Google Chrome

Chrome significantly impacts user freedom through its default settings, extension policies, and integration with Google's ecosystem. The browser's dominance allows Google to influence web standards, potentially creating a web environment that works best with Chrome.[[1]]( Users face potential lock-in through seamless integration with Google services, making switching to alternative browsers more difficult. Additionally, Google's control over Chrome's extension ecosystem has raised concerns, particularly when the company has proposed changes that would limit the effectiveness of ad-blocking extensions, potentially prioritizing Google's advertising business over user choice.[[2]]( Moreover, Google has in the past deliberately degraded performance of their video platform YouTube , as well as Google Docs, for users accessing the website using the competing Firefox browser.[[11]]( [[12]]( Google, whose main business is online advertising, has discontinued support for browser extensions using the Manifest V2 standard.[[13]]( This renders advertising/tracking blockers such as uBlock Origin unusable and deactivates the corresponding plugins on update. Only versions with very limited blocking functionality remain usable. Users who wish to continue to use the web without their every step being traced by Google and other advertising syndicates have no other option but to switch to a different browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Vivaldi, which have all pledged to retain full Manifest V2 compatibility in their browsers. Due to the dominant market share, other web browsers like Firefox are forced to comply with these standards set out by Google in order to be able to access some websites. The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue was 114 million words as of 2020, making it impossible for anyone besides large resourceful companies to maintain a web browser able to comply with these standards, granting Google a bloat monopoly on web browsing. In 2021, Google launched Lit , a web JavaScript framework that forces strict compliance with Google's web standards. It also promotes artificial obsolescence by making it impossible to render pages on older web browsers and older devices with operating systems that are unable to run the latest version of Chrome. Chrome was the first web browser to implement the "visibilitychange" JavaScript event. This can be used by websites to detect switching to a different tab and, for example, block background playback like the mobile website of YouTube does.[[18]]( On Firefox, extensions can block this detection.[[19]]( The visibilitychange event has some legitimate uses such as automatically saving draft posts on an online message board.[[20]]( Since around 2022, a Google account is required to be able to install extensions from the Google Chrome Web Store.[[21]]( Pull-to-refresh is known for causing accidental refreshes when the user intends to scroll up.