Advocating for the entire browser landscape to be taken over by Chromium is definitely not a middle ground. It's letting the world's largest ad company be the dictator of the web.
I never advocated for that. There's nothing saying a fork has to be 100% in sync with upstream and can cherry-pick what parts it wants to keep. Besides that, there's other Blink-based browsers which are very similar but another level removed from Google
Using a fork to work around Google marking addons are malicious seems like a middle ground between "living with ads" and "using a whole new browser the author has political issues with"
Chrome/Chromium is not a bad browser, and that's not what the commentor you're replying to said. The chromium family all uses a single browser engine. It's bad for the health of the web if everyone uses the same engine. If everyone uses the same engine, any bug, vulnerability, or engine quirk is experienced by EVERYONE if there's only 1 browser.
I don't see the difference. Unless the forks become completely independent, Google will have an outsized influence over them. If Firefox goes down without a replacement independent of Chromium, it'll be the end of the open web.
The problem is that any forks wanting to keep MV2 addons available, is to backport the code for each update. The user would need to sideload the addon since it won't be in the Chrome addon store, and that if the uBo dev even maintain the Chrome version after official support is dropped.
define 'simple'. if chrome ripped the whole extension framework out of the source code, a 'simple' fork will suffer the same fate. (notably Edge also doesn't support uBlock Origin anymore.)
They haven't ripped the whole extension framework (yet...) they just marked 1 extension as "malicious" which causes Chrome to automatically disable it. Presumably this is based on proprietary logic that ties Chrome to the Chrome Web/Add-on Store
Edit: Chromium forks/derivatives