Both of them simply patch support back in, but they will not be able to do that once the code is actually removed from chromium upstream on later versions. They are not going to maintain it. Helium will take Brave route and integrate the Adblock (probably brave one that is open source). But this is irrelevant, at the end of the day the main topic is the fact that google decided v2 had to go, and other derivatives browser had to comply as they have not enough resources to maintain a full fork of chromium.

V3 yes, obviously. V3 is what caused the reduction in API that prevented proper adblocking. V3 adblocker are less capable, cannot do dynamic blocking and delegate the blocking to the browser that can impose rules.

Brave work around this by directly injecting the adblocker in the browser, bypassing extensions API entirely. Other browsers do not do that. As of today I do not know of any browser maintaining a fork of v2. When Google killed it with v3 it was gone. Which browser are you talking about?

No, open source chromium parts are not fine. You can see this with the effort from Google to limit adblocker extensions with manifest v3, now backed in chromium. In the past other browsers had to strip privacy sandbox from chromium. Google tried to put WEI directly in chromium before it was stripped in November 2023. Google has become the cancer of modern web and abuses chromium to impose control over 80% of browser market, the same way Apple does on iOS. Long gone the time when Google motto was “don’t be evil”.

Reality is that the only browsers are safari, chrome and Firefox. Anything else is using the engine of these three and heavily dependent on the creator of those 3 to ship anything. Safari is the new IE, Firefox is not without his problems. Vivaldi would protect you from this kind of AI download (maybe) but is not like it is anything else then the chrome engine with a good skin on top. And on iOS all browsers are safari with a skin on top because apple say so.