what the hell does this even mean

It means Google either stopped paying them to promote Chrome or Mozilla paid them to allow Firefox.

GFN is a freemium service which lets you play your Steam games on their gaming PCs. It’s free for an hour after like 15 minutes of ads, or you can pay, $10/month for six hours and no wait on a good PC or $20/month for 8 hours and no wait on a better one. They don’t support all Steam games, and you can’t use mods.

cloud gaming

oh, gross

No, what’s gross is if you tried to do it and it said you had to install Chrome.

both things can be true.

i like my games where they are. on my own system. moddable.

Cloud is just someone else's PC. It's gross in general.

So is using Windows in 2026, but here we are with most games requiring it. So there is some usefulness to playing a game I own on a Mac or an iPhone. All you need is a screen and a controller.

I don't pay for GFN, but I do have an account there.

Could be worse, you could be paying for GamePass and getting nothing but shovelware every month.

Most games do not require windows. It’s mostly huge megacorp publishers requiring it for their AAA titles and esports games, but even then it’s hardly universal.

And yet, when I look at Steam on my Mac, it’s a pretty sad lineup.

A ton of indie games still require Windows.

I don’t count proton compatible games as requiring windows so perhaps that is the discrepancy in our views ;p

Well, if they put Proton on Mac, I wouldn't either. I don't want to install Linux.

Apple inexplicably doesn’t have a vulkan driver, which means porting proton is non-trivial and requires another translation layer, and additionally macos doesn’t really have futexes which poses further challenges.