The Borg Browser

The web browsers have been assimilated, the resistance was futile.

In the closing years of the 2000s Opera and Firefox in particular had a number of built in tools and features and were fast and easy to customize.

But something seems to have happened in the intervening years between then and now.


Perhaps the best way to illustrate what's happened is to compare and contrast older versions of these browsers and the new ones.

Firefox's settings in v. 4:

in v. 6x:

Opera has suffered a similar neutering too. Here's the old version (via allaboutcookies.org), compare that to the new and "improved" version.


Of course things under the hood have changed too. Opera switched to the Blink layout engine which is also used in Chrome. Firefox still uses its own layout engine, but it's incorporated the Pocket service and tracks you. Yes you can opt out of the tracking, but only in a very unintuitive way. Mon Dieu! Firefox has jumped onto the tracking bandwagon!? Say it ain't so!

But why have browsers done this? I think there's an answer: these browsers are trying to be more like Google Chrome.

Yes, it seems like the makers of Opera and Firefox have decided that everyone wants browsers to be like Chrome. It's not like people who want to use Chrome will use it while people who don't want to use Chrome would stick to non-Chrome browsers. No, that would be too sane.

So there you have it, Google Chrome is the Borg of the web browser world and Opera and Firefox have been assimilated by it.