I will take "Things I don't have to care about since I ditched Chrome over two years ago." for $900 Alex.
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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google did play this long game pretty well... get mozilla on-board with webextensions format. get microsoft to adopt chromium for its own browser. use every trick in the book, legal or not, to gain marketshare. then start the rug pull. first: neuter the adblockers (we are here), next (and there will be a 'next') will be killing ad or content blockers and manipulators completely.
See what they don't understand is that I, and many people like me, hate watching ads more than anything, and can, and will, stop using the entire Internet if it's all just ads. YouTube is already so shitty that it's basically already there, and I stopped paying for it and because it's so shitty now, hardly watch YouTube, trending quickly to zero.
Congratulations, Google. You're ruining everything.
I think next step would be forcing chromium-only web development so FF or any other own-engine browser would not work properly on most common sites. That'll kill other browsers in an instant.
It kind of works already, seeing that a few complain about FF not working properly on some sites. Also, FF cant catch up with some features GC has like HID support. Anything which is not chromium is way behind and cant catch up. We are in a desperate need of something that is really good and is 3rd party (preferably OSS) to counter browser market monopoly. It is not monopoly yet, but damn it is on the edge.
USB through the browser is deliberately not added to Firefox
Yeah, people call me stupid, but I have been complaining for a while about Google using its market power to bully standards that only benefit itself.
The one I got flac a lot for was the https thing. Like yes, https is good, but it also ads an often unneeded layer of complexity for small time web stuff. It also makes it slight a pain for local stuff since you can't https an IP, it needs a domain.
On top of that, it harms one of Google's main ad/tracking xompetitors, ISPs. Now, we can debate if tracking is good or not (its really not), but beside that point, Google has a zillion other ways to track you, ISPs, less so, they are not embedding tracking pixels and shit or backdooring your browser history. And Google gets to kneecap them by penalising anyone not using https.
They tried to do the same thing to other competition by pushing to kill cookies, but backed off. Once again, is tracking good or bad? Not the debate here. But Google tracks you other ways, many of their competitors in the ad space use cookies. Or track traffix on their networks (ISPs).
Tracking good or bad is debatable, but lack of competition in pretty much anyspace is bad.
HID support? We browsing the web with a game controller now?
You can flash a firmware of your phone though google chrome if you want. GrapheneOS even suggests to do it this way.
You can visit controller test websites and check your controllers.
Not sure about this one but technically you can play games through game streaming services in your browser. No additional software needed.
HID API is a cool feature ngl. But I still use FF only.
Yech. Seems like this should be a feature of the OS.
I prefer a WebUI configuration app for mice, controllers, and other devices with firmware-level settings to installed crapware that only runs on Windows (and poorly). I use Ungoogled Chromium exclusively for the HID webapps. It's a neat part of the "web app framework" side of the modern browser that is almost totally irrelevant to the "browser" side.
next (and there will be a ‘next’) will be killing ad or content blockers and manipulators completely
They already tried that!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
Fortunately, they jumped the gun on it, and it was shut down ... for now anyway, but yeah they've clearly shown their intentions.
Maybe then Chrome can finally die.
Google will ramp up their sabotage of other browsers and browser engines, so idk
Our main choices being the browser funded by Google, the browser funded by Google, or the browser funded by Google.
Seriously, who is still using Chrome in 2026?
Bro. Have you seen browser marketshare graphs from recent years? It is dominated by chrome and chromium-based browsers. HELL OF A LOT of people use chrome in 2026 and it wont slow down any time soon.
At work I am forced to for compliance reasons. At home: laughs in firefox
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Sucks to be whoever's still using that fucking spyware
I find it astounding how people are so resistant to change to something new even when they’re in a literal shithole
Chrome messing with my uBlock Origin extension, disabling it and uninstalling it when all this started, was the last straw. I promptly made the jump to Floorp/Firefox and even though I was scared for a long time to switch, it was all good and have zero regrets. I'm very happy I ditched Chrome.
I held out until the first ad got through adblock (about a year ago, I think?). Switched the same day. Should have done it a lot sooner. I thought it would be a whole thing, but I was set up i a few minutes.
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I was scared for a long time to switch
But ... why?
I'm honestly asking here. What's so scary about using a different browser? I've got (let me count...) at least 6 different browsers installed on my current machine, switching between them for different tasks each of them is better at.
It's not like switching from Windows to Linux, where you actually have to say goodbye to Windows (maybe) in order to make the switch. You can easily install Chrome and Firefox, using whichever one suits you at the moment. So what's so scary about switching?
15 years of use, everything synced with Chrome and I wanted to also decouple browser dependency for password management say the same time. Not knowing if Firefox is up for the task. In many ways.
But everything is fine. I don't feel I made a compromise.
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So, about that Zen browser...
I'd recommend you just switch to Firefox instead, and make that work for you.
Zen browser (like many of those custom browser forks) is just someone's pet project, and is highly dependent on what Firefox is doing anyway. It's cool to use sometimes, but I wouldn't want to depend on it to stick around or be properly maintained in the long term.
Politely
No.
Those "personal pet projects" are why Google and FireFox exist as many pieces of their projects often rely on open source components often maintained by a single person.
These pet projects also strip telemetry and respect your privacy.
Those “personal pet projects” are why Google and FireFox exist as many pieces of their projects often rely on open source components often maintained by a single person.
Those are a different kind of pet projects, like some small random math library developed by a guy in Nebraska that a big software stack depends on (there's a relevant xkcd about it somewhere). The thing is, if support for such a project stops, the Microsofts, Googles and Firefoxes of the world are able to take over support, pay for it to be supported, or work around it in another way. Plus they are usually careful about which dependency they introduce, if something isn't governed properly or does not have wide community support... it's unlikely to be included.
Taking on a whole browser as a pet project is something entirely different. Browsers are huge and complex. You're basically betting that mr-cheffy will be able to keep up with all the changes, like security updates, feature updates and bugfixes, that upstream Firefox produces, and that he will be able to keep his own part of the codebase secure, and that he won't get burned out or bored with the project in one or two years.
For these reasons, I will never put all my eggs into the basket of some 1-man browser project, sorry.
These pet projects also strip telemetry and respect your privacy.
Turning off telemetry is just a few clicks, or about:config flags in Firefox anyway. And "respect your privacy" is just meaningless buzzword bingo. If you go to facebook or google in zenbrowser, your data is harvested just like everyone else's. Privacy is a process not a product (browser).
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This teaches us that being open source is not enough. If it's managed by big tech, it's still not good. Technically, anyone can take the source and make a fork, but in practice, it's rarely viable for smaller groups to take a big project and start maintaining it. The same applies to android
Excellent point. The way a project is governed should always be a consideration when evaluating software, especially for large and complex projects like a web browser that can't easily be forked.
In the case of chromium, basically all the main developers are Google employees ... so it's no surprise there hasn't been a viable fork.
I really wish we had something like the "linux kernel" of web browsers...
Hello [waves in Firefox]
Apparently Firefox still supports MV2.
They do, but it should also be noted that Google's implementation of MV3 was specifically designed to target adblocking and we know this because Firefox's implementation of MV3 still enables full adblocking capabilities. So even if Firefox does away with MV2 entirely, uBlockOrigin can work with their MV3.
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