Why wouldn't they just patch that part of the code? I'm seriously surprised though Microsoft didn't build an adblock in IE much earlier, that would have stopped google in the tracks.
That part of the code doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it's baked in at a rather low level in the browser. That's how it can block requests! In JavaScript!
Google will begin by deprecating the webRequest block API (that's in progress). Then they will begin deprecating the code that supports it.
Then they will begin removing and deleting the "unnecessary" code. Then, at some point in the future, they may make other breaking changes to the webRequest flow that assume that requests cannot be blocked. Each time Google writes new code that assumes webRequests cannot be blocked, Microsoft must patch that code too.
With each successive change, Microsoft will be forced to make a choice:
1. Support both Google's webRequest API and the Microsoft's, at increasing cost with every merge and rebase where Google has cut off or altered another piece of functionality
2. Adopt Google's API and break ad blockers
Google has a profit motive in shrinking the ad blocking market, and therefore they have a perverse incentive to make their browser worse for users, and more expensive for any forks that want to maintain ad blocking functionality.
Google Chrome Enterprise didn't exist when Manifest version 2 was introduced (and version 1 deprecated), so it's difficult to guess what will happen this time around. But if the policy now is the same as then, here's what will occur:
Chrome will deprecate in a release, approximately 1 year later Chrome will block updating of any extensions using the old manifest, and after approximately 18 months they will remove any extensions from the Web Store that have not updated, and approximately 2 years after the deprecation later the code to support the manifest will be removed.
The video Orange man posted on twitter wasn't doctored. Media has changed the definition of doctored to suit them. It was edited to show only relevant parts but there was nothing fake about it.
Why not let media show the original so called undoctored version?
Video at top has her speaking at normal pace, and then shows a slowed-down version. Is this something you dispute? I have not followed the story at all, beyond seeing that article.
Equally, AUCTeX in Emacs for direct editing of LaTeX (best TeX editor there is).
(For more complex documents, I've had better luck manipulating TeX directly rather than via another layer, e.g. Org mode, which is fantastic for other things.)
Maybe for your use case, but there are plenty of basic applications for which it works fine, if a little slow. The WSL2 implementation should make it fully competitive option for lightweight tasks like frontend web dev and introductory programming - if MS's figures on performance improvements are accurate.
WSL replacing Linux in the near future is, as you say, not a serious concern. But it being a viable alternative for a portion of the people who would normally use desktop Linux is quite realistic, I think. What say?
When it is released it will likely be as buggy as WSL is today. WSL is over 20x slower due to Microsoft's crappy filesystem. They are still using a custom kernel even though it is a VM now. I don't have high hopes about their terminal either.
