Google Chrome

3 of 5 Stars

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.

a user 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.

I switched back to 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.

having the browser track you itself

making changes to its extension scheme

Regardless of whether you approve of ad blockers or not, the current state of advertising online is such that ads end up being surveillance tools and performance hogs. Sometimes running an ad blocker is the difference between being able to read a site and not being able to load it. Chrome has always been torn between the two priorities of making a good browser that runs websites and apps well and that people will want to use, and being owned by a company whose primary business is advertising.

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.)

happening with search

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.

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.

ARM Linux Note: Google is finally launching support for Linux on ARM systems in "Q2 2026". Until now, to get an almost-Chrome experience on Arm64 Linux you'd have to run Chromium (if your distro had an aarch64 package, or could run the Flatpak), or a third-party browser like Vivaldi.

launching support for Linux on ARM

Chromium

— Kelson Vibber, 2025-01-02. Updated 2026-03-12.