People have started falling off of Chrime /Google browsers just as they did Microsoft and IE; both times users finally realizing just how shite the company and browser were/are.

Is there actually any proof of this?

From my quick check, Chromium-based browsers have a very steady market share. Firefox has remained exactly the same. Safari has went up 0.8% and is obviously going to drop substantially when other browser engines are allowed on iOS.

Sure, Chrome has went down by 2%, but Opera and Edge have captured that. And they're both just chrome under the bonnet.

Development of IE stagnated after Microsoft put Netscape out of business, because Microsoft got complacent, until Mozilla resurrected the remains of Netscape and saved the web. Then Chrome came along and Google convinced almost everybody to switch to it, including competing browsers like Opera. Chrome was originally based on Safari's WebKit (a fork of Konqueror's rendering engine KHTML), but then Google forked it (Blink) so they'd maintain control of it.

From what I've heard, most web devs only test on Chrome since every browser other than Firefox and Safari is based on it. And nobody seemed to care until very recently, because they didn't think a browser based on an open source project could possibly be a problem.

I'm honestly not surprised any of this happened, and I stick to Firefox and Safari myself, but I do worry about the ramifications of getting a real Chrome on the iPhone and iPad. I never liked Chrome and don't want to be forced to use it.

It’s reskinned safari. Same with Firefox. Apple doesn’t allow alternative browser engines currently, you have to use their WebKit frame to display the actual pages.

This is what is changing per the EU’s ruling, and why browser extensions from the desktop versions will start to work on iPhones.

Huh, interesting! (also 👎)