[olliej]

But see that's exactly the point. It's much easier for developers to support the majority browser, and that's what they do. MS did lots of shitty things to ensure that once IE was the majority browser it stayed there, but no one seems to remember that it was in the IE4+5 era a faster and more capable browser than netscape. It was only once they got there, and once people started making IE only sites that they were able to then leverage that position to ensure they remained there.

Saying you can use non-chrome versions of blink is entirely moot: if every site requires and is only tested in chrome, then privacy filters in literally every non-chrome engine or blink wrapper is moot because sites will break (cynically I'd guess first breakage would be blink based engines - or UA strings - on google sites). Saying "they're the same engine so they're equivalent" is nonsense. If you use a privacy-preserving blink wrapper then it's disabling a bunch of the chrome-only features that webkit and gecko don't implement, and it's blocking a bunch of tracking mechanisms that chrome uses to support google's revenue. Both restrictions in a non-chrome blink wrapper will cause sites to fail, and we know this is the case because there are already sites that fail in safari and Firefox due to those privacy protections, even though developers know there's a major (? still not sure if this is actually true in the EU) platform where testing a non-chrome browser should be required.

[jemmyw]

There's nothing you've written that I don't disagree with but it doesn't invalidate my points either. Companies did not support Firefox until it became popular. It became popular by being better than IE despite ms efforts to keep users.

An alternative browser needs people like us to rally behind it and build the user base, be better than Chrome so sellable to enough people that supporting it as a platform is worthwhile. Sorry but it's not Firefox for me while it's backed by Mozilla as things stand. I'm totally dismayed by their direction and how they spend their money. As far as I'm concerned Mozilla has been compromised by the executives and board that controls it and Firefox can't do anything useful unless the board is replaced or it is spun out into an independent oss project - which wouldn't surprise me if it happened anyway, I think the only interest those execs have in Firefox is the money the search bar brings in.

The only privacy related feature that has broken sites for me is third party cookies and that used to be the standard, not some chrome only feature.