Question: since adblockers are against their TOS now, why don't they just remove them from the web store ?

Only a fool would miss that opportunity to market their browser at that point, but its seems strange to me they're playing this gang war

First They went after invidious, then they slowly started blocking adblocker only for desktop users..

I think that the plan is to not hit people where it hurts directly ( which is mobile phones ), just start slowly taking things that only matter to a small percentage of users, and once that's taken care of, move to more noticeable stuff

Guys relax. Most of the 'research' comes from this reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/

It points out following code in youtube's polymer script:

setTimeout(function() {
    c();
    a.resolve(1)
 }, 5E3);

But exactly this code does show up on a stock installation of chrome too, and it does not check for the user agent. One of the responses goes a bit deeper into what the code above could do: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/ka08uqj/

It is rather clear, that this code is not aimed at firefox users to slow down their loading time.

I wonder what would happen if Google manages to destroy itself with increasing shenanigans like this.

I mean, so much of digital based stuff relies on them for some extent.

i've got some irrational nerd rage going on right now reading this

less about google, more about the individuals who programmed this. holy hell