Why I finally dropped Google Chrome

Today's success

Today, I finally updated my graphic drivers to nvidia-driver-580. (Which, to be fair, has been available for a number of months, but my drivers don't switch automatically and it took a bit for me to find out that there was an updated driver available.)
I currently use Ubuntu 22.04, and a while back I switched to Mozilla Firefox as my primary web browser. Unfortunately, for a decent length of time, no matter what driver I chose for my Nvidia graphics card, Firefox on Ubuntu ran into issues. Sending images via WhatsApp Web would result in black boxes instead of the intended image, and images uploaded to Bluesky met a similar fate. Graphics-heavy sites turned games into pixelated masses of color as the elements failed to properly display, making it impossible to tell what was supposed to be shown.

Those issues together meant that I was forced to keep using Google Chrome alongside Firefox for certain services - until today. The driver update has, so far as I can tell, fixed my issues, and the services that failed previously on Firefox are now usable. Now, finally, I can close Chrome, and bid it farewell.

Why make the switch in the first place?

So why did I switch to Firefox in the first place, particularly since the experience was for so long lacking?

The simple answer is that Google is trying to kill any semblance of privacy left while browsing the internet.

Every website that you visit nowadays logs and tracks your every move. Targeting cookies, tracking pixels, browser fingerprinting, more stuff that I'm not technically competent enough to understand.... every site greedily takes every bit of information it can, in order to either directly better target you with personalized ads so that you spend more money, or to sell that information to shady actors. Your activity across different sites is put together to build a profile; your demographic information, personality, likes, dislikes, political stances, and more are all aggregated in order to show you more ads.

And boy do they show you ads. It's no longer just the disreputable illegal streaming sites that flood your screen with ads across every free centimeter of space, or force you to sit through ad after ad before showing you the content you want. YouTube, for instance, packs in ads before and after videos, and sometimes even in the middle, along with showing multiple ads in the sidebar. News sites flash sketchy ads in the margins. It's increasingly difficult to find any site that doesn't try to shove ads in your face.

An adblocker is not a luxury or a way of cheating sites out of revenue. It is perhaps the only way to stay sane on a internet that is increasingly invasive but necessary for basic tasks in society.

Google's assassination of uBlock Origin

One of the best adblockers out there is uBlock Origin. uBlock Origin is a free, open-source adblocker, that blocks visible ads as well as blocking much of the underlying tracking and logging that sites perform. It makes pages load faster, since you're not loading all of the bloat involved in tracking you and serving ads, and helps prevent companies from building profiles in order to target you. Unlike other adblockers, uBlock origin doesn't intentionally let certain ads through; it blocks ads and allows you to browse without them.

And so, of course, Google did their best to kill them off.

As far as I understand, Google changed the API routes used by uBlock Origin in order to prevent the adblocker from effectively adapting and blocking new ads, and, since the adblocker used deprecated routes, eventually disabled it entirely. I can no longer enable uBlock Origin on Google Chrome.

Google runs a huge percentage of the online ad industry, from Google Ads to Adsense to running ads on Google Search and YouTube. They have a huge vested interest in you not blocking their ads, because it translates directly into less revenue for them, and everyone knows that revenue for huge companies is the most important thing in life. Adblockers cut into the profits and allow you to think that you deserve a usable browsing experience, and so they have to go.

Once Chrome killed uBlock Origin, that was the final straw. I wasn't going to put up with seeing more ads around, and so I switched to Firefox.

Why Firefox in particular?

Firefox's main advantage is that it supports uBlock Origin. Aside from that, Firefox is the only major non-Chrome-based browser in today's market - in other words, one of the only remaining obstacles to Chrome's monopoly over web browsing. It also has built-in anti-tracking features, and is itself also FOSS (free open-source software). I try, in general, to use FOSS products; my primary operating system is Ubuntu, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only student in my classes to consistently submit assignments in LibreOffice's .odt (text), .odp (presentation), or .ods (spreadsheet) filetypes.
While Firefox does have some downsides - including recent AI integrations that you have to hunt down to turn off - it is, overall, a much better choice for browsing the web than Chrome or Chromium-based browsers.

The internet has become more and more necessary in everyday life. Government services, healthcare bureaucracy, education, and more all require you to use their websites nowadays. News sites have all but replaced traditional mass media for getting updates and discovering what's happening around the world. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, people moved their entire lives online. It is extremely difficult to exist in the modern world without the internet, and so it should be possible to use the internet without being harassed at every step by invasive tracking and privacy-violating targeted ads.

It's a shame that we need tools like adblockers and browser-based tracking blockers in order to have that experience. You need experience and some level of knowledge in order to know what an adblocker is, why it's important, or how to install one, which leaves the most vulnerable people, such as the elderly or those who grew up without access to fancy devices, even more exposed to sketchy ads, malware, and outright scams. The internet is practically a hostile environment these days. The very least that we deserve is a browser that doesn't actively make it more difficult to protect ourselves.