Using a free browser is now more important than ever. We've written recently on this topic, but the issue we wrote about there was minor compared to the gross injustice Google is now attempting to force down the throats of web users around the world. The so-called "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI) is the worst stunt we've seen from them in some time. Beginning its life as an innocuous, if worrying, policy document posted to Microsoft GitHub, Google has now fast-tracked its development into their Chromium browser. At its current rate of progress, WEI will be upon us in no time.
By giving developers an API through which they can approve certain browser configurations while forbidding others, WEI is a tremendous step toward the "enshittification" of the web as a whole. Many of us have grown up with a specific idea of the Internet, the notion of it as a collection of hyperlinked pages that can be accessed by a wide variety of different machines, programs, and operating systems. WEI is this idea's antithesis.