and won't keep v2.
Even if v2 and ad blocking stay around, people still need to get the fuck off of Chromium. It's ads today, but could be something else tomorrow. The problem is Google getting to easily control what like >80% of browsers see and do all because they control Chromium. Even if Google was suddenly like "you know what, we're turning v2 back on," I'd still be practically begging everyone to stay the fuck off of Chromium and get into something Firefox based. This is about so much more than just ads.
Ghostery blocks trackers then sells data about your tracking blocking habits. It was the first tracker blocker I heard of but Privacy Badger is the better one nowadays.
it still boggles my mind that Microsoft developed Edge as a standalone browser as a replacement for IE then just said "nah, let's just use Chromium."
I only use Brave when some site is genuinely broken on Firefox and actually needs Chromium. I only do this because of its built in ad blocker. I'm open to other suggestions. My default is Firefox.
They're really gonna make me buy Sex 2 after I paid for all the cosmetics for Sex 1?
I have a few, I'm sure, but the one that comes to mind is my hatred of PDFs. Or, I suppose more accurately, the things people choose to use PDFs for. If something is not primarily meant to be printed, then a PDF is a suboar choice to something like HTML. Worse, virtually EVERY place you're getting a PDF from is already a website so they already have the ability to give you HTML.
You can create a single HTML file, embedding all images, CSS, JavaScript, etc. directly into the file. Then you can open it in your browser. It works. It's easier to read too, unless you want to print it. I would argue that in the vast majority of cases they actually aren't being printed. And get this, you can actually print HTML files too, ya know. So PDF is really only better if you need to print something with a very specific and strict layout, like a brochure or something.
"But Jackby, I use PDFs and I love printing them"
Okay, that's fine, I just think you're the exception. I think most people open them in browser or some PDF viewer and never print them ever.
My favorite response to this opinion was someone telling me that having all the CSS and JS in one file makes it load slower. Like uh, off my computer? Because I'm talking about distributing the file itself, not hosting it on a website. I think web folks just latch onto best practices for the web.
This but unironically.
Firefox with uBlock Origin on mobile does that too. That said, I do use Brave on mobile when I need a Chromium browser and the Chrome Mask extension doesn't cut it.

My mom was weirdly prudish in the '90s and early '00s, I don't really know why. Like she wouldn't let me watch Dexter's Lab because she thought it was gross or something? Idk. Weird time.