Time for another soapbox session, I think. I'll tell you what I really fucking hate is the devolution of web browsers, and how we're just happily letting Google (of all fucking companies) dictate the standards.
I used Firefox for years and got very comfy with the sheet amount of customizability of it, then tried Chrome for a few days when it came outand kept running into "You can't move this element" or "Chrome extensions don't have the ability to do this thing" and so on. In Firefox, I could block ads from ever loading. In Chrome, they'd still be loaded, just not rendered. That's a pretty big fucking hole if you ask me.
In Firefox, I (at one point, long ago) had one bar across my window, with the rest being clean open rendering space. It had my URL bar next to my tabs and a bookmark menu button next to that. That was it. No other buttons needed, thanks to mouse gestures, hotkeys, and keyword based search. It was glorious.
After that, I've avoided Chrome/Chromium and their derivatives whenever possible for years out of a combination of distrust for any code base built by Google and the fact that, frankly, I hate how stripped down and spartan Chrome is.
It used to be the case that your browser provided basic functionality and otherwise focused on flexibility, so you could do whatever the hell you wanted with it so long as either you or someone else bothered to spend the time writing the extensions necessary. It did its job and then got out of the way. In current year, you get limousine liberal politics shoved down your throat on the default start page, the default UI has its own fucking sense of self preservation, and updates pushed that actively remove features. Good luck building a browser setup like the old Firefox one I mentioned up above, even in Firefox, nowadays, because the QuAnTuM update destroyed that flexibility and everything is fucking Chromium based.
On that now, why in the fuck is everyone in the FOSS scene using Chromium as a basis for anything related to web browsing? How fucking quickly we forget the late 90s Misrosoft tactic of "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish." Google has effectively poisoned the well by releasing a version of their browser as open source, the prevalence of which in virtually any would-be open source alternative or fork has ensured that they get to dictate the standards for what the web looks like from here on out.
God damn, open source devs have become a lazy bunch of pricks, and open source consumers have become a bunch of spoiled assholes. Nobody tries to build from scratch any more, and if they do the only attention their project gets is to get beaten over the head with comparisons against bullshit like all of these Chromium forks instead of valuable contributions, criticisms, and/or bug reports, so they end up abandoning their projects. Software as a whole as become such a toxic shithole.
Disclaimer: For reasons I can't really get into, I do use a modern version of Chrome on a regular basis for work, so this isn't me talking out of my ass based on a few days of hands on experience over a decade ago. It's still the same rigid piece of shit it's always been, just with more idiots duped into maintaining a constant semi for it.
