> Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it comes from a company that is notorious for wanting to know everything about you.
Are you suggesting that Chrome gathers data about you? Because unless you tick that box (which they show pretty prominently) it doesn't. It doesn't by default in most linux distribution packages.
> Unlike IE
I don't know if you've been following, but Microsoft is now the king of knowing everything about you. They record things about their customers' computer activity which should horrify anyone. Sometimes they don't respect user selections either, even all the way up to Enterprise editions (where it is often mission-critical not to send competitive information to Microsoft by accident in a core dump), which is infuriating.
> In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to.
My impression is that at this point, most unique performance problems in Chrome are either an inherent cost of multi-process, a mediocre implementation choice in that model, or a performance tradeoff toward better application latency at the cost of heavy initialization. Chrome could display many pages more quickly if they ignored the GPU, but they use it across the board so that they don't have to restart into "GPU mode" when they realize there is a lot of compositing on the page. Chrome has converged toward other browsers recently, they'll now run multiple tabs on the same process as long as they share a FQDN (sites that host together, crash together), I suspect they do this to save memory.
If we're talking about runtime speed of real web apps and sites, Chrome has everyone matched or beat.
> The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
The problem with IE6 was not Microsoft, or IE6 itself. Microsoft did not win by literally forcing people to use IE6. The problem was, and probably always will be, greedy unscrupulous web developers (and their managers) who want all the cool new toys at any cost. Microsoft was doing the cool, "html5, bro!" type browser innovation that google is doing now, and developers (and their managers) lapped it up. People forget that Microsoft made box-model: border-box, XMLHttpRequest, favicons, , and bi-directional text on the web. They did this all in IE5, this put IE6 ahead, and people loved it too. Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat for honest customers who just wanted their webpage to work, so IE5 quirks are the way of the web.
The problem is not that nobody likes the boss, the problem is that everyone likes the boss.