As a former chrome user it’s so real. Chrome connects every device for you and once you ARE in the loop it’s hard to leave it. Wanna switch to Firefox? Oops suddenly your authentication doesn’t work anymore. Oh what about those useful Google logins tied to everything now? Good luck with that.

It took me huge effort to switch off chromium based browsers because the longer you use chrome, the more it worms it’s way into all your services making it harder and harder to switch. I still can’t figure out how to seperate my Yahoo account from my Gmail account

A huge reason I left is realising that if google decided I broke their TOS on something like say, YouTube ad blocking, they can just terminate by Google account and every service attached to it suddenly becomes unusable. I’d rather not be taken hostage like that

Edit: for all the wise people in the comments. I was trying to decouple entirely from Google products, not just chrome

We can’t forget that a lot of people have absolutely no idea that this is happening or what it means. Many folks just think the Chrome icon is how you access the internet and have no idea that there are other options. Helping to educate those folks is going to be a significant part of minimizing Chrome’s dominance.

I keep going back and forth with Firefox and Vivaldi. The chrome based browsers just tend to run better. I love firefox on mobile but on desktop it’s tougher for me to stick with. Also Mozilla seems to have a different goal for the future with all the other products and ai weirdness they recently announced.

No lie, I actually had to shift to Chrome from Firefox today. Some websites are straight-up broken on Firefox, while others load painfully slow (e.g. try arc.net on Firefox vs any Chromium-based browser). Not to mention the massive shame of Mozilla leadership treating its own flagship product as a second-class citizen in favour of “AI initiatives” or whatever the fuck those C-suites want to stud into their resumes.

To be fair, chromebooks are great devices for kids, and the family link platform makes keeping them “secure”, easier… a lot easier!!!

Some websites load faster in Chrome. But the reason why Chrome is so ubiquitous is because for normal people, Google is still the plucky user friendly company they were in the early 00s.

Because normies were using IE, then enough of them had their “tech enthusiast” grandson show them Chrome in 2010 and now that’s all they use.

Serious question. Is it actually better for the typical user? I don’t mean people commenting here. I’m thinking about the majority that don’t care about privacy, blocking ads, quality technology, etc. for those people, I’m guessing that Firefox is equivalent. Just another browser that works fine. So why switch??

I work at a small company - absolutely everything from work macros, accounts and shortcuts are all intertwined in Chrome, they’ve been using it like that for ten years - it’d be faster for me to find a new job then to unclog that mess from the entire office. I still installed firefox for personal use though.

some small problems i face is that

while i use youtube it runs slower.

and the quick image search feature using google lens is not present.

and telegram voice call does not work.

Firefox is not the better browser in anything but privacy. Maybe it could win in customisability, but that’s something only a few percent of users care about.

It has longer load times and sometimes breaks sites entirely while using about the same resources. Yes, the reason for that is that website creators don’t deliberately support it, but the normal user only cares about functionality.

I still use it and recommend it to anyone that asks, but saying that it’s the better browser is just delusional.

Regulators are blind to this, it’s too technical.

Security? No. Privacy? Of course (assuming you don’t use vanilla FF). Is it much easier to escape the sandbox in Gecko than Chromium. Doesn’t matter what options they give you in the settings titled “Security”.

You need to have effective replacements.

This is why Apple is so popular… much more thoroughly integrated, in many cases a better product, and for the most part paying more than just lip service to privacy.

About the only Google services I still use is the search engine (while it is still marginally useful), and Maps (since so many people on FB Marketplace also use it, so sending an address using a maps link is the ideal solution).

What is a CVE?

Oh, no, no, no, it can look like a good thing, but it’s terrible. If google gets the “spying monopoly”, they will have such power in their hands that they will be able to, alone, to things like manipulate your habits and routine, decide when you should replace your electronics, manipulate elections, markets, and so much more. It can seem, at first, that it would be easier to “just block google and that’s it” or “just let the governments regulate them”, but in reality, they would create a scenario where you couldn’t even browse the web or use simple tech devices without being logged in in a “safety-something compatible device”, while lobbying heavily to do so.

They’re already trying to go that way. With a monopoly, they would simply have no resistance at all.

but see, they wont. thats the problem.

google/microsoft are circling the wagons and are about to prevent anything but chrome and edge to be ‘official browsers’

so, to your point, yes we want everyone to use what they want. but continuing to use chrome will kill the very ecosystem that allows the choice you want to have.

If only you had made this comment regarding AI plaigirism, you’d be swimming in the upvotes instead

let people burn tires in their backyard if they feel like it, ffs

Nobody’s stopping you. Just saying it’s either ignorant or stupid to, and actively makes the internet a worse place.

And that is why soon there shall be a monoculture of browser and all control shall be ceded to massive corpo.