Google Chrome started to dominate web browsers usage stats as of 2012 and as of 2023 its market share is over 60%. Its engine even made it into Windows default browser Edge. Regardless of whether you like it or not, Google Chrome is now the dominant web browser and one that's hard to avoid.

I'm basically a conservative user, so even though many people around me have switched to Google Chrome in recent years, I've resisted as much as I can and stuck with Mozilla Firefox. I don't know exactly when it was, whether it was when some streaming service's DRM didn't work in Mozilla or when my favorite Linux distribution started using Chromium as its default browser, but Chrome-based browsers have found their way onto my computer.

Actually, the defining moment was probably how perfectly Chrome-based browsers integrate Google translate so that a page written in any language can be translated into English with a single click. Still, I tend to prefer Chromium over Chrome for its intention to be open source despite it used to have problems with downloading binary blobs.

Case sensitive search in Google Chrome/Chromium

It was a Chrome-based browser, which I had open just as I discovered a misspelled identifier error in my C++ source code. I had substituted a capital letter for a lower case one. So I quickly opened github and browsed through the commit historry to find out when the error was introduced. I pressed CTRL-F and... And this was a time I made a big discovery. Google chrome lacks support for case sensitive search by design! Unbeliveable is true! Major browser, wchich cares about every possibility to track down user behavior to Google servers lacks the feature, that has been available in Internet explorer in 1995!

Actually, there are some hacks how we can get the feature of case sensitive search back into the Chromium:

Workaround is to use so called bookmarklets and populate them with the content here.

There is also plugin using regular expressions.

Pros and cons using Chrome and chromium

• Pros
  • Google translator integration without additional plugins to translate pages,
  • most of the DRM based services will work there,
• Cons
  • By default, Google chrome signs user "into the browser" whatever it means, whenever user logs in to any of the Google services,
  • Google Chrome downloads files into one single directory Downloads and makes very messy to organize downloaded files,
  • very hard to clean History as you are also removing all that tracking cookies Google likes you to have,
  • strange QUIC protocol, that makes all Google transfers running on UDP and not TCP,
  • plethora of "improvements" that integrate the browser and the operating system and make any browser sandboxing very difficult,
  • and without any chance to change it, Google chrome does not have capability of case sensitive find when pressing CTRL-F. Requests for this feature gets closed. Chromium developers are discussing this feature for years.

For the time being, translating capabilities of Chromium are deciding factor for me. If the Firefox is able to integrate decent translator engine into it, that would be deciding factor to quit using Chrome based browsers. Deepl plugin seems as potentially promissing plugin based solution for Firefox..