I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest!

Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink.

The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8.

In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork of Webkit. So, does that mean Apple controls everything?? But Webkit actually came from KDE's KHTML, didn't it.. Linux wins...

The kicker for me is: Blink and V8 are open source, and anyone can fork them at any time. Because of this, Microsoft, Oracle, Brave - every "Chromium" based browser vendor is contributing code. So does Google really control us that much? Blink and V8 make a rock solid browser core and are being worked on by a lot of companies, not just Google. It's like the Linux kernel - kind of a marvel of open source. Not something we need to fight against so viciously, in my opinion.

(Edit: "rock solid" might sound extreme to some... The HTML and JS specs are absurdly complex to the point where there's basically no hope of anyone implementing them from 0. There's a lot of bloat in modern web, no doubt. But if you're really worried about crazy JS features cluttering your browsing experience, you can go clone the Chromium source and pull out the crap you don't like.)