Also, users like me who are in the Google ecosystem and were slowly gathering energy to move off Chrome and switch to Firefox, well, the grass isn't that much greener over there, is it? Back to inertia and apathy.
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I'm sure that other Chromium-based browsers like Brave are picking up a lot of users too. I personally stopped using Firefox on Android because they showed no sign of ever implementing a sandbox in the near future, let alone one with site isolation to stop Spectre leaks, etc.
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I haven't used it on the desktop since a decade ago, but I used it on Android for uBlock Origin. I'd rather just use a Chromium-based browser with comparable filtering built into it, but uBlock Origin is still significantly better than the built-in filtering engine options.
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Could you please give more details : why unblock origin is so much better than filtering lists? (AFAIR, it uses EasyList and EasyPrivacy)
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It's a particularly good implementation able to block more of the connections based on which content isn't needed, along with having some extensions to the filter syntax. It uses more than EasyList and EasyPrivacy. Other implementations aren't able to block as much of it.
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It's a best effort stopgap measure as a form of attack surface reduction and uBlock Origin does it best. I don't believe in blacklisting as a way to fundamentally improve privacy since it's very incomplete, easily bypassed and is pushing advertising / tracking to being 1st party.
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I think the end result of increasing usage of client-side filtering is going to be a strong move towards the tracking / advertising being heavily integrated into site functionality, without an easy way to remove it. Server-side middleware makes this easy for the site operators.
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But the party who wants the tracking can't trust that the site isn't falsifying data, and there's a huge commercial incentive to falsify it. That's why killing third party content is such a good approach.
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It exploits the adversarial nature between the parties who are screwing the user over.
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I don't think it makes that much difference if the code is pulled in by middleware on the server or the browser. Either way, the site can interfere with it, and in both cases they can try to defend against that with obfuscation and having lots of constant churn changing it.
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The older approach that they took of having sites include a script tag pulling in their third party analytics is not working well for them anymore. They're already getting inaccurate, biased data due to the huge assortment of ad-hoc best effort anti-tracking mechanisms deployed.
For example, ubuntu.com has Google analytics on it but I wouldn't be surprised if >50% of the visitors to the site are blocking it in their browsers. The groups of people blocking vs. not blocking it are also not the same, so these kinds of analytics aren't accurate.
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On the other hand, if they do it via their servers and first party code, which they might already do, they are going to get far more accurate and representative data. It can still be 3rd parties providing tracking code / middleware instead of having the browser load from them.
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