"Begin disabling installed extensions still using Manifest V2 in Chrome stable"

I've finally switched (back) to firefox today.

I switched from firefox to chrome for their superior devtools a few years back, but hopefully firefox has had time to catch up.

Everything old is new again!

This is why we need to break up Google.

Google is a de facto monopoly. They own the entire web. The gateway, the browser, the protocols, advertising, discovery.

Google is too big.

Sure, but we saw this coming a mile away (as in, people have been saying this about Chrome for about a decade). People--especially tech nerds--didn't have to switch to the closed source, conflict-of-interest, browser. But, everyone did, and this is what we get for it. We now have proprietary DRM built in to the web standards, and all kinds of other bullshit, because a bunch of people decided to not learn any lessons at all from Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

But, every time Mozilla does something slightly abrasive, HN users pile on about how Mozilla is ruining their privacy-respecting reputation, and then go back to using Chrome... The double-standard is really something else.

Maybe instead of getting someone else to break up Google for us, we could just... stop using their shit? I'm typing this from Firefox, I use Proton Mail (and pay for it!) for email, and I mostly search with DuckDuckGo (I know that's not perfect, either). I certainly don't feel like I'm living like a caveman...

/rant

> tech nerds you would be surprised how many devs these days have drunk the big tech coolaid.

leetcode all the time and dream of working at google and using chrome and writing javascript.

if the tech nerds took a stand and used firefox en masse, we wouldn't have this problem.

unfortunately it is now normie season. we have to travel through these dark times.

There's still hope. I would like to draw a parallel to Microsoft Windows, with my own narrative added over.

Tech nerds mostly knew that Windows was not a good server operating system. It was also not a fantastic software development environment unless you were using a big, all-inclusive, IDE that was probably aimed specifically at developing Windows libraries and applications.

But, Windows was (and still is) the choice for normies by a WIDE margin.

The tech nerds continued to mostly ignore Windows for server stuff, and more and more ignored it for other dev stuff, too (many migrating to Macs, some to Linux, etc).

If you have a lot of users, but no developers on your platform, you're playing a dangerous game. Eventually Microsoft found a way to have Linux running in Windows. I don't know or care if that "saves" Microsoft or Windows or whatever, but I do see that as a win for the tech nerds.

All we have to do is get the tech nerds to stop using Chrome. Chrome can't survive forever if the nerds stop using Chrome, if we stop optimizing our web pages specifically for Chrome, and if we stop writing and maintaining extensions for it.

Eventually, they'll probably cave and put back more stuff to make the nerds happy, in order to bring them back to the platform and save their normie userbase. Either that or Chrome will die. Both are fine with me.