All of this "debate" is pretty absurd.
Yes the webrequest v3 proposal seems problematic for scripts /malware / crypto / ad / etc blockers.
This is consensual.
Chromium is open source and has those two main actors: opera and Microsoft.
Almost everybody seems to consider chromium in the debate as a proprietary software owned by Google.
And thus argue to switch to Firefox.
Let's be clear, when you look at the technical, chromium is a far superior browser.
Chromium has far more active devs, far more features (look at caniuse.com) and has almost systematically better performance. And it has many others kinds of advantages.
All of the stated advantages are sufficent to consider chromium as the best browser.
So instead of arguing that opera or Microsoft or simply open source community will simply stay in sync with chromium master but keep the patchs for keeping the current webrequest api.
You want people to choose a poorer, less featureful browser which has real consequences on what web devs can offer as user experiences.
This is forgive me, dumb.
What everybody should ask for is to mozilla to get rational and to migrate Firefox to chromium while backportikng the best parts of gecko to chromium 1) and to ensure the respect of privacy in the chromium source code 2)
This would lead us to a web that evolve far more quickly, to the fastest browser and to an implementation which satisfy every interests (the ones of Googles and the one of Microsoft/mozilla)
If Google and mozilla disagreed on something, mozilla should maintain a set of patchs for applying their custom changes (a micro fork)
That's simple but there's still a long way for the medias and the people to understand that.
I would have hoped that hackernews community, wanting to be like the pre-eternal September would debate with intellectual riguour in the common goal of seeking true, sound progress.