Google Chrome is the most popular browser on the planet with shares 65.7%. It is probably installed on your computer, and it is through it that you are now reading this article.
And at first glance, this is an ordinary browser that everyone is used to. But in reality, everything is not so simple.
Google Chrome today is no better than Internet Explorer was in the 2000s, and Google itself is largely to blame for this. This is a big problem that has no easy solution.
Briefly:
Why Chrome became popular
Beta of the first version of Chrome
Google Chrome was released in 2008. The timing of the exit could not have been better. The entire Internet was already tired of Internet Explorer, which greatly hampered the development of the web, and Firefox was actively gaining popularity, but it was far from the Microsoft browser.
At the time, Chrome was like a breath of fresh air after its cluttered and slow competitors. It had a simple and clear design, an address bar and a search engine in one window (yes, there were two different windows for this back then) and, most importantly, most of its components were available to everyone in the form of Chromium, an open source browser.
How Google employees destroyed Internet Explorer
Chrome supported all modern web standards at that time, including HTML5, which allowed developers to create websites at a new level. Back then, Google strived to make the Internet free, and the bet paid off.
A few years later, Google Chrome was a significant player in the market, with its share growing at the expense of Internet Explorer.
Google made a very good browser and constantly improved it, adding new and useful features. In 2013, Google released the free Blink engine, abandoning Apple WebKit, and from that time the first problems began.
What’s wrong with Google’s own engine
Dynamics of browser popularity from 2009 to 2024
Google was already a huge corporation in 2008 with Gmail, YouTube, Maps and many more services. The company initially promoted Chrome as the best browser for its products.
But Chrome originally ran on the WebKit engine. It is an open source engine developed by Apple in 2003 and is still used in Safari today.
The problem was that Google engineers always had to adapt to WebKit. It was a good engine, but alien.
When Google released Blink, she now has everything she needs to dominate the Internet. Its popular services worked in its browser and on its own engine, that is, the way Google itself wanted.
At first these changes were invisible, but after a few years some Google services stopped working in other browsers. At various times, problems with third-party browser support have been observed with Google Meet, Allo, YouTube TV, Google Earth, YouTube Studio, Hangouts, Inbox and AdWords.
Now there are no such problems, services work everywhere (of those that survived until 2024), but in Chrome they still work a little better.
The current version of Chrome is October 2024
This is partly due to the fact that Google engineers themselves optimize services for Chrome, because they use them and the browser itself. But there is one more nuance.
Chrome developers often create many new technologies that are adopted by the W3C and then become new web standards. All standards are open, that is, they are Maybe should be supported by every browser. However, at the time of release, Chrome was the first to support them because Google develops both browser and web standards.
In general, the topic has been with Google and W3C for a long time is being discussed in the West. Google often accused is that it has effectively subordinated the work of the W3C. In particular, Google’s 106 employees assist W3C in its work, and the number of members exceeds other companies, which in most cases have one employee at W3C.
How does all this affect ordinary users?
Everything Google does results in Chrome being the best choice for users. Partly because Google really makes a fast browser, but often third-party developers themselves optimize the experience for Chrome.
For example, service VK Video works much better in Chrome than in Safari. At a minimum, because there are no delays during video playback in Chrome, but they appear constantly in Safari.
Naturally, the more often users encounter such problems, the more likely they are to choose Chrome as their main browser to avoid problems in the future.
Google, in turn, will be able to continue to refine Chrome to suit its huge audience, which no longer cares about how services work in other browsers. It turns out to be a vicious circle.
Don’t forget about data collection
Google’s core business is serving ads, and Chrome does the best job of collecting user data. While Safari and Firefox compete with each other to see who can collect the least amount of data, Chrome continues to collect information.
In 2020, Google announced that it would stop supporting third-party cookies in Chrome. With their help, advertisers can track user behavior.
At that time, Safari and Firefox had already stopped doing this, and Google promised to stop supporting it in 2022. Then this deadline was repeatedly postponed. The final withdrawal date was set for the end of 2024.
But in July 2024, Google statedwhich will leave support for third-party cookies in Chrome. The decision drew criticism from privacy advocates and even from advertiserswho spent time and resources preparing for the changes to Chrome.
Why extensions stopped working
Chrome is largely open source, but the extension store is owned by Google. The extension framework is called WebExtensions and is supported by Firefox and Safari to make cross-browser extension development easier.
Each extension has a manifest.json file, which contains information about the add-on, its capabilities, and the permissions it needs to work. The current version is now Manifest V3and before that there was Manifest V2.
Manifest V3 was announced back in 2019 and was very negatively received by developers extensions and their users. First of all, Manifest V3 limits ad blockers like uBlock Origin. Manifest V3 prevents extensions from directly changing the content of sites, which is what ad blockers did with Manifest V2. Now the extension only sends a request, and Chrome itself does the blocking.
This approach has its pros and cons, but it has already led to changes in the way uBlock Origin, perhaps the most popular ad blocker in the world, works. uBlock Origin Lite with Manifest V3 support still blocks ads and does it well in most cases. But the developer had to cut most of the features to reduce the size of the extension. For example, we had to remove the function for selecting elements to block, which sometimes helps a lot.
Old and new version of uBlock Origin
Additionally, all extensions are now unable to download code remotely. This is another major blow to ad blockers.
As it was before: the extension constantly loaded new rules in order to quickly block new types of advertising. Now all content filtering rules must be contained in the extension code, and they can only be updated together with the extension through the Chrome Web Store.
Google says Manifest V3 is designed to improve the privacy, security, and performance of extensions. Many are sure that Manifest V3 was created only to combat ad blockersalthough this is, of course, not true. Manifest V3 has many important and useful changes that affect other extensions as well.
Other browsers, even those running Chromium, do not block Manifest V2, so the old extensions still work for them. But they will eventually follow Chrome’s lead. Firefox will likely support Manifest V2 for a long time.
Chrome is slow under load
Google Chrome is known for being resource hungry. Around the mid-2010s, Chrome went from being a lightweight browser to being a real memory hog.
Forgive me for such analogies, but I have used many different browsers on different computers and under different OSes, but only Chrome always slows down when there are a large number of open tabs (30+).
My main browsers are Safari, Firefox and Chrome. Among the trio, only Safari and Firefox drain the least amount of battery and RAM on my MacBook Air. This is despite the fact that Google regularly releases Chrome updates specifically designed to reduce resource consumption on the Mac.
The most interesting thing is that I have exactly the same story with other browsers based on Chromium, although Opera and Yandex Browser work even slower. I admit, I haven’t opened Brave and Vivaldi for a long time, but Arc’s performance was just at the level of Chrome.
What alternatives does Chrome have?
Firefox and Safari are great replacements for Chrome. I especially advise you to consider Safari if you are tied to the Apple ecosystem.
Brave and Vivaldi run on Chromium, but they themselves block ads, do not collect data, and support older extensions. If it is important to you that the browser runs on the same engine as Google, then these options are worth considering. But you have to be careful with Brave because it has been involved in several privacy scandals.
For lovers of the unusual, I can recommend Arc. We had a review of this browser, which is not like any other browser at all. But this is what attracts many people.
Will Chrome change in the future?
Hardly. Chrome is currently the most popular browser in the world, and there is no indication that this will change.
Where did the very first Internet browsers come from? One of them was made by Steve Jobs
If in the future Chrome continues to stand out from other browsers for the worse, make unpopular decisions, and developers optimize sites only for it, then we risk getting an Internet that again depends on one browser, as was the case with Internet Explorer 20 years ago.
Source: www.iphones.ru
