Readit NewsI remember when Chrome was new, and it was fast, and Google had other game-changing products (like email with enormous storage). I was just an average consumer back then, and I went for Chrome.
Then, once you capture enough market share (due to poor competition), people start targeting Chrome as the de facto standard. Throw in Android and you have a browser that the world now depends on. Even Microsoft gave in (with a built in ad-blocker, cause they're bitter about it, too).
Should we all be running a C++ based Javascript interpreter? Absolutely not. But try explaining why to the masses...
But the UK is getting a triple whammy from the financial fallout of Covid-19, Ukraine invasion & fossil fuel prices, and Brexit.
The problem with Ubuntu is that they have made, and are accelerating, changes that provide no relevant benefits for most use cases and without good documentation or deprecation pathways, and with core OS functionality. They are making a lot of user-hostile changes that are intended to push users towards using Canonical created tooling and systems away from standardized techniques that work across distributions (e.g. the move from /etc/network/interfaces to netplan, the current push towards snaps away from apt packages).
By contrast, the changes in something like Alpine are much easier to deal with as part of our maintenance. Many of the changes are more negatively impactful for use-cases are Alpine that are outside of containerized applications, so they don't impact us.
Ubuntu's packaging of Firefox as a Snap (outside of apt) though is very much a surprise at first, and makes it easy to mistake your system/browser as being up-to-date... And that Firefox Snap container is not sandboxed like OpenBSD, and has full filesystem access.