Do you think IE6 was bad? Remember how long it took to get rid of it? Imagine a world where the monopoly leader doesn't just walk away from the browser (which is what MS did with IE6) but actively abuses the situation. It will be orders of magnitude worse. Say hi to amp. Say hi to chrome. Say hi to google. Say goodbye to the web.

I suspect a lot of people in this conversation are not old enough to remember, even if they wanted to.

Maybe universities should have an obligation to promote nonprofit tools (i.e. Firefox) rather than shady commercial software that only happens to be gratis.

Now… well, IE11 doesn't even support ES6 properly, and good sites have started relying on that, and Edge is just evil Chrome – unless it's got Firefox installed, Chrome's your only option. But sites that use Chrome-only APIs aren't worth using anyway.

(Oh, wait, Zoom needs either Chrome or a malwarey desktop program.)

And there are alternatives to Zoom, e.g. Jitsi.

...and the malwarey desktop program is also Chrome.

I also don't understand why everyone is up with pitchforks at Google on this when Apple did the same thing to URLs a while ago. I guess engineers are just as susceptible to groupthink as anyone else.

They do kind of do that. Rather than going through the consensus process for getting a web standard added, they implement it in chrome then unilaterally write a standard for themselves. See for example, the SGX (signed exchange) "standard" they pushed out.