I went from Netscape to Mozzila and from Mozilla to Firefox and, guess what... my browser never fucked me up in the name of maximizing corporate profits.
Google was already a wholly untrustworth Ad Company With A Tech Arm back when they invented Chrome, and shit like this was already back then a question of WHEN, not IF.
My recommendation is librefox and if you really want a chrome based alternative I'd suggest Thorium (although I don't know what thorium will do when this is implemented I'm hoping they don't follow it.)
Web browsers using Gecko (Firefox's engine): GNU IceCat, Waterfox, K-Meleon, Lunascape, Portable Firefox, Conkeror, Classilla, TenFourFox. Edit: and Fennec
Web browsers using the Goanna engine (which is a fork of Gecko): Pale Moon, Basilisk.
Flow is a web browser with its own proprietary browser engine.
The other active engines listed are: WebKit (Apple's engine), and Blink (Google's engine, which they forked off of WebKit, and which is used for Chrome, Chromium, and countless other browsers).
Pale Moon still supports the even older extension model. I used it briefly until my extensions got updated to the newer format. I still kinda miss the old theme engine.
Because using Chromium and Chromium-based browsers reinforces Chrome's market share dominance which will harm comparability as more and more sites will only be tested against Chrome and in many cases refuse to serve pages to other browsers without user agent string fuckery.
It also cultivates dependence on Google for the extension ecosystem, etc