this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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Why are people using chrome?
Why did people use Internet Explorer before it?
It's just "the internet button" for most people, the same as Windows is just "the computer" and Android is "the phone".
The idea that you can change out fundamental software components of a modern computing device is alien to them.
"People" have no IT knowledge. They use Chrome because they recognize its icon as the one you click to make web sites happen. They have practically no knowledge of it beyond that, including that there are other options and the reasons why they might prefer those.
When you use Google services there's a very annoying popup "why u no use Chrome" that appears at least once every three week and you can only choose between "ok I give up, install now" and "no, ask me again for the 134th time"
Or you could just stop using google services?
I have seen that on Firefox one time in 3 years
It appears almost every single time I login to gmail
I only have it installed so I can configure my Keychron keyboard.
Integration and convenience for those people. Literally a closed wall garden environment much like iOS, Windows, or Facebook.
The majority of people just can’t fucking be bothered, don’t fucking care or are completely unaware that there are other options.
Yes, there are options, but some of those people see them as inconvenient.
Pretty much this. People on the fediverse generally forget how ridiculously non-tech savvy the public at large is, moreso the underlying issues with things like AI, tracking, etc.
And even if the public does know they can just shrug and say “so what?”
People don’t know, don’t want to know, and can’t be bothered if told.
Also recognise that for some people, things breaking is either scary, or just more annoying than ads. They expect ads, but freak out when a website is broken -which will always be a possibility with adblockers due to the nature of them.
!technology@lemmy.world
A few days ago, I had to use the Graphite image editor to refine a 3D scene I rendered in Blender. I'm a daily user of Waterfox, but for some reason, whenever I access the Graphite WebApp, it instantly grows in RAM usage, as the whole Waterfox freezes and crashes (which I found out to be a specifically a "core dump" kind of crash when I launched the browser from a terminal). Same for Librewolf. Then I had the idea of accessing Graphite through a spare Chromium (not Chrome, but still a Google thing) I unwittingly have to keep for development purposes, and suddenly it worked without a hassle, it didn't even require that much RAM.
This happens because Graphite, just like many webapps out there, was made with Chromium-based browsers in mind, likely using some esoteric features which are unavailable or badly implemented in Firefox-based browsers (an incompatibility of which indirectly affects Waterfox).
This, I guess, is part of why people still use Chromium-based browsers: because it became indistinguishable from Internet Explorer and its idiosyncratic features (ActiveX) back in 2000s, with most developers (including myself) coding webpages that used said features (think about having to deal with the filesystem: devs would either have to use Java or devs could use the cool
FileSystemObjectActiveX; similar thing applies nowadays with some HTML5 APIs that can be quite useful for some webapps but are only properly implemented in Chromium). At least we used to have a "This site is better viewed in IE7 on Windows XP with a resolution of 1024 x 768 and Macromedia Flash Player installed" back then, now webpages can simply crash the whole browser when it doesn't refuse to load after an endless spinning animation.Don't get me wrong: I would neither recommend Chromium, nor anything Google-related, for anyone, not even my worst enemies (a daily reminder for people, especially we Fediversers, to stop recommending the damn Youtube)... but this is the depressing reality of Web, and IT in general: things (some of which are sine qua non for "living in society" nowadays, such as internet banking and government platforms) that can only function in a specific platform/browser, be it Windows (when it comes to desktop platform), Android (when it comes to mobile) or Chromium (when it comes to the Web).
Honestly the more I think about this the more I think Chromium has become actively harmful to the Internet overall.
The problem isn't Chromium itself. The problem is that we're going back to the old days of Internet Explorer, where every popular site is optimized for Internet Explorer (including its non standard quirks) and thus other browsers don't render it right. And some websites would detect a non-IE useragent and just refuse to load.
The problem is the dependence. Google announces that MV2 is going away and suddenly 5 other 'independent' browsers (which are all just Chromium reskins) say 'yeah it's going away, sorry too bad so sad but there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it our hands are tied'. No one company should have this much control over the browser ecosystem, not even Google. (or these days, especially not Google since they seem to embrace their shedding of the 'don't be evil' mantra).
I think there's an opening, but it requires resources. A good web rendering / javascript engine isn't a weekend project. But I think it's worth the effort to make a new one. And like Chrome's origins, it should be focused on speed and efficiency.
I say that as a student of history-- used to be IE for normies and Firefox (with a ton of extensions) for nerds. Then Chrome came along, and could often render a page in under 100ms. So everyone (nerds and normies) adopted it. Only now it's full of Google bloat, web pages cram megabytes of javascript bullshit (to the point that if you hit a major news site, your browser is literally running a live auction in javascript to see who wins the pleasure of showing you an ad), plus a ton of tracking crap. So unfortunately javascript isn't going away, but a new rendering engine is necessary.
Totally agree with your comment, I'd just make an observation to this specific part:
The problem with a new rendering engine is who have influence over the specs/standards, as well as who holds the necessary keys to be granted access to its features. We humans have been tying ourselves to centralized entities who pinky-swear they can guarantee "Safety/Security": SSL/TLS, HDCP and any other technologies gate-kept by "Divine Beholders" of the only keys able to "bless mere mortals" with the temporary grant required to develop using a technology. I mean, this is exactly what's happening to mobile apps, with "sideloading" having been a boogieman word for installing apps without having to rely on a centralized app store, a manufactured consent that worked so well that people and governments have been accepting, even relying on, Google's "Integrity Check" shenanigans (and the Apple's whatever analogue i-thing for iOS). The supply chain attacks that have been happening (from PyPi to AUR) feels like something that's further pushing us to more centralized "authorities" who'll then have absolute power over who can and who can't pass.
Even if a truly independent entity were to come up with a full-fledged browser engine, as compatible as possible with current specs, Google still seems to possess lots of influence on the official Web standards and they can simply commit changes to the specs that would uncirvumventably require Google's "blessing" to function (for your security, of course /s); so anything "not blessed" would simply fail to function because it isn't signed by the "blessing", "divine" keys.
And Mozilla doesn't feel trustworthy as well, especially because they're overly reliant on Google's money to exist, and also because they've been pivoting to opt-out (so one must explicitly disable it and confirm their will to disable it, otherwise it will be on by default, which turns to be a shady lack of consenting, much like Google's behavior) "features" much despite of their own userbase's demands.
This said, I used to believe in third-way projects such as Servo and Ladybird... except the latter went down a very unacceptable road (founder turned out to be a transphobe who dismisses using neuter pronouns and assumes the user's gender to be always a "he/him" because "we don't do politics here"), and the former... it belongs to Linux Foundation, where big corps such as Microsoft, Google and Oracle have their horses (after all, "Microsoft loves Linux"; sure, Nadella, we know how Microsoft "loves" Linux /s).
I'm afraid there's no light at the end of the fiber optics (pun intended) when it comes to alternative engines: either we try to actively boycott the "modern Web technologies" altogether (ditching HTTP(S) and pivoting to entire alternative protocols such as Geminiprotocol and Gopher whose standards/specs are slightly more distant from the dirty hands of "Google et al"; worth mentioning how Fediverse has Geminiprotocol-capable platforms such as tootik, it's more doable than reinventing the cursed wheel of the Web which turns to be the infamous Chromium wheel) or we try to stick with the "lesser evil" (forks of Mozilla Firefox, until Firefox becomes totally enshittifiedly indistinguishable from Chromium) until a solution happens (or likely not, then we're left with just the other path, which is pivoting to alternative standards altogether).
Because some sites don't work unless you have Chrome.
I guess I don't use those sites then
Especially on mobile... It's crazy how many times I tried to do a food order or some checkout process and mobile Firefox just hits some error.
There's always Brave. And yeah, I know there's some dilema going on out there, but it works for stuff that only loads on chrome.
Ungoogled Chromium works, too.
Does ungoogled chromium have an ads and tracker blocker integrated regardless of the MV2 block in it's upstream Chromium base?
No. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Fair enough
There was a time when Chrome was that much better. Since then, nothing else has been better enough to switch.