The Chromium Monopoly
Why Google controlling 70%+ of the browser market share is the biggest threat to the open web.
What is Chromium?
Chromium is the open-source codebase that Google maintains and uses as the foundation for Google Chrome. It is extremely fast and capable.
The Illusion of Choice
If you switch from Chrome to Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, or Arc, you are still using Chromium. While these browsers strip out Google's telemetry, they rely on Google's Blink rendering engine and V8 JavaScript engine.
Why does this matter?
- Standards Dictation: When Google wants a new web standard (like the Privacy Sandbox / Topics API), they just build it into Chromium. Since Chromium has 70%+ market share, developers have to support it. Google becomes the de facto W3C.
- Security Monoculture: A zero-day exploit in Blink/V8 affects nearly the entire internet simultaneously.
- Manifest V3: See our Manifest V3 Guide. Google crippled ad-blockers in Chromium to protect their ad revenue. Edge and Brave had to scramble to maintain ad-blocking capabilities, but they are fighting upstream against the codebase maintainer.
The Solution
Use a different engine. Firefox (and its forks like Mullvad) uses Gecko. Safari uses WebKit. Using Gecko is a vote for an independent web.