Would you daily drive a rally car?
Rally cars are fun, fast, and able to handle poor-quality roads—or even "not-actually-a-road"s—exceptionally well. However, that capability comes at a cost. Rally cars are stripped of all the conveniences found in your good old city car. There's no AC, no multimedia, no automatic wipers, no adaptive headlights. The seats aren't built for comfort; they’re specifically designed to keep you in place during tight corners. Adjusting your seat or steering wheel on the fly? Forget about it. All of this makes for a car that is anything but comfortable.
Now imagine a world where people started picking rally cars over city cars for daily use. Statements like "All these buttons were scary; I never used them," "Cars can have AC? Really? I never noticed!" and "Yeah, maybe it is a bit rough, but it's so fast!" become common refrains. Over time, governments at all levels stop maintaining roads because rally cars perform well even on ruined ones. The degradation of road quality reaches a point where some areas outright forbid access to regular city cars.
In response, city car manufacturers scramble to adapt. One maker, in its latest model, removes convenience features to save weight and engineering resources, focusing instead on the engine and suspension. While this version handles poor-quality roads a bit better, it’s less flexible and still lags behind the rally car in speed. Another manufacturer abandons its old model entirely, buys the rally car design, and attempts to build on top of it. However, this approach struggles—while it adds some extra features, they fail to work as intended, as the precise, rugged design of a rally car resists the inclusion of convenience elements.
Now back to our world. This isn’t about cars but web browsers. In the early days, browsers like Opera and Firefox offered something unique—Opera aimed to build everything in, while Firefox provided impressive extensibility with external modules, enabling nearly limitless personalization. Then came Chrome. Fast, but lacking in features and difficult to extend, Chrome became the most popular browser due to its raw performance and manipulative, even abusive marketing practices.
As creators of websites noticed Chrome’s dominance, testing against other engines became less of a priority. If a site worked fast enough on Chrome, that was deemed "good enough." Chrome’s ability to handle poorly made websites made things worse, as websites—and later web apps—continued to degrade in quality. Other browsers couldn’t keep up. Opera was the first to give up, abandoning its codebase and forking Chromium, adding features back on top but remaining limited and rigid in terms of customizability.
A few years later, Mozilla shifted its focus to performance, stripping away its browser’s old extension API. This system, while powerful and offering near-unlimited access to the browser’s internals, was hard to maintain and could be exploited maliciously. It had to go eventually, but its loss severely limited user power. Unfortunately, the newer extension API, based on Chrome’s model, comes with similar restrictions. Over time, Mozilla’s browser lost many features, making it less versatile and more frustrating to use. Worse still, it continues to struggle with the poorly built websites users frequent, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Nowadays, Chrome has gone overboard with limitations under the guise of performance and security, making it impossible to implement complex content blockers. While some users are outraged and migrate to other browsers—either those with extended support for the old API or back to Mozilla—this shift hardly makes a dent at the global scale. Most users don’t notice the changes because they never relied on these features. Even those who did often depended on a bare minimum feature set that remains available.