#and seo means text-based searches on first aid are unreliable

[awkward-teabag]

An advertising company that's faced or facing multiple anti-trust lawsuits and has lost multiples of them—including being fined collectively over €10 billion for violating EU laws, has been sabotaging its websites performances on alternative browsers to "encourage" people to use its browser instead, will collect and store your data even in incognito mode, partnered with a healthcare system to collect and store people's health records and promised it was safe and secure and wasn't shared or visible to anyone else but never notified patients of it or let them opt out of it.

An advertising company that has been pushing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which has ruined search engines because bots and large companies can devote the time and resources to adding and constantly adding/changing these invisible keywords, has removed or dramatically lessened the ability for people to be specific or granular in their searches, sells advertisement space so you can be a "sponsored" link on search pages that looks nearly identical to the actual search results.

An advertising company who has done nothing about malicious actors buying ad space in search results to get people to install malware or who hijack browsers to the same effect even though this has known (and reported) for years.

An advertising company that let slip they alter the search results in the background so they get more money out of it. They do not inform users about this.

An advertising company that created and is pushing for Manifest V3 that will not only limit or prevent you from blocking ads on Chrome but it reduces the ability for add-ons to protect your data or give you privacy... if the add-ons are even allowed on Chrome anymore. And MV3 will be the default on Chrome when it's rolled out.

An advertising company that is notorious for killing off projects that it gets bored of or doesn't make enough money (not unprofitable, just doesn't make as much money as they want... ignore they make hundreds of billions in revenue and could have absolutely kept most of these projects going infinitely)

An advertising that bought Youtube (which has its own host of issues and the algorithm tries to push people to right-wing content) and recently got in a slap fight with an ad-blocker because it tried to block Youtube on browsers that had an ad-blocker installed and tried to push people to buy Youtube Premium to get around this even though people with Premium still got warnings about using an ad-blocker. Oh and increased the price of Premium after doing this and having people sign up.

An advertising company that not only lets generative AI art be in its image search results but pushes those results higher thanks to SEO.

And so, so much more. Like how it's sold data to cops for racial profiling facial recognition or how it's helping Isreal to commit genocide by using (and training) its military AI.

You don't have to switch to Firefox but you should ditch Chrome and Chromium-based browsers and switch from Google to another search engine (personally I use DuckDuckGo). Google/Alphabet is a sketchy AF company that is infamous for collecting user data, falls foul of EU laws regularly, and has so many conflicts of interests but can get away with it by being a monopoly.

Though I don't recommend Brave. It has built-in crypto and was co-founded by a former Mozilla employee (who is CEO of Brave now) who chose to leave because he (and the company) faced internal and external backlash due to his donating to the Republican Party and being homophobic. He also believes in covid conspiracy theories, which you can find throughout his Twitter.

The most popular browsers in different countries in 2012 and 2022.

by @theworldmaps_