this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Never used Chrome, and strongly suggest to other people not to use Chrome. However, I've not had the hate for chromium browsers (so far, the killing of extensions might drive me away) - I've really enjoyed Vivaldi for a lot more features and having the engine that works on websites (yes this sucks). My mom OTOH is a Firefox person, and I just had to help her get onto her insurance website - she had tech support on the phone, and Firefox just would not let her set a password and just kept looping and using up the reset link. Finally I tried in Vivaldi (Chromium) and it worked first try. Of course, I've had the same experience in the opposite direction. So I have to keep using both.
Also, Vivaldi anyway has a much better UI IMHO for what I want than Firefox does, and is faster. As an IT person, I much prefer semantic versioning which Vivaldi also has.
Anyway, at this point Chromium is like IE was - you can't not have access to your health insurance website, and they don't apparently test in Firefox so it doesn't work. You can't drop your provider cause you don't pick it, your work does. The upshot of Chromium is that there are rebuilds and it runs on other platforms than Windows - so... there's that at least.
Honestly, I'd like to see someone fork Chromium and keep web extensions etc, but no one wants to write a browser engine anymore - even Vivaldi, which was the old Opera team that wrote 2 browser engines over the history of the browser through v12 - can't afford to make their own engine. What I don't get is why so many browser makers have chosen chromium vs gecko - almost no one wraps gecko in the last 10 years. (Maybe Firefox is different now? I know it in some ways started getting crappy wrt extensions back in v28? whenever Pale Moon forked.)
Also as a long running Firefox user, I don't get these incompatibilities at all. And if you start using Firefox and increase the usage numbers the incompatible sites would need to reconsider their stance.
The problem is just we have to use the sites. There's no real choice ( we have some of this for work too). I'm not losing my job or impacting my medical care for a browser war. If I can fool the site with an extension or something, then if I know that I'll do it. But this idea that you can just avoid browsers when you need a website is not really true. I will say - I very rarely see these problems compared to back in the day. But I have contacted tech support and they just say use the working browser. I can't report a bug, they don't even understand why I'm being a PITA.
That's really unfortunate and a bad service provider for you. If there is nothing that can be done for that service, you don't need to use that browser as a daily driver, but can just use for the services that you mention. And you need to keep nagging the service provider for support.
This is not just a browser war. It's a war over your rights, your control over your choices, your privacy, what software and hardware you can use. You are already feeling how that affects your life daily, consider this in a mass attack on you.
WEI will enable service providers to decide what firewall you can use, what addons you can have, what version of the browser you can reach their websites, what antivirus software that you need to have, what cpu architecture, which tablet .. This list can go on.
sure this won't start in this manner right away. But I can assure you it will evolve towards more control service providers have on you.