After seeing how google treat's users of other browsers as second class (YouTube, search, to name a few), I decided to switch to Firefox before Google gain's complete control over the open web
Google might be #1 but they're there because people chose them and people can just as easily choose something else. The only company that actually has control of the web is Apple because the 1.5 billion iOS/iPadOS users have no choice in browser engines and so Apple can basically prevent any standard from progressing by refusing to ship it in Safari iOS. On Mac if they don't ship people can choose Firefox or Chrome or whatever else. No other company has that kind of power over the web, certainly not Google since at any time people can switch away from Chrome.
I disagree. While I agree with you that it is highly problematic that iOS/iPadOS users have no alternatives to WebKit in terms of what rendering engine their browser uses, I disagree with the sentiment that Apple has a level of control over the web that is remotely comparable to Google’s.
Why? For one, Chrome has much higher marketshare than Safari on mobile. While Apple has a huge marketshare in terms of revenue, Android devices are much more popular than iOS/iPadOS devices in terms of sheer numbers, and these devices predominantly run Chrome.
As such, Chrome dominates both the mobile and desktop browser market, and the only way for the consumer to work against that is, simply put, to run Firefox/Gecko on his computer and his (Android) phone, or if you’re basically anti-Google like me, WebKit on your iPhone.
No, people don't choose them because they like Chrome, people choose them because Google makes sure that their services don't work well in other browsers!
