This is the point that company breakups start to make a lot of sense.
When Google can do something that every one of it's users hates and none of us can do anything about it, they perhaps have too much market power.
I don't think this is remotely the case. Quite a few tech-savvy people I know (some of them software developers) use Chrome and mostly don't care about whatever Google does with it. I mention "manifest v3" and get a blank stare. I talk about advertising and ad blockers, and most people don't care, with some of them not even using ad blockers.
We really live in a bubble, here on HN. Most people think of privacy as some abstract thing that they have little control over, and are mostly fine with that. And some are even also fine with government erosion of privacy, in the name of "save the children" style arguments, and of corporate erosion of privacy, in the name of getting free stuff in exchange for their personal information.
It's a sad state of affairs. If most people really did care strongly about these sorts of issues, then I think it would be baffling why we haven't seen more change here -- after all, Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use. But the lack of change is no surprise: most people don't care.
If this weren't true, Apple could just start inserting ads into every iphone's Safari window tomorrow, and Youtube could serve the ad in the same stream as the video to defeat adblockers, and they'd make a bunch of extra money with no downside. The fact that they don't do this suggests that Apple and Google understand this: people only tolerate restricted platforms that do a convincing job of pretending to be unrestricted. In practice, this means that step 1 of Google foisting off user-hostile stuff on us is getting Firefox to include it too, which is presumably why they spend so much money on it.
Yet, noone cares, even on HN.
This is false. Safari supports Manifest V2 and has no plans to deprecate it.
I'd guess that you're confused because Safari lacks support for webRequest BlockingResponse: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
Just slapping another name on it doesn't make the issues go away.
This is not true either. There are many different aspects to Manifest V3, such as restrictions on script execution.