Tech

4 reasons not to use Google Chrome

Google has put Chrome in the eye of the hurricane with its intentions to implement Manifest V3 to the detriment of the second version of the specification. Although the company sells it as a great improvement, the reality is that everything indicates that it could mean the end of ad blockers and therefore a reduction in the power that users have over the content that is displayed on the web.

Thanks to Google’s machinery and its strong dominant position, Chrome has emerged, on its own merits, as the greatest threat to users’ freedom. The criticism that the company has received has made it give Manifest V2 another year, but let no one get their hopes up while Chrome retains around 65% share on both desktop and mobilewith Microsoft Edge (on desktop) and Apple Safari (mobile) as the only relatively solid competitors, and to top it off, the former uses basically the same technology as Google’s browser.

It is obvious that Chrome has become for more than one a high-flying satan, but things were not always like that and even the application, or rather the project from which it derives, Chromium, was at the time a breath of fresh air in one sector, that of web browsers, which had been stuck in ways of operating rather typical of the beginning of the century.

Chromium, a necessary revolution

Chromium was released on September 2, 2008, the same date that the Chrome beta for Windows operating systems appeared. On an aesthetic level, both are identical and for more than a decade they shared features such as synchronization through a Google account, but internally they have some important differences that make the first more reliable than the second.

Chromium is free software, so its source code is publicly available for anyone to pick up, modify, and redistribute. Nevertheless, it is released primarily under the terms of the three-clause BSD, a very permissive license under which it is possible to create proprietary derivatives.

And this is where we come to the trap created by Google. The laxness of the three-clause BSD license allows the company to lock down the source code when it builds Chrome, which opens the door for the introduction of other components and mechanisms that cannot be freely audited by a third party. Suspicions about this possible practice have led to the derivative being accused of being spyware on more than one occasion.

The laxity of the three-clause BSD license is not only exploited by Google, but also by Microsoft in Edge, Vivaldi (although it often releases the source code at the wrong time), and Opera. Brave, for its part, chooses to publish its source code under the MPLv2 license (the same one that Firefox uses), so it remains free software or even strengthens that front by using a more restrictive license.

Google Chrome running on Windows 10

Leaving Google’s self-trap aside, which is obviously made to lure users into it, it’s no less true than Chromium. At the technological level, it was a necessary revolution to take better advantage of hardware that was not so modern at the time, in addition to having been the main promoter of HTML5.

Chromium introduced a feature called multithreaded, which, as its name indicates, allows it to run in different processes. This approach has the drawback of generally requiring more hardware resources, but it also brings important advantages such as the fact that if one of the browser processes crashes, the application has many options to continue standing (for example, a tab falls while the rest continues to function normally), which adds to a better use of multicore processors.

The part of the best use of multi-core processors is possibly the one that users have noticed the most, especially in the case of using one that has four or more cores. At this point, Chrome was vastly superior to Firefox for years, until Mozilla released Quantum in 2017. To notice the difference, you didn’t have to use a next-generation quad-core, but in 2016 the superiority of Chromium/Chrome was clearly manifest over an old Core 2 Quad.

Changing the subject, Chrome has been the main promoter of HTML5 on the desktop, and if it weren’t for Google and Apple, today we would still use Adobe Flash to play video through web browsers. Apple vetoed Flash on iOS and Google was limiting its radius of action in Chrome, while Adobe’s own technology hit it hard when it came to attacking Android.

Chromium web browser

Chromium web browser.

Although it is true that at first the playback of multimedia through HTML5 was not going well, for years it has been much better and is much more efficient than Flashwhose excessive consumption of resources could have made support for 4K on YouTube and other video platforms unfeasible, mainly due to the autonomy of the battery of laptops (and mobile phones also if successful).

However, Chromium’s heroics are now a thing of the past, as Firefox has also embraced multithreading and in the past few months it has vastly improved. At the multimedia level, Microsoft Edge has long been ahead of Chrome at least on Windows, while Chromium is falling behind Firefox on Linux in things like hardware acceleration, Wayland support, and integration with things like libadwaita. to make the dark theme work automatically in GNOME. On the other hand, using bare Chromium is only popular among Linux users.

Now yes, returning to the present, we are going to mention Four reasons why you should stop using Google Chrome.

Can’t tell what Google Chrome actually does

As we have already said, Google Chrome is a derivative of Chromium to which the source code is closed, so the official product of the search giant cannot be freely audited by a third party, but, most likely, it has to be done through a contract. with draconian conditions in terms of secrecy and confidentiality.

The fact that Chrome is proprietary software, coupled with Google’s tortuous track record on privacy, triggers rumors that the company includes additional tracking mechanisms that could be especially aggressive against user privacy. Whether or not that statement is true, yes it has been known that Google breached the conditions of private browsing in your web browserwhich leaves the search giant in a situation of little credibility.

Of course, we focus on Chrome because it is the protagonist of this post, but what is exposed here can be applied to Microsoft Edge, Opera and partially Vivaldi. As a result, if you want a Chromium browser that offers transparency, you should go for bare Chromium (although its use is only popular among Linux users), Ungoogled Chromium or Brave, to which you can add other derivatives that remain as true open source (which is not the case with Vivaldi).

Brave, the Chromium derivative that stands out the most among those published as open source

Brave, the Chromium derivative that stands out the most among those published as open source.

Your privacy, far from being guaranteed

This reason derives from the previous one, which although we have focused on privacy, leaves the door open to many other things. Chromium can be oriented towards ethical purposes, although it is important to keep in mind that privacy on the Internet has a lot of fiction and little reality, but leaving that question aside, it is obvious Chrome is a product made by and to follow the interests of Google, which lives largely on things like targeted advertising.

Here it is possibly worth highlighting the case of FLoC, Google’s attempt to retire the questionable third-party cookies. The idea itself was not bad, but seeing the curriculum of the corporation nobody trusted, so Mozilla, Brave and Vivaldi decided to position themselves against it. The strong rejection around FLoC forced Google to have to discontinue it and replace it with another mechanism called Topics.

However, it is important to keep in mind that Google does take care of security and a lot, because otherwise nobody would use its services. The question is how the company uses the data it monopolizes from usersBecause they do not pay for the services provided by the search giant, the product ends up being the user himself due to the typical relationship that develops around many products and services that are offered for free.

Firefox, the only real alternative to Chromium

Firefox, the only real alternative to Chromium.

Avoid a monopoly

That Chrome has a “monopoly”, or rather a very clear dominant position, is an undeniable reality, so this reason goes beyond the official Google product to cover a broader spectrum, that of Chromium browsers.

For many years, alternative web browsers have tended to take Chromium, a technology promoted by Google, instead of Firefox as a base. The reason comes largely from Mozilla’s delay in responding correctly to the technological advances provided by Chromium, which for a long time was clearly superior in aspects such as performance (especially in loading JavaScript) and in the playback of multimedia content.

But back on topic, switching Chrome to use another Chromium browser, be it Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, or Brave, is pretty much jumping out of the frying pan and onto the hot coals, as it’s still a way to feed the sheer power of Google on the web. The day Chromium takes over the entire market, its technology could end up supplanting the very W3C. The website would work following the Chromium criteria and not those of the W3Cjust as it happened at the time with Internet Explorer.

In short, if you want to avoid Chrome’s monopoly, your thing is not to use Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Opera or Brave, but Firefox, which has established itself as the last resistance seeing that WebKit does not spread too much beyond the Safari of Manzana.

If you use Linux, you are falling behind technologically

Realistically, Firefox lags behind Chromium technologically, but there is one system where Mozilla’s browser continues to put up a real fight: Linux.

The development of Chromium for Linux hasn’t been going as fast as it should for years, which has allowed Firefox to rise to the front in some aspects such as integration with Wayland (the graphics protocol that aspires to succeed Xorg), hardware acceleration and integration with libadwaita, so Firefox adopts the theme defined via the base GNOME implementation, while in Chromium this must be forced manually if it is supported.

However, most of the improvements that have allowed Firefox for Linux to catch up against Chromium have been introduced by Red Hat and not by Mozilla. Although the foundation has improved its relationship with Linux in recent years (and most likely forced by circumstances), its contribution still does not go much beyond the rendering engine and the features shared with the other systems.

Linux has become the only strong bastion left for Firefoxand not only because that is where it has proportionally more faithful, but also because it is the only area where it still competes technologically with Chromium, even if it is due to the fact that the dynamics within that system are different from those of Windows and macOS.

conclusion

As we can see, there are reasons not to use both Chrome and Chromium, not only to improve the privacy that one gets when browsing the web, but also to help ensure that its definition remains really in the hands of the W3C and not Google, which it is ultimately the owner of Chromium despite being an open source project.

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