The endless browser wars

I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel?

I believe browser diversity is healthy for the world wide web. I don't want Firefox to become dominant either, but right now there is a short supply of browsers which are independent from Chromium. I don't want the W3C to be replaced by the Chromium Project.

I believe Firefox is a good enough browser to go toe-to-toe with Chrome. It and it's developer are not without problems. However, at this point I'd use Firefox even if Mozilla was just as bad as Google because I think the diversity is worth it.

For now. Android has shown us exactly how Google treats their "open source" products once they have rid themselves entirely of viable competition.

Google really has become the late-90s, early-2000s Microsoft. First they "embrace" by releasing a product as open source. Then they "extend" by packaging the official release of the product with their own proprietary functionality. Then they "extinguish" by slowly siphoning functionality from the open source project into their own proprietary extensions (see Google Play Services).

There's a separate problem in that Chromium isn't capable of any other ways of more freely and openly syncing the things it used to sync to Google's servers. But when thinking about any open source software, I feel that its important to separate "things it does which I don't want it to do" and "things I wish it did". In other words, code which was written that doesn't serve the users' interests, and code which could serve the users' interests if it were written. I don't believe its productive to worry or complain about the latter; its more productive to just write it, file feature requests, etc. Of course, in Chromium's case, its unlikely they'd be accepted, but that's a separate, third issue.

I also disagree with the article's position that Firefox isn't a valid alternative. Firefox is somewhere within the range of 98% to 102% as good as Chrome, depending on the website you're visiting. By comparison, I would place Safari (the only other real alternate browser on any OS) at 92%-96%. Firefox is a fantastic browser which can absolutely replace Chrome/Chromium, and should be used by more people if for no other reason than to add more balance to the Big Three. Throw out the FOSS ideals for just a second; there are effectively three browsers left, and the most ideal marketshare for those three is 33% each, given that the primary long-term benefit and risk from marketshare is, at the end of the day, power toward influencing the future of the web. Power should be distributed, always.

And this is hardly contentious, but the industry need a 4th browser. I would rank this as the single most important project any company, group, or individual could commit productivity to at this time. Of course, important things are rarely easy, but to me, it doesn't even matter if its open or closed source; open source would be better, but what matters far more is distributing power further.