There has to be google engineers here. Does this just fall on deaf ears? I realize it’s a massive corp but imagine high ranking staff have a say and input. Maybe they don’t and Sundar isn’t worried about that. Or they do a simple cost analysis and short-term they see the benefit and are willing to to risk long term erosion that maybe be minimal. Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I m…
Whereas a normal extension maintainer would transparently update their extension to a new API, removing any features that could no longer be supported, gorhill elected to let the old extension go out of support, and replace it with a similarly named extension under the same organization. The features in the old extension removed in the new one were minor to non-existent. The main worry was originally that they wouldn't be able to cram all the network filtering rules they needed into the limited number that were permitted. However I believe this issue was mostly worked around.
The rest of the issues raised were a masterstroke of politiking on gorhill's part. Basically, google's justification for this removing of apis business was in part to increase privacy/security. Such improvement of course could only arrive if extensions didn't demand broad permission to see all the data on every page a user visits. So gorhill designed the new "ublock origin lite" around not needing to demand this permission. Of course, such an extension necessarily must have much more limited features than the original "ublock origin". Gorhill then presented this loss in functionality as somehow a necessary casualty of the "Mv3" upgrade.
Of course, the original uB0 extension demanded the same broad permission, so this loss in functionality wasn't really a casualty of the new manifest version. Rather, it was an accusation by gorhill against google that their justification for bumping the version was false. The new uB0l extension incidentally supports a mode that demands this broad permission, so in fact the total amount of lost functionality is practically non-existent. The result is that everyone has the opportunity to flame google for their seeming anti-user behaviour. However, to a google engineer this would presumably come across as unfair, and they would presumably feel as if they were being targeted.