Google Chrome

★★★☆☆

There was a time when Chrome was the fastest web browser available, especially cross-platform, and I used it as my main browser on Linux, Windows and macOS for most of the 2010s. But it gradually got more complicated, cluttered and slower. And since 2020 or so, it’s felt less like a user agent and more like a Google agent.

I switched back to Firefox a few years ago when Mozilla made some massive strides in performance, but kept Chrome as my alternate browser for websites that just won’t work right (or refuse to run) in Firefox.

The final straws:

• Planning to replace third-party cookie tracking by having the browser track you itself, which is both a breach of trust and will give Google’s own ad network an advantage.
• Google, an advertising company, making changes to its extension scheme that conveniently make it a lot more difficult to run ad blockers and privacy extensions.*

It’s clear that the people trying to make a good web browser are no longer the ones calling the shots: the advertising execs are. (You’ve probably noticed this happening with search too.)

Trust is easy to lose, and hard to rebuild. I uninstalled Chrome from everything except test environments and replaced it with Vivaldi, which has worked out great.

Yes, even my Android devices. Unfortunately there’s one website that I have to use that won’t work right in Vivaldi or Firefox, and I have to keep Chrome available on one device for that. Otherwise I’d flat-out disable it.