This is a 10000ft overview of the browser market and where things stand. There could be mistakes in the breakdown here, so please excuse them, but I believe this is the general gist of how things are currently going.
Now that Google practically has a monopoly on the browser market, they're implementing what they call Manifest V3.

Manifest and version 3

Manifest is essentially Google's extension platform for Chromium, its engine for the Chrome browser as well as a whole litany of "forked" browsers.
There are some great things about Manifest V3 compared to Manifest V2 - from From Chrome's developer page

• Moving to service workers - Extensions in Manifest V2 had a long-lived background page that took up resources, even when an extension wasn't running. In Manifest V3, we have moved the background context to service workers, which run only when needed.
• No more remotely hosted code - Manifest V3 removes the ability for an extension to use remotely hosted code, which presents security risks by allowing unreviewed code to be executed in extensions. With this change, an extension can only execute JavaScript that is included within its package and subject to review by the Chrome Web Store.
• Changes to network requests - We are deprecating the blocking version of the webRequest API. This required extensions to proxy all network traffic to provide filtering capabilities, which came at a performance and privacy cost. The new declarativeNetRequest API provides a safer alternative for many use cases.
• Other changes - Manifest V3 also adds a number of new APIs and capabilities, improvements to the platform including support for promise-based methods, and more.

At a glance, the one that really gets me is that Manifest v2 allowed remote code to be run. This must slow down computers depending on the host computer connection and even worse must be a huge security risk. So I can imagine this being a good thing.
But what it really comes down to is Google is losing a lot of potential income through the emergence of adblockers.
So where does that leave us if your ad blocker of choice is not going to work as of sometime this year? The easy answer is switch away from Chrome or Chrome based browsers. If you're not using a chromium based browser then google manifest doesn't affect you. But that begs the question, which browsers are Chromium based? I bet you might be using one of these and don't even know it's based on Chromium.

Proprietary
• Arc
• Amazon Silk
• Avast
• Comodo Dragon
• DuckDuckGo
• Epic
• Huawei
• Maxthon
• Microsoft Edge
• Naver Whale
• NetFront
• Opera
• Puffin
• Samsung Internet
• Sleipnir
• SRWare Iron
• UC Browser
• Vivaldi

Primarily non-English
• 360 and QQ, for the Chinese market
• C?c C?c, for the Vietnamese market
• Yandex, for the Russian market

Free Open Source Software
• Brave
• Dooble
• Falkon
• Konqueror
• Otter
• qutebrowser
• Supermium
• ungoogled-chromium

Things that stick out to me are Opera, Edge, Brave and Konqueror. Opera being closed source is somewhat of a surprise, but it's not owned by the same people who originally developed it and word is it spies on people tremendously.
Edge isn't really a surprise other than the fact that Microsoft left the market to just use a chromium based engine rather than continue with their own.
Brave being open source is a bit of a surprise and Konqueror was the first unix based browser I used. Aside from Safari, I think it was my first taste of Webkit.

Alternatives

It begs the question, if I like privacy and hate ads, what does that leave? Not much really since the majority of the browser out there rely on Google now. The big outlier here is Mozilla/Firefox's Gecko engine and other non-google webkit browsers.
I've been searching for a new browser for some time, because things by Mozilla are changing and not for the better.
I'd post a list of Gecko based browsers but it's not promising as most are forked from very old Mozilla code. Firefox is at version 136 and most are from version 52 or 56. They just aren't safe to use.
Mozilla and it's products have relied heavily on a partnership with Google, where Google would pay Mozilla Millions of dollars to make google the default search for Firefox. A ridiculous amount of Mozilla's income came from this deal and when the US government hit google with antitrust lawsuits, then won and threatened to break google up, the writing was on the wall for Mozilla and they needed to find an alternative source of income.
They started by reducing some of the restrictions on facebook and their tools, then had a preferred advertising setting in the privacy section of the browser, went as far as buying an advertising firm and finally have Removed never sell personal data from their FAQ. The long time champion of the private web has fallen.
I'm trying to compile a list of browsers and what they offer so that we can make an informed choice one what to switch to. It might be in the comments or maybe in its own post. But essentially, for now, I'm sticking with Firefox for a couple of reasons:

1. Not falling victim to Manifest V3
2. Helps spread an open and free web
3. They haven't implemented any major privacy breaking things yet, but the writing is on the wall
4. Firefox Sync can be run on a home server, which is something I'm going to do when I set up my own home server using something like CasaOS
5. As a forum member said on either OSNews or ArsTechnica: They're still the best of the bunch, or at least the least worst

One last thing to mention is a browser called Ladybird Browser, not much is known about it other that it's open source and so far mac only. It's completely new but has some key people behind it. You can't download a compiled version yet, but you can compile it yourself from their github page. There's a decent amount of hubbub surrounding it.

I found this through a random internet blog on the current state of Explorer today.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share

very cool, let's compare to this site.

The numbers
Firefox @ 47%
Safari @ 27%
Explorer @ 16%
Chrome @ 8%
Opera, Mozilla, Camino, Opera mini @ < 1%


interesting stuff eh? can you believe Explorer has gone from 95% world domination to 48%? insane.
Has anyone started using ie9?

Apple announced today that safari has more than 11 millions downloads in 3 days. pretty impressive.



excuse the marketing in the second half of that.
i'm sure a lot of people will be going back to firefox after they try safari simply because of the amount of addons and extensions available. i think i'll stick with safari 4 for a while. it's fast, light weight and renders pages properly. until they release firefox 4 that is.