Using Chrome is a bad idea and you should switch to alternatives, which are listed at the bottom so skip for a TLDR. Why is using Chrome bad, and why does it lead to a Google monopoly? The explanation needs a lot of words so this is going to be a lengthy article. If you have the attention span to read to the end, you’re amazing.
Here’s the gist: when Chrome has a browser monopoly, which it borderline does already, Google can start abusing their power and make using the internet miserable. For example, they can make adblocking completely irrelevant and make advertisments an even bigger annoyance, implement new methods of tracking and ‘data analytics’ that are much harder to block than with a simple script blocker (already looming over us), and enforce unfair standards to anyone using the internet. If you’re not a zoomer, then you’re probably familiar with the terrible years that was the Internet Explorer (IE) monopoly. Do you want to see that again, but with a company that is way more cunning than Microsoft?
Ok, why does this matter? Web browsers are completely free
Sure, browsers cost you nothing in a financial sense, but they do cost you your privacy and data. It’s safe to assume that Chrome reports everything you do to Google: your most frequently visited websites, the ads or media you click on, the passwords and accounts you create on various website, your embarassing searches made through “incognito” mode, the audio or camera footage you may have allowed sites to access, and probably even critically sensitive information about you. Don’t be fooled by the control you think you have through the advanced settings options, Google is still datamining you. They then sell this data to advertisers trying making a buck off of you or maybe even sends it to your local national security agency because either you’re an interesting subject or they just want to keep an eye on you. Giving Google a monopoly will only exacerbate this problem. Maybe in the not-so-distant future when Chrome actually becomes a monopoly, we’ll be back to the 90s when browsers had to be purchased, or yet worse a subscription plan will exist…
Here’s another way of looking at it: competition in any market is always good for the buyer. A monopoly is the complete opposite, so why would you be ok with the monopolization of something so commonly used like a web browser?
Consequences of a Chrome monopoly
Now, a quick disclaimer: I’m not knowledgeable enough to explain the technical reasons of how these consequences would arise. All I can do is attempt to explain what the end result would be. Most of the arguments may seem speculative, but are absolutely plausible.
Obsolesence of ad blockers
Ad blocking is an evolving strategy game; new methods of displaying ads are implemented, then someone figures out how to block them. Rinse and repeat, with each iteration of advertisements becoming harder to block. A company like Google probably doesn’t want adblockers since that would likely harm their revenue in some manner. Google could probably just burn some easy millions of dollars to constantly create new ways to show ads that are very hard to crack and are always changing. The company has already done something that raised some red flags. The more people use Chrome, the easier it is for Google to make browsing worse because they control Chrome. It’s like when a monopoly selling a product raises prices, there’s nothing you can do about that. No one wants to see ads, and a monopoly of Chrome would likely kill adblocking altogether. Ask around, how many people that are even slightly familiar with using a web browser use an adblocker? You probably do too. Imagine if one day that adblocker you installed was suddenly ineffective, how would you feel?
Unavoidable tracking, privacy intrusion, and ‘standards’
This one’s a bit easier to explain: If Chrome is the only browser around, then you’re going to be forced to use it. By merely being forced to use Chrome, Google now monitors you. There’s a good example of this I can personally bring up: when I used to use FB Messenger, sometimes there would be group calls held through that platform. I wanted to use my desktop to join the call since its more convenient. I access Messenger through its website and use a Firefox clone as a browser. It turns out, Messenger calls are only supported on Chrome-like browsers, so by using a non Chrome-like browser I was SoL. Eventually I settled with joining calls through my phone, but the exclusive support for Chrome-like browsers upset me. And there’s a lot of other services out there that do this nonsense. If you’re one of the good people that use non Chrome-like browsers for whatever reason, how would you feel about being force to use Chrome?
Chrome is in a dominant enough position where it can enforce browser compatibility-wrecking standards to the whole web. Google might implement APIs that make it extremely easy for developers to create web services, but the catch is that those APIs only work with Chrome-like browsers and are either incompatible with other browsers or the performance is intentionally gimped. Or some websites might look fine on Chrome, but because Chrome is doing its own little thing, the same site looks broken on Firefox. Imagine that you try something as simple as going to Youtube on Firefox and get an error while trying to play a video telling you ‘your browser is unsupported, use a secure browser like Chrome’, or the video buffers so much to an extent that it’s unwatchable.
The browser wars - Remember the IE monopoly nightmare?
Maybe you’re thinking that I’m on some drug and spouting nonsense, or that these kinds of events would never happen. Here’s a summary of real events for the zoomers or the older but uninformed about the years of IE monopoly and the consequences, because it’s good to be aware of history. If you’re not sure why everyone hates IE, read this section to get an idea of why, so you can hate on it as well but without being baseless.
Back when web browsers took off in the mid 90s, they used to be a paid product. They weren’t free and there was no preinstalled browser like Edge on Windows or Safari on Mac, you had to purchase an installer CD through a retailer and use that to install a browser on your computer. The dominant browser at the time was Netscape which was so popular that the company developing the browser changed their name from Mosaic to Netscape. One of the other browsers around at the time was IE from Microsoft, but it was inferior and no one really used it.
One day, good guy Microsoft decided to play a few pranks on Netscape by absolutely destroying their business and erasing their nearly 100% market share in just a few years. How was this done? Microsoft started preinstalling IE on Windows installations for free, and actually tried to make a performant browser that was compatible with a lot of features Netscape supported. This essentially invalidated Netscape, since everyone who bought a computer at the time was likely using Windows and IE is already there so why bother purchasing Netscape? In just about 5 years, Netscape lost almost all of its popularity and IE replaced it as the browser everyone used and developed for. Netscape went from over 90% market share to a literally nobody in about 6 years, but its legacy was passed onto Firefox.
When Microsoft established a monopoly, they decided to hibernate. Development pacing dropped off a cliff, features were left off and bugs and security vulnerabilities were left on. Microsoft abused its monopoly to implement standardized specifications in non-standard manners that broke site compatibility between itself and all other browsers. A website would look fine on every other browser except IE, and the poor webdev would be forced to create very hacky solutions to get IE to play nice. The other popular browsers at the time such as Firefox (born from the ashes of Netscape) and Opera (when it was good) were innovating with new features, actually standardized specifications, and better performance and security. IE was so unmaintained at this point that even by the time Microsoft scrapped it, the browser had feature and security holes everywhere.
he place I work at needs IE for really legacy crap, and trying to access the sites by Edge or Chrome is impossible because only IE accepts such poor security levels. There’s a lot of broken sites that rely on IE to work still out there, and trying to use modern browsers messes up https so you’re sending passwords through plain text! Obviously, users and developers grew to dislike IE and by the time Microsoft woke from its monopoly sleep, it was too late.
Even as a simpleton fifth grader I remembered hating IE, mainly because I wasn’t smart enough to download Firefox and thought the logo was ugly, and the school computers (really old Dell desktops with CRT-thickness monitors) only had IE. All of my classmates hated IE too because every website visited took 30 seconds to render just text and no images. Then one day, someone found Google Chrome. It was blazing fast compared to IE, supported logging into our fancy new gmail accounts, and had customizable themes compared to IE’s antique Windows XP theme. What more could a fifth grader frustrated with IE want?
In just a few weeks, almost everyone in my school was using Chrome. Little did I know that the whole world was ditching IE en masse for Chrome as well, siphoning the market share of Firefox as well. Google gained momentum and money, advertising the browser on their search engine which surely was very effective at gaining attention. The browser kept improving, Microsoft just woke from its sleep and was brushing its teeth while trying to cook eggs and start fixing the dumpster fire that IE was, and Google’s amassing money propelled the browser further.
Google effectively pulled a Microsoft soon after and made Chrome the default browser on Android and Chromebooks, and before you knew it we’re at the present with Chrome’s untouchable market share and universal web engine. Meanwhile poor Microsoft was so behind with IE that they scrapped it, re-announced IE by calling it Edge before finally submitting to Google and converting Edge into a Chrome clone.
If you’re interested in reading more details, there’s a great Wikipedia article about the browser wars. It’s an entertaining read and I recommend you check it out for yourself. I also recommend you look into the behaviours of Microsoft and how they’ve pulled a Netscape for other markets too.
Chrome clones - Why just any alternative browser won’t do
Now that we’re back from a great history lesson, one of the last topics to discuss is why you can’t just start using Edge, Brave, Vivali and say that you’re against Google’s monopoly. Simply put, modern browsers are extremely complex programs; you can’t easily just create one from scratch and expect it to not break on some obscure websites. So how a lot of browsers out there are developed is that they start with some open source browser as a base and build on top of it. One of these browsers to build off of is called Chromium, which is an open source browser developed by Google and as the name implies, is related to Chrome because Google internally modifies Chromium to develop Chrome.
Chromium is a very popular base for other browsers to use, the most well known examples are Microsoft Edge (the most recent incarnation), Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera. The problem with these offshoot browsers is that at heart, they’re essentially Chromium but with extra stuff added from the developer. So when you find a website that makes the stupid comparison of Edge vs Chrome vs Firefox vs Brave, the comparison is really between Chromium 1 vs Chromium 2 vs Firefox vs Chromium 3.
This is the problem with just choosing any other browser, if you choose one that was built off of Chromium, you’re still using a Google developed browser at heart and that’s where the monopoly problem lies. To use a true alternative browser, you need to use a browser that uses a different web engine, a core piece of the browser that renders webpages. All Chromium-based browsers use the Blink web engine, the other 2 engines in development are Gecko (used by Firefox) and WebKit (used by Apple). The WebKit engine is used by less browsers, sadly leaving only Gecko as a viable alternative. And this is where the best alternative browser comes in.
The browser you should be using: Firefox or a Firefox clone
Firefox has been sometimes touted as the ’last resistance’ against a Google web monopoly, and in some aspects it’s a true statement. If the Gecko web engine were to fall, your only choices for browsers are Chromium copies or Safari, pick your poison. Both are meh, most are going to be proprietary so they use you as the product, so your only viable options are open source browsers like Brave but again you’re still using Chromium at the end. This leaves Firefox and its copies as the one of the only viable alternatives to the Google browser stranglehold.
Why Firefox?
Firefox is open sourced, developed by the Mozilla Foundation, focuses on your privacy (there are caveats though), and is one of the few true alternatives to Chrome. It provides better defaults than Chrome, doesn’t have spooky Google nonsense in it, and is comparable to Chrome in performance and features. Its very nature of being a real alternative is enough of a reason to use it. If you were to migrate from Chrome to Firefox, likely the biggest ‘feature’ you would lose is Google integration but you shouldn’t be using that with Chrome as well.
Firefox has its issues
Firefox has its own issues, especially the developer behind it. The Mozilla Foundation, or just Mozilla, is in a tough spot. Ever since the IE monopoly days, Firefox slipped from being one of the most popular browsers in the world to losing nearly all of its users to alternatives. The organization has questionable management , makes hypocritical decisions for what their public stances are, and has made poorly received business decisions.
For instance, Mozilla started their own VPN service which looks mediocre, has a ‘feature’ called Pocket that litters your tabs with news clickbait junk, and also includes some telemetry out of the box… Mozilla is also mostly funded through Google ironically despite being competitors because if Firefox were to go under then Google would be accused of monopoly so Google keeps Mozilla barely breathing. This is also why the default search engine on Firefox is Google. The overreliant Google funding is why Mozilla is trying to find other sources of revenue, but so far their endeavours aren’t getting anywhere and the browser keeps bleeding users.
Firefox clones to the rescue
Because Firefox is open sourced and licensed under a copyleft license, anyone can fork the project and make modifications. This resulted in a lot of community-driven Firefox clones that enhance it in all kinds of ways, mostly fixing odd default settings (that are still better than Chrome), removing telemetry and DRM, and other small tweaks. The open nature also implies that if Mozilla were to stop developing Firefox, in theory others could continue development but browsers are extremely complex and money would defnitely make it easier.
The point is that Firefox clones are abundant and worth looking at. The easiest one to recommend is LibreWolf, which is a security hardened Firefox clone with good privacy settings and some Mozilla bloat removed. I personally use this browser on any supported OS and can vouch for it. On Android, the closest thing to LibreWolf is Mull, another hardened Firefox clone. On iOS, I’m not sure what clones are available.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading to the end of my rambling. If you’ve made it all the way through, you’re cool. If you’ve skipped most of it, that’s fine as long as you read the section on why not to use Chrome, and instead use Firefox or its clones. Get off Chrome, it’s not hard to move and you don’t lose anything; in fact just by merely using stock Firefox you’re helping everyone against Google’s encroaching domination. If you think you do lose something from moving, that’s probably from your overreliance on Google integration and is a habit you should try to remedy separately. If you’re using Safari, you’re in a gray zone and I still recommend you try to migrate to the Firefox family or never touch Chromium. The average person’s interactions with their computer is 90% web browser at this point. An internet monopolized by Google is going to be bad even to the most technologically inept person who doesn’t know what an adblocker is. Google’s earlier attempt failed, but there are bigger threats on the horizon. Their next tricks are going to be much more subtle and unnoticeable to many. Aim to move off of Google as much as you can before you’re completely trapped in their system, and your browser is one of the easiest places to start changing.