But they’re not blocking ad blockers. They’re restricting a huge attack surface which has the side effect of making it harder to build ad blockers. With this change, extensions can “only” alter/inspect/redirect/block 30,000 domains if they use the webRequest API. That’s not enough to build uBlock Origin with, but at least there’s limit now.
Google should add a specific ad blocking API (though I suppose that name would run afoul of market competition laws, so maybe they’d need to workshop that stuff info “content enhancers” or whatever) before removing the ability for extensions to hide/block/redirect/alter arbitrary requests, but the way extension’s currently work is pretty terrible.
It’s all fun and games if uBlock Origin uses this API, but if one of your other extensions get bought out by a Chinese malware company, you’d be wondering why “save downloads to Nextcloud” and “remove Google search bar from the browser home page” were able to steal all the money out of your checking account and open several credit cards in your name.
Google’s approach sucks, but in my opinion other browsers should show stronger warnings when installing extensions with access to everything you do in a browser (and outside it, if you screen share).
I don’t really care about Chrome, Chrome users can just download another browser if they don’t like ads. I do care about the risks in other browsers, and browsers need to do a lot better communicating and compartmentalising this risk to end users.