Sooo... Vivaldi let go of uBlock Origin. I gave it about six weeks and I'm back on Firefox. For now. Yes, I know, I wrote a whole post about leaving.
What killed it: Chromium dropped Manifest V2. Vivaldi kept it alive for over a year longer than expected, credit where it's due, but Chromium 152 closed that window. Google says it's about security and performance. Sure. It's also a company that makes its money on ads deciding what ad blockers are allowed to do. Chromium is open source the way a company town is a democracy.
And it's not only uBlock Origin. Getting away from ads is turning into a treadmill, and none of the usual fixes covers everything:
Built-in blockers give you a list, not a say.
DNS blockers can't touch ads served from the same place as the content.
uBlock Origin Lite is what's left on Chromium, and it plays by Google's rules, so it can only do what Google allows.
Every one of them leaves a gap, and the ads have moved into the gaps.
Vivaldi's built-in blocker is fine, I tried it. But I want to decide what loads on my own machine. For personal browsing I don't want an internet I can't curate my way, and Firefox still lets me. C'est la vie.
If you're picking a browser, ask three things:
What does its extension API let a blocker actually do?
Who can change that without asking you?
How fast could you leave?
For anything Chromium, the answer to number two is Google, whatever logo's on the tab. For Firefox it's Mozilla, who I've complained about plenty. But uBlock Origin runs there, so that's where I am.