I'm curious why you'd be opposed to throttling background tabs. I could see it being a problem if it interfered with, for example, playback from things like soundcloud, but I'd also consider that a bug. Other than that, it seems like it would be a win in battery life for people on laptops. Maybe there's some use case I'm not thinking of or not aware of though.

Hasn't Safari been doing something like throttling background tabs for a while? I don't really know the details of how Safari and Chrome's new feature compares, but you may be equally unhappy with Safari in that respect.

I'm with you on the other stuff though, I always disable Flash, NaCl and DRM plugins. I also hate the forced Material Design UI. Having a Mac native app look like Android is visually jarring.

I tried switching to Safari, Firefox, and Brave a few months ago because I was unhappy with the direction Chrome was going, but ultimately ended up coming back to Chrome. The big things that brought me back: Safari isn't supported by Privacy Badger. With Brave, it was that if you open a new window and start typing immediately, it would lose the first few keystrokes... though I just downloaded the latest, and that seems to be fixed now. I don't remember off hand what stopped me from using Firefox