ITCOMO

I won't geek out here too much, but we will get into it a bit. I'll keep it readable because it's an interesting history. If it's all just too long, at least read "Privacy and Security" about half way down. Sorry, but that's long, too. Look, I want to help you understand how all this works and why I recommend what I do.

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The browser wars

Growing Pains

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You can skip this bit if history ain't your jam. The first graphical web browser (displaying text and images) that enjoyed a level of use (for that time, anyway) was Mosaic, developed in 1992. It was pretty short lived and chances are good you never used it even if you used computers back then. That's mainly because the World Wide Web (as it was more popularly known back then) was in its infancy.

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Next up was Netscape Navigator, released in 1994. If you were using computers in the mid-90s, chances are good you used Navigator. It enjoyed massive success in the mid 90s, hitting its peak of almost 90% before beginning a slide (that steepened in 1996) from which it would never recover. By 2003 hardly anyone was using Navigator.

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Next we'll discuss Internet Explorer from Microsoft. Introduced in mid 1995, IE gained market share at Navigators expense, passing it by in September 1998 and eventually hitting around 92% in mid 2003 before it began its own slide toward oblivion. IE is no longer shipped as a standalone browser having been replaced by Microsoft Edge. When IE was at its peak, Microsoft got lazy and development/innovation suffered, opening the way for competitors.

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Mozilla Firefox, introduced in 2004, slowly began chewing into Internet Explorer's market share and by 2009, had become the number one browser with a zenith of around 47% market share. The other 53% was spread across IE (44% and sinking) and new entrant Google Chrome (4% and rising). By now Google Chrome is starting its rise, dispatching both IE (quickly) and Firefox (more slowly) in the process.

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State of browser market share today

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Today, in late 2023, we have the following major browsers and their market share.

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• Google Chrome, 65%

• Apple Safari, 12%

• Microsoft Edge, 11%

• Mozilla Firefox, 6%

• All the others combined, 6%

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What exactly does a browser do?

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The browser is a program that runs on your computer that can access and display the contents of websites. That's what it does.

 

Websites are holders of content that reside on servers (many millions of them) scattered all over the world -- hence the name the World Wide Web or just "the web". When people say "the internet" today, they usually mean the web although technically the internet is far more than just that.

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So when you type in a web address (like www.itcomo.com), a directory service called DNS (Domain Name System) works out the details of locating that website, fetching its IP address, and giving it to your browser. Your browser then begins reading the website and displaying its contents according to formatting rules and programming set up by the webmaster.

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That kinda sounds simple, yes? My website that you're reading right now (did I say thanks?) is pretty simple indeed, mostly being pages of text and some graphics. But websites can be incredibly complicated. Consider how complex Amazon.com must be. Millions of products to look at, videos you can watch, a merchant processing system for buying what you see, reviews to interact with, and countless other features. Your web browser has to understand and display all of that.

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Tug of war

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You may control what sites you visit but once you are there you have basically no control over what the site can download into your browser and what it can force your browser to execute. Sure, you can choose what to click on, but there's an entire class of things that happen outside your control or visibility.

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This is where privacy and security come in.

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Privacy and Security

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Big Data wants to know everything about you they possibly can. So when you visit most websites, large or small, there's a number of technologies that website can use to gather identifying data. Many websites also want to show you advertising. They get paid by ad-serving companies every time an ad is displayed in your browser. They'll get more if you click on the ad. And possibly even more if you buy whatever the ad is selling.

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Ads are not only annoying, they can slow down your browsing experience by using additional bandwidth and resources on your computer showing auto play videos and other graphics and hang up your browser while ad-servers are contacted to deliver content. They can also contain malware, which we call malvertising. Nice, huh? The ad-serving companies don't often do a good job of vetting the ads submitted to them to display. So it's up to you, dear reader, to mitigate that.

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One way to mitigate that is by installing ad-blocking and privacy enhancing extensions in your browser.

 

What is an extension? It's like an app that plugs into your browser to give it new functionality. There are thousands of extensions giving browsers many new useful tricks. One of the most popular classes of extension are ad-blockers and privacy enhancers. And one of the most popular of these is uBlock Origin which is available for most major browsers. That's the one I recommend!

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And it's right here where we get to the entire point of this article...

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First, I need to set the stage so I can explain further down.

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There's a browser called Chromium that is developed and maintained by Google. It is separate from Chrome. Maybe you've heard of Chromium and maybe not. Chromium is not a "retail" browser like Chrome is. That means Google doesn't advertise it and actually prefers that you not use it. Unless you're a developer then you probably wouldn't want to use it anyway because it lacks certain niceties and polish that a customer-ready retail browser has.

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The main purpose of Chromium is to be the code base to a number of retail browsers, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, and some others.

 

Think of it this way: Chromium is the "mother", and the various retail browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, etc. are her "children".

 

What I just wrote above is a pretty apt analogy to segue to my next item to discuss...

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Google, the maker of Chrome (and Chromium), is overhauling how extensions work. Changing the DNA so to speak. These changes, included in an update called Manifest v3, has some positive impacts on security but also some unnecessarily restrictive impacts as well. One of the bigger negative impacts will severely reduce how effective ad-blockers and privacy enhancing extensions work. That's really bad.

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Google makes big money from Chrome's tracking and displaying ads. So they are nerfing Chrome to reduce the effectiveness of extensions that interfere with that profit-driven mission.

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But it's not just Chrome this is affecting. Google is actually making the switch to Manifest v3 in the Chromium code base. So any browser that is a descendant child from Chromium, like all the ones mentioned just above, will also be affected.

 

A lot of browsers are just "reskinned" forks* based on Chromium. Developers do this because they can roll out a fully developed browser that contains their particular special sauce without having to recook the entire dinner from scratch. OK, that was kind of tortured, but it worked, yes?

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* A fork is when a piece of software (usually open source) is copied, then the copy is customized, leaving the original alone.

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So, what do you do?

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If you don't want your ad-blockers, cookie blockers, and privacy enhancers chopped off at the knees, then you need to stop using Chrome. And you can't just switch to another Chromium-based browser, either, because they'll all be affected. There's ways that other Chromium-based browser makers can evade this nerfing, but not without considerable extra effort. And right now, as of this writing, it's not clear what these other Chromium-based browser makers are going to do.

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But there are two notable exceptions; browsers that aren't based on Chromium and so won't be as materially affected. That's Firefox and Safari. To be sure, Firefox and Safari will need to adopt Manifest v3, and indeed they will. This makes it easier for developers to create their extensions to be cross platform. Cross platform means "write once, run anywhere". It's a huge time saver when there's multiple platforms out there.

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But since Firefox and Safari are built on entirely different (non-Chromium) code bases, they can maintain support for the existing Manifest v2 which allows ad-blockers to work as designed.

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This is a really, really big deal! If Google doesn't back down again (they already delayed enforcing Manifest v3 by one year) then Firefox and Safari will be the only two major browsers that will fully support ad-blockers and privacy enhancers.

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This is an evolving story as the various browser makers contemplate and decide on what direction to take.

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You, the consumer, have the power to select the browser you want. I recommend Firefox (for Windows) and Safari (for Apple products). Both are full featured browsers and you can import all your bookmarks and passwords. I can help you if needed.

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To install Firefox, click this link:   Install Firefox
After you install Firefox, come back here and click this link to install uBlock Origin

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I look forward to Firefox rapidly gaining browser share at Chrome's expense next year as people figure out what's going on. By reading this, you are getting a nice head start.