I thought that was the problem; people couldn't tell wither it was loaded or not?
Well; only cause an old dog has a hard time learning new tricks/browsers.
And IE 9, 10 and 11 have been working pretty good; till just lately with the new CF. And how many extensions, add-ons, and plug-ins would it take to come up to the functionality of IE11 and it's native relationship with Windows7?
The problem was that the module was loaded in without announcement. This struck a nerve with the user base for obvious reasons. But anyone who peered into the open source could at any time see the module. The whole episode wasn't terribly brilliant on google's part and should at least have had an appropriate announcement.
You bring up a good point about difficulty of setup. This is one problem I found with Firefox. It seemed everything I wanted to do required an extension. Firefox still has the largest extension selection, which is nice. But extensions take time to choose, can conflict with each other (and with the engine at update time, which is frequent these days), and slow the program down because they're not compiled into the base code. I have always felt that FF should have incorporated basic features that, for instance, Tab Mix Plus offers into the code for that reason. All those extensions demand resources and slow the program and system down.
Unhappy about that, I went back to the old Opera, which is now defunct. The new opera, also based on Chromium, was not a viable option, IMO. So I looked and found Slimjet, which I have not found a better alternative for yet. SJ has all the features of Chrome, does not need an extension for everything, has more privacy guards, and has
a lot of nice features built in (and it's still young). Soon it will have its own adblock compiled in as well, which should have a significant positive effect on performance. And yes, you have access to the complete Chrome store.
The Epic browser looks very interesting. But I don't think I could put up with the shortcomings mentioned, and sending my search data through a proxy would concern me. As an alternative I recommend using a secure search engine such as Duck, Duck Go (Bing based), or my choice, Startpage (google based). If you use SP enable the POST search option, which will make the searches even more secure.