Chrome is the IE 6 of Today

In a Hacker News thread about Firefox 90, user bergheim commented:

All my friends use Chrome, and think I’m weird. I think they are. They care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital world looks like, is now way worse than what Microsoft with IE6 ever did. They had their share, but nothing compared to this. At least Microsoft was just a software company.

I completely agree and am happy to see that the comment is at the top of the page. I often refer to Chrome/Chromium as the IE 6 of today. I wrote quite a bit about this in a browser-home blog entry but decided to delete it, just saying the following:

With Chrome becoming an ever greater threat to privacy, Firefox is in a position to “win back” many users, and I think it is unfortunate that Mozilla is ruining the opportunity through amazingly poor decisions. I wrote more than half a blog entry about the details, actually, but I deleted it because it was a bit depressing and had an “old man yells at cloud” feel.

I still find it depressing that Chrome/Chromium is so popular. Chrome/Chromium is a very significant threat to privacy, yet Chrome has a 65.27% market share as I write this. Due to the way that corporate law works, Google has fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit for their shareholders, and profit generally takes precedence over ethical concerns in today’s corporate culture. What I find depressing is that people choose to use Chrome/Chromium for convenience in spite of the threat to basic human rights.

It is my hope that many people will stop using Chrome/Chromium when Manifest V3 is released. What alternative is better? From an ethical point of view, pretty much any of them! My choice is Firefox, in spite of Mozilla’s terrible decisions. Edge exists in order to maintain the momentum of sales of mostly crappy software, but it is not a threat to privacy. Safari keeps users locked into a walled garden that exists in order to drive sales of overpriced hardware, but it is not a threat to privacy. Many other browsers exist, and new browsers are being released as well, but be careful because some are based on Chromium.

Perhaps it is worth noting that I do not use Chrome/Chromium for technical reasons as well. Firefox Multi-Account Containers is essential, IMHO, and it is the primary reason why I use Firefox. I do not do much web development these days, but I am often frustrated by Chrome/Chromium when I do. Here are some recent examples:

• Chrome/Chromium does not support MathML! This is very frustrating!
• Chrome/Chromium has had bugs in getting the position within a textarea, making it very difficult to implement user interfaces using textarea.
• Chrome/Chromium does not handle hover events within SVG images.

I do not like talking about such politics, and I am once again tempted to just delete this entry instead of publish it. With a sigh, I git commit before I change my mind.