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by derefr 2183 days ago
In theory, Chrome works fine without extensions. In practice, if Chrome was "banned by the Extension developers' guild" so that every other browser got to participate in the WebExtension ecosystem except for Chrome, people would leave Chrome quickly. (Sadly, probably for some "exactly Chrome, but not by Google" browser, rather than for Firefox.)
1 comments

People won’t leave chrome quickly or at all, Chrome didn’t win the battle of the browsers due to having better or more extensions it won because of 3 major factors.

Better brand recognition - more people switched off IE to Chrome than from FF to chrome (hence why I’m not putting the terrible performance and reliability issues that FF used to have like crash and lose all tabs as a factor but it took a decade for FF to sort their shit together and by then it was too late).

Better integration with Google services right when a Google account became quite important.

Being the default browser for the Android eco system.

So I don’t know who would exactly leave Chrome because of extensions but I have a feeling that even you wouldn’t.