As Chrome Suicide Day finally approaches (after being delayed a year) I thought I'd bring up one point about the supposed morality of Manifest 3 that I don't think has been mentioned.
Google has always insisted that Manifest 3's limits are needed to protect user privacy from an extension gone rogue. They claim that letting uBO examine the flow of data in the detail it needs to means letting any extension examine that flow and report it to bad actors.
(I'm aware others have attacked this by pointing out that, technically, Manifest 3 only removes "blocking", meaning a rogue extension could actually still appropriate all the "valuable data" that Gorhill lets slip between his fingers; it just can't also pretend to be a full-strength adblocker. But that's a completely independent line of attack from my own.)
Google is not just a browser maker and advertisement broker. They also run half of the smartphone app store duopoly.
One thing a lot of end-users really want is an adblocker that works on smartphone apps. Google prevents that from happening. They are sympathetic to app authors' argument that dodging the ads on "free" apps amounts to "piracy", and kind of have to be since if they didn't app authors would flee to Apple. (Apple is in the same boat.)
There is one way for a smartphone user to block ads anyway. That is to turn off mobile data and route all traffic through a Pi-Hole like solution. But most smartphone owners aren't clever enough to set that up themselves.
For such users, solutions have appeared in the form of "adblocker" apps that are actually just packaged VPNs with "Pi-hole" functionality baked in. (These apps require subscriptions, since they cannot run entirely locally.) This arrangement creates a golden opportunity for the very evil Google claims to be fighting with Manifest 3.
If Gorhill betrayed us (and somehow Mozilla's "Recommended Extension" review process failed), he'd eventually be caught and unable to deny it since web extensions are archived and easy to reverse engineer. But with those smartphone adblockers, all the filtering is done in the adblock seller's datacenter, not the user's phone. Any data collection would be impossible to detect.
If Google actually cared about rogue adblockers spying on people, they'd provide a way to provide "just as good as Pi-Hole" adblocking on a smartphone with no need to involve another computer. They don't need to (further) offend their app programmers by providing Firefox-level adblocking (that can bypass blocker-blocking), they just need to give the user everything he could achieve with a VPN.
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