We all must switch to Firefox

<blockquote><em><a href="#377628">In reply to paragon:</a></em></blockquote><p>It means that the open standards are better adhered to. Think back to the days of Netscape and Internet Explorer. IE got a majority share and MS started to push through IE-only features, which meant a lot of web sites didn'T work with Netscape or were partially broken. You only got the "full experience" with IE.</p><p>When Firefox appeared, the move back to standards started and the IE-only bits and pieces started to disappear, although IE was very slow at getting standards compliant, so webdevs had to break sites so that they still worked with IE.</p><p>Then Chrome came along and Google is now trying to push through its own proprietary extensions as well. As long as there are two or three "popular" rendering engines out there, with enough support, then this annexation of the standards and branching away from the standards can be held in check.</p><p>Some of the changes aren't bad, but they benefit Chrome and Google first. It is better to keep the standards standard and everybody adheres to them.</p><p>Then there is the problem of the extra telemetry data that Google gets through Chrome. Microsoft aren't as bad, but you really need an open source browser, like Chromium or Firefox whose main purpose isn't to send back as much information to base as possible.</p><p>Again, without the likes of Firefox and to a lesser extent Vivaldi and its fellows, people will probably switch in droves to Chrome, which is a bad move, in terms of data protection – unless you are fully committed to sharing all your information with Google.</p><p>This is one of the problems with Android, for example, the browser defaults to Chrome, just like Windows defaulted to IE back in the 90s, And like IE, you can't deinstall Chrome if you don't like it. Given that Google has reached monopoly status in the smartphone world (over 85% market share), this is, IMHO, a big problem.</p><p>I know what Chrome does and actively avoid giving information back to Google as much as I can. But most people don't. My wife came up to me in the Spring and asked me to "de-Google" her smartphone.</p>

<blockquote><em><a href="#377682">In reply to paul-thurrott:</a></em></blockquote><blockquote>Having a standard for web rendering is, in fact, a net positive;</blockquote><p>Which is why we have a standards body. Having the likes of EdgeHTML and Firefox's Gecko mean that it is harder for, for example, Google to ignore the standards and start making their own extensions to the standard, like Microsoft did in the 90s. That said, EdgeHTML never really caught up with the standards and was more half-hearted than the others, for some reason.</p>