Fair point. I naively assumed that a) people turn this off in the settings, and b) the big browsers respect the settings. Trying to use a web browser without getting fucked over is exhausting. It's fine if you just want to scroll Lemmy, but once you need to book flights or log in to some bullshit from your school or work it's hard to use anything that isn't corporate-blessed.
There are only really two and a half browsers; Firefox and Chrome/Safari. Firefox (engine: Gecko) is descended from Netscape (which was American) and Chrome (Blink, fork of WebKit) and Safari (WebKit, fork of KHTML) are descended from Konqueror (KHTML, German, abandoned). Everything else (almost) is a reskin of one of those.
There are two up-and-comers, Servo (cancelled Gecko replacement, now resurrected by Igalia in Spain) and Ladybird (Swedish). I'd love to use either, but they're not ready yet. These (and all the other little independent browsers that aren't just Chrome/Safari/Firefox with a new hat) are awesome, but will fail on the shitty "modern" websites you're inevitably forced to use.
(To some extent all of the above mentioned browsers are open-source and not really just developed in one country, but I'm simplifying for the sake of choosing whether they're European or not.)
AI.com bought by Crypto.com founder for $70mn in biggest-ever website name deal
Maybe you think it's not any good, and maybe all the humans who use it don't think it's any good, but Microsoft says it's great, and they're the ones who stand to lose all three money.
Trust the devs