> The problem isn't within Google. They aren't doing anything substantial to lock users into Chrome.

I feel this is meant to trigger people into reacting and causing a flame war.

Google has been making its own web properties work well on Google Chrome while making them perform poorer or make them break on other browsers. Google Chrome optimizes for Google, not the web, and certainly not “the open web”.

One example of special treatment is Chrome giving *.google.com sites access to system metrics for the CPU, GPU, and RAM usage[0][1] through a default extension that isn't exposed to users.

[0]: https://xcancel.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018

[1]: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...

Safari and Firefox are capable web browsers. Where do people get this outlandish take from?

Maybe the actual problem is some people having this sentiment.

Can't speak for Safari, but Firefox has never been anything but a dumpster fire for me. Constant reminders about updates and a UI that slows my computer to a crawl no matter what I do. Yes, I open many tabs and don't use a turbocharged laptop, but the same applies to my Chrome use with next to no problems, so really, fuck you Firefox for not adjusting after decades, as per possible user needs. Chrome seems to manage it, so why can't the Mozilla people with their own expertise and funds?

Many new versions and updates of FF that I've tried have claimed to be much smoother and more efficient, only for the exact same shit to start happening across the years and multiple laptops used.

When was the last time you tried? I have a 2012 Mac mini that runs it like a champ and has done so for a very long time. I only have a handful of plugins but uBlock Origin is one of them.

several times since 2012. The last of these was just last year, on a whimsy in which FF didn't disappoint in by now predictably disappointing.

Either you need to service your computer or configure your Firefox.

I went back to Firefox about 5 years ago and not even once missed Chrome since.

Why should the user need to do that? The browser should automatically configure itself for optimal performance on any reasonable hardware.

Because none of what they talk about is a problem. So the problem may lay on their side. Or they roll on a half-a-decade old sentiment.

Firefox does, though. There really aren't these wild and crazy speed issues with it at all, even with fresh out of the box defaults.

The only time I've had to touch about:config in the last several years was due to some smartcard related bug caused by an external library, that forced me to tweak firefox's behaviour. Once that bug was resolved, I switched it back.

Firefox being slow is well into the self-perpetuating FUD territory.

Capable is a interesting word choice. Capable means something meets a bare minimum for success. A and B are great. C is fantastic. D is arguably first class. E is capable. When making a free choice, I want the best one, so any lackluster review feels like one of those southern backhanded compliments, getting the message across without insulting it in polite company. Capable perfectly describes my feelings towards Firefox and Safari.

Seeing that Safari doesn’t drain my battery on my laptop and it doesn’t send my search engine to an adtech company…

It does; Google is the default search in Safari.

I meant browsing history. I don’t care about my search history. Even though these days I use the paid ChatGPT with the web search tool most of the time. Google is becoming more useless every month

Chrome Sync (i.e. saving your history + everything else to the cloud so it syncs to all your devices) is an optional setting. Microsoft Edge has the same thing under another name. Safari does too.

Google also uses your browsing history to create a profile for advertising

https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...

And Apple provides end to end encryption of browsing history so it can’t decrypt your browsing history

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2021/03/25/whats-in...

> What’s interesting about the Apple decision is that it appears to explicitly separate browsing history and bookmarks, rather than lumping them into a single take-it-or-leave-it package. Apple doesn’t claim to provide any end-to-end encryption guarantees whatsoever for bookmarks: presumably someone who resets your iCloud account password can get those. But your browsing history is protected in a way that even Apple won’t be able to access, in case the FBI show up with a subpoena.

That's not Chrome's browsing history - that's an ad network, adsense, profiling you, via cookies/ip/digital fingerprinting, across every website that serves it's ads. It's like logging into facebook and saying they can see your browsing history - yes some of it, but it's because they're watching a server they own serve you requests.

The entire idea behind “privacy sandbox” is to create a profile of you for advertising based on your browsing history and the profile is created by Chrome - without being logged in and without cookies.

https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/

More specifically the Topics API

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Topics_API

It’s opposed by both Mozilla and Apple and is only supported by Google/Chrome.

Interesting. So the browser knows your browsing history like every browser does, but it uses it to share some distilled data. Yeah, I definitely don't want that. Looks like I already totally disabled it though, so I'm good I guess.

Privacy and security > Ad privacy

Ad topics: Generates a list of your interests based on your browsing behavior.

Site-suggested ads: Allows advertisers to retarget you based on your interactions.

Ad measurement: Enables advertisers to assess ad performance.

Toggle each of these settings to "Off" to disable them.

Yep.

And I slightly misspoke. I said it was only supported by Chrome. More accurately, it is supported by Chrome and some Chromium based browsers.

Not used Firefox in ages, but what’s the matter with Safari? It sips battery and cpu cycles on my macs.

None. Safari is the best browser I’ve used by a long margin.

Safari is really good.

But I have to admit extensions are really lacking, both the infrastructure for installing them and which extensions are available.

I now use Orion which is based on Safari but has native vertical tabs (although not native vertical hierarchical tabs, or support for dumping them as markdown).

On the developer side I've always found Safari messy to support with out of date APIs

Feels like Apple doesn't really care about it

Well, last time, the presidential election changed executive support as well. That would make this significant since it’s a new Justice Dept.

This suit began under the last Trump administration. If there was a Google-friendly administration, it was Obama's.

What's disappointing to Google is that all of their kowtowing to the Biden administration's "content shaping" ended up worth nothing in the end. Harris would have rewarded them for that help, but Trump of course hates them for it because it was largely directed at him.

This is plain nonsense. Trump got bad search result because he's literally terrible and wholly unqualified to be president.

You're so close to getting it. Indeed, the problem with monopolies is they make it difficult to create effective competitors. And that's precisely why they're not allowed to do those things and why Google is in the position it's in for doing those kinds of things.

> The problem is unforced errors on the part of both Apple and Mozilla creating awful web browsers that aren't worth using.

This feels like quite an exaggeration. I’ve used Chromium-derived browsers only sparingly in the past decade, with Safari and Firefox instead getting the bulk of my usage depending on the platform.

Generally if something doesn’t work under those browsers, the top two causes are unnecessary user agent sniffing with the site working fine once I pretend to be Chrome or the dev simply not testing against anything but Chrome. It’s been vanishingly rare that the browsers themselves were the cause of an issue.