Feel like Google is ready for their end game of shakedown everyone: advertisers, content creators, and users.
They have been at this shenanigans for years with Firefox, where Youtube and all their products use extensions that only Chrome implemented:
YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube’s Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome.
Recently, their relentlessly push for Manifest V3 which basically neuter the adblockers by severely limit the extend how an extension can intercept a request. Now, only the browser can do it, which put all control on Google hand to decide what user can and cannot see. By hijacking the W3C and using Chrome dominance, they become de-facto web standard.
Both this and the Manifest V3 push happening at the same time is not a coincidence. Their target is clearly adblockers and openweb standards, where thing can interact independently from their walled garden platform.
They literally use Microsoft’s playbook of “Embrace, extend, and extinguish” (EEE)
Back then, M$ got an anti-trust suit hit by the DOJ which stopped them on their track, which ironically, what give Google the chance to flourish. I’m not sure we can bring another anti-trust hit to Google. They’re basically Microsoft 2.0 with much more discreet and subtle violations as seem like they learned from Microsoft’s antitrust case.
Also hoping this adblocks backsplash will push people back to Firefox. They’re one of the few non profit org that still supports the open web. They have been sabotaged by Google from inside and outside for years and losing users as a result.
