I’ve been thinking about the trend of making desktop browsers as limited as possible, and the doomed-to-failure attempt to make them resemble and function like their phone-based counterparts. Part of that is certainly just design and developer laziness and expedience, of course, but that cannot explain it all. (In fact, in many ways, it’s harder to make a desktop program work/behave like a mobile one than to let it be more native.)

You can ignore altogether the fabrications about “security.” It has nothing to do with that at all. That’s just a propaganda distractor.

I’ve concluded that the real reason to make the desktop browsers vastly inferior is to attempt to drive the last holdouts using capable desktop systems onto mobile devices where it’s much harder to block ads, where the device is consumption-friendly and creation-hostile, and the user can be tracked much more readily with no way to prevent this.

The browser makers (et al.) have concluded correctly that by making the desktop experience worse, they can drive users to the mobile devices.

This doesn’t completely explain how Mozilla has destroyed Firefox, but they have tons of other issues and are chock full of “smart” simpletons, so that’s another factor at play there.