My name isn't Viola

🤦

Wait-- for real???

LOL...
I promise you she was

Yeah.

Edge still has its problems, but it's nowhere near the hot mess it wass in 2015 when it was basically a reskinned IE. Once they switched to Chromium it was still a hot mess, butit did get polished and has all the features you'd expect of a modern browser.

That being said, Edge is the main innovator behind built-in AI chats and similar bloat, which Chrome also likes to shove down people's throats.

And although the feature has existed as a Firefox addon for ages, I think the first browser to support tab groups and horizontal tabs was Edge.

So since both are pretty on-par feature (and bloat) wise, run the same engine and are made and maintained by billion-dollar corpos gobbling user data, both seem like two sides of the same coin.

So for 'normies', it pretty much boils down to which ecosystem you're more ingrained - that will make you prefer Edge or Chrome.

Us lunatics on Linux and/or ActivityPub prefer an independent option.

I use Waterfox also

They need to feel the personal impact it will have on them ...

i've become convinced that this is the only way that will galvanize any change.

Just to be clear from the start, I don't use Chrome (or any Google products or services) and recommend everyone switch to Firefox/Firefox forks which are more privacy friendly.

I completely agree that it should be opt-in as well.

It’s subjective but I think I would describe it as “sneaky” to add a 4gb AI component to a browser.

Google CONSTANTLY adds and removes default features from Chrome without any user notice (outside of patch notes) and many without the ability to opt out (Manifest v3, for example). Most people simply don't care to pay attention to the patch notes, which is understandable.

But, this specific AI thing isn't one of them.

Like you said, this is Google attempting to dominate the AI space my pushing it's own AI features and integrations.

This means a lot of self-promotion

They have a blog post:

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/ai-mode-chrome/

An announcement video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56b9uHAcHYc

Developer documentation:

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in

A product page:

https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/

(There's also YT advertisements and text ads, which I've seen on work PCs but I have them blocked at home so I have no links to examples)

The article, and many other articles sharing the same framing, are simply cashing in on outrage by ragebaiting the anti-AI crowd. Google has been loudly promoting their AI services and integration in all of their products. It is not at all surprising that Chrome is included in that and Google has made every attempt to tell every person on Earth that this is the case.