Comment by SoftTalker
3 years ago
Chrome was started by Google as a push to improve the web, which was mired in the stagnation of Internet Explorer dominance. This was good and it worked, but now they are the new monopoly, controlling not just the majority browser but also the majority search engine, majority email platform, and majority online productivity tools. They naturally work to ensure that all that stuff works well with Chrome. Pretty much the only space they don't dominate is social media, but most people access that through apps, not a browser. Even if Firefox is a better browser (and I'm not saying it is, though I personally prefer it) there just isn't much space for Firefox to start driving a wedge in.
It's an alternative for those who want it, but it's hard to point to any technical reason to prefer it.
> This was good
Was it though? It seems like a lot of "ends justify the means" from hindsight. Were all the dark patterns that Google used to insure Chrome dominance enough to justify the ends of "stop IE stagnation"? In the exact same time period Firefox did really well on word-of-mouth. It didn't need dark patterns, and ultimately lost to Chrome's dark patterns and it is harder to argue that that wasn't at least somewhat evil by that point because I think it is a lot harder to argue that the ends of "defeat Firefox" justify those means. I think it is getting harder and harder to justify that Chrome did all those evil things, whether or not you think that Chrome itself is evil.