Honest question… I get that Chrome has a bunch questionable privacy practices that sends data back to Google, but do the chromium based browsers do that as well? My understanding is that Chromium is just the rendering engine. How is it bad?
Also, if Google implements their bullshit DRM features, I wonder if the derivative browsers will be able to disable it. I believe I saw that Brave said they won’t use it.
And when they control the vast majority of browser share (already true):
They add non-standard features, some websites use these features which locks out browsers that follow the standards.
Sure, you could maintain a Chromium fork that strips all the "bad" stuff. But that's a lot of dev time and money.... and it only gets worse with time as they add more. And why go through all the trouble to make your user's experience worse?
And now Google de-facto controls web development standards.
The more users we can get off Chromium the better. Right now it's literally just Firefox and Safari that are holding out.
Up to date chromium is 100% just as bad. Forked and selectively maintained version (like brave) aren't 100% just as bad, but varying degrees well below up to maybe even slightly above this hypothetical 100% marker. Not advocating for Brave (I don't personally use it), but the way they update is my main point here.
Not all of chromium's constituent components are required for a functional browser. At the end of the day, Firefox is just easier to trust and better supported than any of the chromium forks, personal opinion.
The problem is largely that it gives power to Google to implement what they want (and how they want it) and everyone else just has to go along or become incompatible with 70% of all web users