Comment by noman-land
3 years ago
People are bending over backwards to justify why they should continue using a browser that is actively hostile to them made by a company whose sole revenue comes from collecting the entire world's data at all times.
I don't mean to trivialize it but it seriously reads like an abusive relationship. Or an addiction or something. Just leave, man.
I read a very apt quote[1] on HN a month ago, about how much Google values Chrome users thoughts:
> Chrome user opinion to them is important to their business in about the same way meatpackers care about what cattle think of the design of the feeding stations. As long as they keep coming to eat, it's just mooing.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035733
This is beautiful and I'm saving it. Thank you.
It 100% is an abusive relationship. And it's the same as with Microsoft and Windows. People struggle a lot against it, but at the end of the day, they are completely vulnerable to Windows, as they depend on it.
I don't use Chrome as my main browser but I can see one reason why people continue to do so despite the problems with it: there are simply no good alternatives, only slightly less bad ones. Mozilla absolutely does not care about your privacy as anything other than a marketing tool or they wouldn't keep pushing adding a million different ways the browser phones home and in some cases executes remote code each release. They are also funded by Google. Brave is mired with crypto and also involved in ads. Edge is Microsoft, enough said. Same for Apple's walled garden browser.
If you have to chose one devil over another anyway it becomes easier to put your convenience first and ignore the rest.
We can ignore everything except the last sentence because convenience is all it boils down to. Protecting yourself is annoying. It's annoying in part because companies like Google make it annoying on purpose. They make so much insane money from preventing people from protecting themselves (from Google) that they fund their competitors to buy public goodwill.
Even if you somehow think that Mozilla is as bad as Google, which, to me, is a ridiculous notion, you can still choose the lesser of two evils. At the end of the day Mozilla is a foundation, a legal entity which is driven by its mission[0], and Google is a corporation, a legal entity which is driven by profit and data collection. And there are also tons of other browsers that are less bad than the worst one.
To choose Chrome is, again, to bend over backwards to justify continual use of an abusive tool, in the name of convenience.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/