He said basically nothing on this topic in the interview. I guess he's trying to express that they are using open source blocklists in their test harnesses and they may or may not use them in release?

Nothing he said ruled this out, but I think it would be a stupid waste of resources and a slap in the face if they didn't work with gorhill on this.

My feeling is that the point of these consolidations is to centralise the ecosystem of their browser and open up revenue streams. The first does make sense from a user friendliness perspective, new users don't automatically know they should be using uBlock Origin and Mullvad VPN for the best experience. The latter is obviously questionable and undermines the whole ecosystem.

My most pessimistic prediction would be that they don't work with gorhill because he's committed to providing adblock for free, they waste a bunch of resources building an engine from scratch, then they charge a subscription for access to 'premium' up-to-date lists which are really just aggregated open source lists.

Why would anyone want to use an ad blocker made by a company funded primarily by the largest ad company on the planet?

What would it even mean for the ublock origin runtime framework aka firefox to be equipped with an adblocker?!

I think it is not surprising. Adblocker can be a great source of revenue if managed correctly - ad companies will pay to be allowed to show unobstructive and less intrusive ads.

With Google and Meta's cooperation and support?