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Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?
by dotcoma 5mo ago
Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?
- TrackerFF 5mo agoEasy. You work for a company that has only whitelisted chrome or edge.
- bpye 5mo agoNothing says you have to use the same browser at work and outside of work? I use Edge for work, Firefox everywhere else.
- thyristan 5mo agoI agree. This is Google doing underhanded Google-things. Why the hell would anyone trust them in the first place?
- liminis 5mo agoGoogle's "don't be evil" motto already felt ironic over a decade ago, long before they even replaced it with "do the right thing [for shareholder value?]".
- account42 5mo agoYou have to understand it to work like in many RPG games - you get to murder and pillage from time to time as long as you donate some of your ill gotten gains to move your alignment back to "neutral".
- sevenzero 5mo agoWhat browsers would you recommend? I use Brave but it's still Chromium under the hood. It's the only one that I never had trouble with adblock though. Also lets me play youtube on mobile when my screen is locked.
- StingyJelly 5mo agoBrave origin on linux looks pretty solid now. Now I'm using that and Librewolf.
- sevenzero 5mo agoI just checked it out, but it removes Tor access? It would pretty much downgrade the regular browser
- StingyJelly 5mo agoI think using tor in brave just makes you stand out more - stock tor browser is probably a better setup. Whonix even better.
- heavyset_go 5mo agoIt helps if you're doing mundane things and want to help people who need to mix their sensitive traffic with it. More people "legitimately" using Tor makes it less likely to have its exit nodes outright blocked, as well, and assuming all traffic from them is malicious.
- StingyJelly 5mo agoThat's charitable, but even then you probably want to avoid fingerprinting...
- dwedge 5mo agoI will never use Brave after the debacle where they injected content into sites downloaded over HTTPS to pretend people were promoting their crypto token and adding a "donate" button on the page.
- StingyJelly 5mo agoThat made me avoid it for a long time but there hasn't been more concerning behavior since, so some point, we can move on.
- k_bx 5mo agoI use Chrome because at Google Meet it renders a nice separate window with mute/unmute controls as you switch to another tab and screen share. Curious if Google plans to allow other browsers doing that too.
- utopiah 5mo agoYou could use Chromium just for Google Meet. That's what I do. I have Chromium relatively up to date that I basically solely use when I need to. It can be Google Meet, or Teams, or whatever was purposely botched in order NOT to work with Firefox, basically sabotage, but it can also be very rare cases like Lego Spike or GrapheneOS Web installer which require WebUSB. 99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.
- k_bx 5mo agoThat's exactly what I do with Chrome, use it for Google Meet and some websites that work best in Chrome (heavy apps like Figma or whatever). 99% it's Firefox.
- hacker_homie 5mo agoBecause ladybird isn’t alpha yet, and Firefox is a mess.
- Sharlin 5mo agoWhat mess? I only ever used Chrome as my main browser for a short while when Firefox had become rather bloaty and had slow JS, and Chrome was small and nimble. But that was something like fifteen years ago. Firefox works, is plenty fast these days, and only eats most of my RAM compared to Chrome which takes all of it, and serves me a web devoid of almost all ads and most trackers.
- hacker_homie 5mo agoFrom a funding standpoint there’s no future to Firefox. They will get brought Mozilla foundation is an investment fund now. Firefox it dead weight.
- vrganj 5mo agoFirefox is open source :)
- tdeck 5mo agoThis isn't particularly relevant to whether you should use it right now though. If there's a restaurant I like but it might go out of business in a year I don't stop eating there today.
- glenstein 5mo agoThey push millions of lines of code every quarter including thousands of patches, constant security updates and performance improvements and deepened support for web platform standards. As open source projects go, it's probably one of the most active and thriving ones there is. As eager as some people are to dance on Mozilla's grave, that day isn't coming anytime soon. If you wanted to point to the year where they've been the best financed they've ever been and where they've had the most resources invested into browser development they ever have, that year would be 2026. Only to be exceeded by 2027 and then 2028, 2029 and beyond. At a bare minimum, their endowment gives them probably a two to three year firewall in the event that their funding is cut off, which it hasn't been. I also thought the accusation was supposed to be the other way around, namely that we all knew they were going to get funded into perpetuity as controlled opposition.
- CalRobert 5mo agoI have no idea but when I mention Firefox my colleagues under 35 or so literally think I'm joking.
- heavyset_go 5mo agoThey've been consuming 15+ years of anti-Mozilla rants anytime it or Firefox are mentioned online. It's how you get things like "Browser monocultures are an issue, so don't use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!" said in earnest.
- CalRobert 5mo agoThe more time goes on the more I feel like I live on a different planet. Even things like "shouldn't you be able to decide what software you run on the stuff you own?" gets blank stares.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoHello fellow extraterrestrial
- Schlagbohrer 5mo agoOld heads checking in... Back in my day, we had an exposed file hierarchy and we liked it!
- CalRobert 5mo agoI still remember "oh my friend's iphone has a nice camera, how can I send myself that picture he took with bluetooth?" and being... a bit surprised that it wasn't really possible.
- cdrini 5mo agoIs anyone disagreeing with that statement?
- jangxx 5mo agoIt's the browser that annoys me the least. Almost everything just works.
- tim333 5mo agoYeah that's mostly why I use it. When I try Firefox I get out of memory messages for some reason. Also the Google Lens tool is very handy and gets used often.
- jimbob45 5mo agoWhat are the alternatives? Only a massively moneyed corp has the resources to fight vulns at acceptable rates. Firefox doesn’t count because they’re being funded by Google.
- dotcoma 5mo agoIn the short term, Helium (if, like me, you can’t live without Chrome’s bookmarks). In the medium term, perhaps Ladybird. In the long term, we’re all dead.
- ranger_danger 5mo agoI think they were looking for browsers that aren't based on Chromium or Gecko, which, for something still regularly updated and works with most websites, I think webkit is the only real alternative.
- ranger_danger 5mo agoAnything webkit-based and open source like Epiphany or Konqueror/Rekonq, it matches your "moneyed corp" requirement (Apple).
- 0x0203 5mo agoI don't understand this perspective. How can one accept the objectively more user hostile option because the less hostile one gets money from the other. If one objects to using products funded by google, why is there not also an objection to using products from google? For as long as the funding for Firefox continues, it remains a viable option. And despite all their bad decisions of late, they still give users the ability to configure or disable user hostile components. Their funding model is a risk, but I've been using Firefox and librewolf forever and I'd argue it's a much better option than chrome or edge, especially with a handful of plugins. A risk is still better than the actual realization of the risk.
- maleldil 5mo ago> Firefox doesn’t count because they’re being funded by Google. Even if that were true, it's still a better option _today_.
- braggerxyz 5mo agoExactly my thoughts. There are so many good alternatives already, it's insane to me that people still use this garbage. LibreWolf is a godsend
- pjmlp 5mo agoWhy in the world do people keep shipping Chrome with their pseudo native applications?
- lukewarm707 5mo agoi use chrome enterprise for my personal use, which is managed via the google workspace admin. you would think google is not stupid enough to mess with gcp account holders
- azangru 5mo ago> Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world? There are only three major browser rendering engines. One is Gecko, by Mozilla. One is Webkit, currently tended to by Apple. And one is Blink, which is Google/Microsoft. Of those, Blink is the most featureful. That's why.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mr_toad 5mo ago> Blink is the most featureful It’s not a waste of bandwidth and disk space, it’s a feature!
- 31337Logic 5mo agoThank you. Exactly this question. Full stop.
- htx80nerd 5mo agobecause it's really well developed and Just Works
- timbit42 5mo ago...and enslaves you.