Thank you. The pretence (naivety) of "there must be a good reason" has to stop

There’s usually a “good reason” — however that “good reason” is subjective to the people maintaining the application and might not align with the preferences of its users.

Reasons don’t really matter to users though. It’s pointless arguing if we should assume innocence or guilt because irrespective of the developers motives, if a particular feature is a show stopper for you then you switch to a platform that supports said feature. Anything else added to colour the discussion is irrelevant.

I agree with what you pointed out about subjectivity. I think it’s still worth discussing though to serve as a warning to others who act with their own best intentions only to have them get bitten. Without calling this out it just always leans on the malicious side which doesn’t trend with reality in my experience.

In terms of end users driving decisions ultimately, I agree. That said, this is a discussion forum so I figured it was open for discussion and assumed that folks would be deciding on their own how to react to the change.

I guess this all depends on what we think we’re having a discussion about!

The problem is any such discussion is going to be entirely speculative. Sure, you can discuss what you presume the developers motives might have been but it reveals more about the opinions and personalities of the people holding the discussion than it does about the developers since all you’re doing is projecting your own story to fill in some pretty sizeable blanks.

But what many others in this thread have done is just as speculative, assuming malice, and to be clear, I think it could very much be the case, but I’m sharing another perspective based on a lot of experiences I’ve had where external parties assumed malice when internally it was far from it. Take it or leave it. This is the internet and I’m typing into a box.

I agree, but I suspect this was also what was believed when they originally did it and adversaries found very clever ways to find that cookie store - that part at least is true, which is why I bother mentioning it, given the complexity of browsers it is likely very daunting to redesign this kind of thing around the existing features. Anyways, I'm glad I'm not working on browsers, it seems like an ever-losing cat and mouse.

Those two things are unrelated if there is such interaction and the fix was removing the dialog I would be scared to use that browser.

So whether your theory is true or not, no one should use Chrome.

I agree.