Open source won the browser battle versus proprietary browsers, but it feels like FSF style "free software" is losing the war. Chrome is certainly open source but product development is completely dominated by Google. Google drives the web standards; they design the "reference" browser; as Google shifts to maintain ad-driven profit margins they're positioned to displace ad blockers.
It doesn't matter if they Manifest V3 implementation is open sourced; If Web Environment Integrity is ultimately implemented then having access to the source doesn't really buy you anything. In a future where WEI is mandatory then being able to build Chromium without WEI empowers you to run a browser that's summarily locked out of services that demand WEI.
Open source mattered much more when simple access to source code gave users meaningful freedom but we're transitioning away from that era. Google is on the path to make open source irrelevant by providing an open source browser that must be built with the Google-specified set of features in order to operate correctly.
We can't claim a victory when open source software implements embrace-extend-extingush semantics.
It doesn't matter if they Manifest V3 implementation is open sourced; If Web Environment Integrity is ultimately implemented then having access to the source doesn't really buy you anything. In a future where WEI is mandatory then being able to build Chromium without WEI empowers you to run a browser that's summarily locked out of services that demand WEI.
Open source mattered much more when simple access to source code gave users meaningful freedom but we're transitioning away from that era. Google is on the path to make open source irrelevant by providing an open source browser that must be built with the Google-specified set of features in order to operate correctly.
We can't claim a victory when open source software implements embrace-extend-extingush semantics.