Hello Firefox, Goodbye Chrome
Posted on
A few weeks ago I said to myself, enough was enough and dropped the Chrome web browser.
If you aren’t actively following the web development world it’s easy to miss, but Google and Chrome have really been hostile toward the open web over the last few years. A few examples:
In 2016 Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages. From its wikipedia page:
AMP has been widely criticized by many in the tech industry for being an attempt by Google to exert its dominance on the Web by dictating how websites are built and monetized, and that “AMP is Google’s attempt to lock publishers into its ecosystem”. AMP has also been linked to Google’s attempt to deprecate URLs so that users will not be able to immediately see whether they are viewing a webpage on the open Web or an AMP page that is hosted on Google’s servers. AMP has been described as being “poisonous to the underlying concept of an open internet.”
In Chrome 68 they began to deprecate HTTP and now list HTTP sites as insecure.
In Chrome 69 they added a behavior that strips the www subdomain from the URL bar. (Try visiting www.mikezornek.com and it becomes mikezornek.com. This may feel like a small thing for users but as a developer its a firm violation for how the web URL works.
Just this weekend I read a story of some more shenanigans:
A few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. From now on, every time you log into a Google property (for example, Gmail), Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you. It’ll do this without asking, or even explicitly notifying you.
There’s a reason people are reacting to Chrome like this. This isn’t an overreaction over one single event. It’s a delayed reaction to a pattern of bad behavior.
It’s contextualized by the very messed-up power dynamic between Google and the open Web.
Google’s influence over the web through its search was already over the line in many ways but to see its once celebrated browser go down this road is depressing.
Actions speak and Firefox is treating me well. I now use it across my computers and devices, from MacOS to iOS and even my Windows gaming tower. DuckDuckGo is my default search engine (and has been for like a year now) and works well too. It feels good to be using products from people who share my interests to heart.