If tomorrow Google turns next-level evil in terms of privacy / steering the web, Microsoft will have forked Chromium within a week, and everyone (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc) will swap their upstream immediately.
People have this illusion that Google has an ironclad grip on Chromium, but they don’t. It’s maximally permissively licensed, the only reason they get to decide much is because they put in (pay) the dev hours.
Or, Microsoft will be happy with this "next-level evil."
My fear isn't that tomorrow Google will start doing the browser-monopoly equivalent of kicking puppies and twirling a black mustache.
My fear is that Google has gradually accustomed everyone to their monopolistic dominance over the web, to the point where they can engage in blatant monopolistic privacy-destroying activities like privacy sandbox and people will still rush to their defense saying "but they haven't broken out the mustache twirling yet!"
I’m simply freeing people from the illusion that Google has “won the web” or whatever. Google is effectively giving everyone a free ride with Chromium. They aren’t forcing anyone onto Chrome (where the real tracking happens), and if they did by making Chromium private from now on, again, forks and upstream swaps would happen at lightspeed.
Mozilla these days seems more happy at pumping out tech-woke messages rather than being privacy first. Hell, they’ve refused to add an adblocker to their iOS browser for years now.
3rd party WebKit browsers are more rare, thus less well-developed.
I’ve settled on using Brave.
Brave does it via their extras. Mozilla mostly via their search deal with Google.
> "Thank you for loving Firefox".
> I really resent the presumptuousness of this message. I never told you I "loved" Firefox. How could anyone "love" a Web browser? It's a functional tool: a doorway to the Web.
I am dying. This has to be one of the funniest things I've read all year.
Guess I just don't care. Some people want it. I mean I change my theme. But there's defaults and I don't have to think about most of these things and they don't affect me or anyone I know, so why care? lol