@woe2you @asm @lea @marialeal

Chromium isn't a monopoly. Firefox and other browsers exist. Chromium does have the majority market share, tho, and I agree this is on par with the forcing AI into everything problem.

IMO Vivaldi gets points for avoiding AI. Only 5% of the code base is proprietary and it's only the UI. 90% is open source Chromium base. Vivaldi is privacy-friendly to the extent that they don't use and sell your data for profit. They've also built ProtonVPN into the browser and users can use the free tier without a ProtonVPN account. I think Firefox is inherently more privacy-friendly because it's not Chromium-based, and has the container tabs feature which Chromium-based browsers sorely lack.

Zen, LibreWolf, and Waterfox are better Firefox skins if you want no-AI and more privacy-by-default settings, but they don't have mobile apps.

@hyperreal @asm @lea @marialeal It's as close to a monopoly as makes no difference. Firefox is a rounding error these days, even Edge has more users. The only thing in the market share stats that's hiding the true extent of the Chromium problem is Safari, which is a different problem all of its own.

Yes, Chromium is de jure open source but it's de facto a Google product, and that's a threat to the open web. They contribute the lion's share of dev time and funding and they dictate the direction of the project. Take the Manifest spec for example: the changes from v2 to v3 were specifically to neuter ad blockers. Effective ad blocking is a threat to Google's bottom line, so Google said frog and Chromium hopped, and all Chromium-based browsers are now more privacy hostile by design.

Firefox's soft forks are vulnerable to every piece of dipshittery that comes out of Mozilla. They have to spend time and resources unfucking things that Mozilla have fucked. Speaking of Mozilla, they also get a huge chunk of funding from Google, because that enables Google to point at them and say "look, Firefox is still around, we're not a monopoly".

The browser landscape is utterly fucked.