> It's a lot easier to just accuse Google of acting in bad faith, and Mozilla of being their lapdogs, and ignore any possible evidence to the contrary.

There are two issues at play here.

Manifest V3 is, undeniably, a security improvement over Manifest V2. Providing full read/write access to all websites is a huge security risk, and the fact that we're willing to do it is really a testament to how bad the state of the web is without adblockers.

However, the final standardized version of Manifest V3 limited the size of content filters - essentially, limiting the number of ad sources that you could filter. This severely limits the utility of adblocking extensions.

Mozilla responded to this by promising not to implement the cap in their implemention of Manifest V3 - ie, ignoring that part of the spec and allowing extensions to filter an unlimited number of sources in Firefox. Chrome and other browsers are sticking to the spec, though, including the cap on sources.

I believe UBlock Origin Lite is a downgrade feature-wise from UBlock Origin, but that's because it's targeting both Firefox and non-Firefox browsers. In theory, a Manifest V3 version of UBlock Origin Lite designed for Firefox could provide the same functionality as the Manifest V2 UBlock Origin.

Honestly, I hope someone (whether gorhill or someone else) takes up the mantle and does that, because there's no reason that Firefox users should have to use an adblocker with a less secure design, just because other browsers don't support it.

Last I checked google didn't remove the read-only access to network requests in v3, so an extension that wants to track everything can still do that. It just can't block anything with custom code.