The problem isn't within Google. They aren't doing anything substantial to lock users into Chrome. The problem is unforced errors on the part of both Apple and Mozilla creating awful web browsers that aren't worth using.
I feel this is meant to trigger people into reacting and causing a flame war.
Google has been making its own web properties work well on Google Chrome while making them perform poorer or make them break on other browsers. Google Chrome optimizes for Google, not the web, and certainly not “the open web”.
[0]: https://xcancel.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018
[1]: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
Many new versions and updates of FF that I've tried have claimed to be much smoother and more efficient, only for the exact same shit to start happening across the years and multiple laptops used.
I went back to Firefox about 5 years ago and not even once missed Chrome since.
The only time I've had to touch about:config in the last several years was due to some smartcard related bug caused by an external library, that forced me to tweak firefox's behaviour. Once that bug was resolved, I switched it back.
Firefox being slow is well into the self-perpetuating FUD territory.
https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...
And Apple provides end to end encryption of browsing history so it can’t decrypt your browsing history
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2021/03/25/whats-in...
> What’s interesting about the Apple decision is that it appears to explicitly separate browsing history and bookmarks, rather than lumping them into a single take-it-or-leave-it package. Apple doesn’t claim to provide any end-to-end encryption guarantees whatsoever for bookmarks: presumably someone who resets your iCloud account password can get those. But your browsing history is protected in a way that even Apple won’t be able to access, in case the FBI show up with a subpoena.
https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/
More specifically the Topics API
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Topics_API
It’s opposed by both Mozilla and Apple and is only supported by Google/Chrome.
Privacy and security > Ad privacy
Ad topics: Generates a list of your interests based on your browsing behavior.
Site-suggested ads: Allows advertisers to retarget you based on your interactions.
Ad measurement: Enables advertisers to assess ad performance.
Toggle each of these settings to "Off" to disable them.
And I slightly misspoke. I said it was only supported by Chrome. More accurately, it is supported by Chrome and some Chromium based browsers.
This feels like quite an exaggeration. I’ve used Chromium-derived browsers only sparingly in the past decade, with Safari and Firefox instead getting the bulk of my usage depending on the platform.
Generally if something doesn’t work under those browsers, the top two causes are unnecessary user agent sniffing with the site working fine once I pretend to be Chrome or the dev simply not testing against anything but Chrome. It’s been vanishingly rare that the browsers themselves were the cause of an issue.
But I have to admit extensions are really lacking, both the infrastructure for installing them and which extensions are available.
I now use Orion which is based on Safari but has native vertical tabs (although not native vertical hierarchical tabs, or support for dumping them as markdown).
Feels like Apple doesn't really care about it
What's disappointing to Google is that all of their kowtowing to the Biden administration's "content shaping" ended up worth nothing in the end. Harris would have rewarded them for that help, but Trump of course hates them for it because it was largely directed at him.