The misuse of this meme is one of my biggest meme pet peeves. Have people forgotten that in that scene, his vision is clear when he's not wearing glasses? So the meme should be the other way around.

God damn I thought I saw the last of these stupid browser takes on reddit, chromium is open source and we've seen multiple browsers (Brave, Vivaldi, I think librewolf) using its potential to remove themselves from the chromium baseline and build out their own fork with ad blocking services that didn't go down when manifest V3 happened.

There's no "browser monopoly" anymore than there's a "V shaped engine" monopoly in cars. Why don't people use Gecko more? That's like asking why people don't use rotary piston engines in cars, you could, it's just garbage. Gecko isn't the standard because no one wants to build a web browser with it.

This is precisely what makes Firefox so important. It's basically the only other open and independent implementation of the web stack. If Firefox goes away then the web becomes whatever Chrome is doing just how it was in the days when IE was the only game in town.

This will also make Google the gatekeeper for the Internet, and there's a pretty big conflict with an ads company controlling how people consume content online. We've already seen how Google keeps trying to make API changes in the engine that kneecap adblockers.

Of course, people could fork Chrome into a separate project, but maintaining a fork is a herculean effort, and it would basically need the funding and infrastructure that Mozilla already has.