Written by Theundercoverman on 2022-02-13
Internet Explorer used to be the most used web browser in the world, peaking at around 95% market share in the early 2000s. Back then the web wasn’t nearly as complex and new browser versions didn’t come out often, so creating a new web browser was not that hard. During Microsoft’s dominance, they rarely updated IE, only releasing new major versions whenever a new version of Windows was released. Some people still used IE even if they didn’t like it because that was what was available at the time. Others would only use IE to install Firefox and then use that browser instead. Internet Explorer was slow, insecure, and overall an unusable piece of shit, but at least back when it had most of the market share, there were actual alternatives to it. If you didn’t like IE, you could choose between a few other browsers, each with their own rendering engines.
In 2008, the first version of Google Chrome was released. Unlike Microsoft, Google updated their browser frequently and added new standards (aka bloat). Since everyone already used their search engine, with a little advertising, everyone starts using Google Chrome, leaving IE and Firefox behind. Google would continue to add new features, and websites would implement those new features, and overtime the web becomes increasingly bloated to the point to where it is no longer possible to develop an alternative web browser. As a result, all of the other browsers have became forks of Chromium, save for Firefox, which is controlled opposition (tor), and most of the new browsers including Vivaldi, Brave, and Ungoogled Chromium, are all based off Chromium. Every browser uses the same rendering engine and codebase, giving Google complete control over the web.
Now you may be thinking, what’s so bad about Google Chrome? There are many problems with Chrome besides being massive spyware. I wrote about Chrome’s issues on my old website. Here’s an archived version of the Chromium article. Chrome has a terrible UI, lacks any basic options such as the ability to remove the user profile button on your toolbar, and has no option to disable history. You cannot even clear history upon exit. Just about every other browser including Firefox and Brave has this, but not Chrome or Ungoogled Chromium. I don’t want Google deciding what my browser looks like or how I browse the internet.
While there are more browsers to choose from today, just about all of them use Google’s blink engine, including more lightweight browsers such as Falkon and Qutebrowser (both which use QtWebEngine which is based on Blink). The problem with these browsers is that since they use Google’s technology, they are affected by Google’s anti-user decisions.
Let’s take a look at what options we had back when Microsoft controlled the web and what options we have now. I won’t be including browsers that use Blink or WebKit.
Browsers from 2007 (the year before Google Chrome):
Browsers today:
So as we can see, Pale Moon is the only option left for browsing the web, unless we wanted to abandon the modern web and stick with static HTML/XHTML websites like the ones on Neocities. All the other browsers are either dead, controlled opposition, or forks of Chrome.
Moving forward, we have three options. We can either continue using forks of Chrome and Firefox (Ungoogled Chromium and LibreWolf) that do nothing except remove several automatic connections, we can use browsers like Falkon or Luakit that use either WebKitGTK or QtWebEngine, or we can just leave the modern web entirely and use a browser like NetSurf or Links that completely ignores today’s standards. I think at some point we’re going to have to use Chrome or any of it’s forks to access bloated websites, in which case you should only use those browsers for those websites and a different browser for everything else.