Given how quickly everyone I know took to using Chrome on phones despite no adblock being available, I think sadly it won't have as big an impact as I wish it would.
Anyone that really cared switched a year ago when they said they were going to do this. They told us they were going to do this publicly.
I stopped using Chrome a while back, but still use Gmail because I'm lazy. Every time I crank open Gmail in another browser, Google whines at me to use Chrome. That grizzling pop-up is now the main reason I don't use Chrome, and it will eventually drive me to migrate away from Gmail. DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!
I remember when Chrome released and it was a hot mess performance wise. I haven't used it since and it doesn't seem like I'm missing anything.
The last straw for me was about a decade ago when an update completely broke Chrome on my machine. It would open and immediately crash, even after reinstalling. Everything else worked fine, virus scans came back clean and everything, it was only Chrome. I spent the next 2 months playing browser roulette before settling on ol' reliable Firefox once again.
I saw a comment mention something about “power vs authority,” and that seems relevant here.
We still have maybe two years before they start destrying gmail. I think they're already itching
The IMAP support has been more or less broken since the very beginning. Their custom labels make folders behave in a non-standard way and the IMAP itself is terribly slow compared to every single other provider I've used. I used to have dedicated workarounds in my email automation scripts for their weird folder semantics, for even such trivial tasks as actually deleting an email as opposed to merely removing a label from it.
It's already unusable as far as I'm concerned.
