Don’t use Google Chrome. Bonus: Microsoft Azure Clown Computing

I’m sick of typing out why people should not use Google Chrome.

Instead, I can make this page to direct people to which sums up the major point.

Even before Chromium (the base of Chrome) gets rid of the ManifestV2 API for browser extensions next year (2023), it has already deleted APIs that ublock-origin and NoScript depended on for security guarantees.

ManifestV3 just makes things much worse, again.

AdGuard has already made a prototype extension that conforms to MV3, and it’s completely terrible according to users. (Warning: Google link) Ads load and then basically get hidden, so that they can spy on you regardless of whether you see them or not. And the rules limit makes it very hard to even do that.

Soon, the choice will be to use something like this or to not use Chrome at all.

Not using Chrome at all is a better option, and you can move your bookmarks and passwords over to another browser now while there’s still time.

I’ve never used Chrome for my default Web browser and refuse to install it on any machines where I need security. Google is the major threat to your security when you have their software on your computer.

Just having their repository allows them to install anything they want on your computer, which won’t complain about it even if it replaces your operating system files with malware, because you imported their signing key when you installed Chrome.

(This is essentially the same situation people who use Raspberry Pi OS face with the Microsoft repository, which is enabled by default.)

Chrome is too dangerous to use on the Web, for many reasons.

Primarily because the company that makes it is an ad tech that gives it away for “free” because it is malicious software designed to run other malicious software and display advertising.

Most JavaScript is malicious software and not permitted to run in my browsers due to NoScript.

Chrome isn’t actually a Web browser. it’s a host for malware written by an ad tech.

People sometimes confuse Chrome for a Web browser because it does do that too for legacy compatibility (from Google’s perspective), but that’s not really its purpose.

Chrome’s primary purpose is to run Google’s replacements for the Web (Google’s Web apps) and make it really easy for Google’s ad servers to display ads and spy on you, its second purpose is to corrupt the Web sites that are not Google’s so that you cannot access them without Chrome.

Most Firefox “Gecko” engine development these days is simply implementing “fixes” for things that always worked fine before which don’t now, because of Chrome and other browsers that use Chromium.

Google doesn’t care much if you use another browser based on Chromium because the rendering engine helps them gain market share and convince Web developers it’s not important to support Web standards anymore.

As long as Google keeps getting major Web sites to throw out Web standards support and stick a page in your face that says to get Chrome, or to just break down in other browsers completely so you’ll give up trying to use them, they win.

The point of Chromium isn’t to do open source to be nice. It’s to grind down every other company that makes a Web browser and get them to throw in with Google.

Recently, ComEd, the electric company in Illinois, redesigned their site. It’s very nasty now. Hosted on the Microsoft Azure Clown. Demanding Microsoft Clown JavaScripts. Sending code that only works in Chromium and confuses SeaMonkey. And one of my banks stopped working in SeaMonkey for the same reason.

In the late 90s and 2000s, most people saw Microsoft Internet Explorer as this completely miserable pile of shit you only opened when you had to when you got some stupid bank that said “Sorry, try again.” in a sane Web browser.

Today’s Internet Explorer is “Google Chrome”, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi.

We can only stop this is we refuse to use it.

We can get around some problems that shitheads running certain nasty Web sites create with trivial workarounds, so they load properly in Firefox/LibreWolf, and perhaps even SeaMonkey.

I don’t even use Firefox/LibreWolf as much as SeaMonkey. I might spin it up to deal with my bank or power company.

I figured out that ublock-origin and NoScript work fine in SeaMonkey, you just have to use “legacy” versions of the extensions. Oh well.

Microsoft can’t even make their own Web sites work reliably enough to consider using. Why are other companies coming to them for VMs and hosting?

For the last few weeks, I’ve been getting errors instead of Outlook WebMail to load in every browser, with NoScript on, off, or not even installed. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

IMAP in SeaMonkey Mail has worked throughout 99% of whatever’s going on in there.

Unfortunately, Microsoft is still a thing.

They threw in towel on trying to hijack the Web platform, and now in addition to their Edge browser being malware (just like all of their browsers have been), it props Google up as well.

I only use Outlook Mail as part of a general “I have all of the ‘free’ email addresses I can grab everywhere.” thing, so fortunately I wasn’t caused serious harm by the outages, but some people probably were.