Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself

But when?

Again, this isn’t Microsoft, whom you can rely on for prompt footgunning. Chrome is still very fast, reasonably lean, and developed with more resources than Mozilla.

Hence Firefox could die before Alphabet starts to really tighten the screws. That’s what I’m most afraid of, as the next step for Alphabet would be “depreciating” Chromium, closing the source, and killing all the forks.

I don’t want a world where the only viable browser is a Chrome binary.