Google's bias is now noticeable to the normies. (Dr. Juric is at the University of Washington, for reference.) Best quote of the tweet:
for anyone with a shred of awareness of human history it should be clear how unbelievably irresponsible it is to build a system that aims to become an authoritative compendium of human knowledge (remember Google's mission statement?), but which actually prioritizes ideology over facts. History is littered with many who have tried this sort of moral flexibility "for the greater good"; rather than helping, they typically resulted in decades of setbacks (and tens of millions of victims).
It looks like the good Doctor may have had a bit too much to think...
I'd like to think I haven't either. But I'm pretty sure Brave is some sort of Chromium. And Steam is now using some form of Chrome for it's store.
So if you use those like me, you've used some flavor of it, like I have, whether we like it or not.
Is it telling uncle google about everything we do? I have no idea. Possibly. Maybe. They say it doesn't, but someone's word doesn't mean a whole lot anymore.
All browsers and all app interfaces are built off Chrome now, they've successfully monopolized the browser market in a way Microsoft could never have imagined 25 years ago or whenever the antitrust suit was.
I've still got a truckload of salt from the day that Opera switched over from it's in-house browsing engine to yet another bad copy of chrome.
I've yet to find a good replacement, as you said. I tend to use an unholy amalgamation of Vivaldi, Brave, and other whackass alternatives, but if anyone knows of browsers that don't use Chrome as a base, feel free to share.
You're going to have to break down and use Lynx.
The difference between Microsoft then and Google now is Microsoft forgot to pay their protection money to the feds.
Chromium aka Apple's WebKit aka linux KHTML is open source.
The real bad stuff Google adds in Chrome and isn't open-source so you can't even know what they are doing exactly without reverse engineering it.
The main bad thing about Chromium is Google runs the source and extension repo and makes it hard for derivatives like Brave to keep up with their adblock and privacy protection patches. But they can only do so much fuckery here since Brave and others can fork it at any time and take over development.
There's even an ungoogled chromium which works surprisingly well. It is however my secondary browser, Firefox supremeancy for as long as possible since I don't like Google nor the huge market share they have.