Once upon a time, I genuinely thought of a browser as a "user-agent", as hinted in the HTTP header; a tool I could use to reach out into the world. I have incr

Once upon a time, I genuinely thought of a browser as a "user-agent", as hinted in the HTTP header; a tool I could use to reach out into the world. I have increasingly had to abandon that idea and treat browsers as potentially hostile incursions into my computer, since browser makers seem determined to prioritize the needs of web developers by granting them access into my machine without really bothering to get my consent. Why do I have to use third-party add-ons that break browser default behaviors in order to get back to a comfortable security state? This suggests that my interests and those of the browser makers, especially Google, are not well aligned, and that really reduces the usefulness of the web for me.