Before Edge came out, I always preferred IE11 over Chrome (on machines that only had those two installed), because IE11 kept the legacy "must compete with Netscape" features like decent contentEditable context menus. And websites that didn't work in IE11 generally weren't worth using anyway.

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.)

Zoom works in Firefox.

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

> Zoom needs either Chrome or a malwarey desktop program

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

The backdoor part isn't Chrome, though, is it? (If it's a Node.js script bundled with yet another copy of V8, I'll scream.)

This analogy would work if Google was deliberately holding back new features on the web to favor its proprietary operating system but in fact the situation is pretty much the opposite.

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.

>This analogy would work if Google was deliberately holding back new features on the web to favor its proprietary operating system but in fact the situation is pretty much the opposite.

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.

Most people don't use apple.

Apple is massively popular in the US. The last few projects I've worked on our users were 50% iOS Safari.