[HN Gopher] Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data sett...
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Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings
Author : arm
Score : 1108 points
Date : 2020-10-18 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lapcatsoftware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lapcatsoftware.com)
| delduca wrote:
| That's because the sync.
| austincheney wrote:
| Is this behavior also present in the Chromium browser as well or
| is it unique to Chrome?
| demygale wrote:
| Chrome is the Internet Explorer of this decade. I'm old enough to
| remember when some developers defended IE when it was hot trash.
| There's just no excuse for using it.
| n1vz3r wrote:
| I don't understand why your post is downvoted. We need to SHOUT
| about switching to single other alternative left (Firefox)
| until it is too late.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Use Chrome, they said. Use Gmail, they said. Use AMP, they said.
|
| And in the end, the open web was gone.
|
| Yours truly, 2025.
| markawesome wrote:
| God, people are so quick to jump on the Google-hate train and
| then advocate for a politicized justice department to hop in and
| somehow make everything better. Mozilla is just as guilty as
| Google. Mozilla has Firefox sync and Chrome has its own sync.
| This is basically to stop clearing browser data from
| automatically disabling sync, which most people would want. There
| are a plethora of third-party tools that allow you to clear your
| browser data completely if you want. There is nothing stopping
| you from using them, and you'd also be surprised how much you can
| do (including disabling Google Sync) from a simple policy file.
|
| Stop waiting on your government to fix things because they aren't
| going to. If you want to fix things, then build your own tools to
| abstract syncing, bookmarks, and other features from the browser.
| They exist, whether you've ever taken the time to look or not.
| Somehow it is easier though for people to simply say... The
| government will fix it for me, rather than fixing things
| yourself.
| dbuder wrote:
| What is your relationship with Google et al?
| mthoms wrote:
| The author posted elsewhere in this thread that they were
| signed out of Google entirely. So sync was disabled.
|
| > _Mozilla is just as guilty as Google._
|
| Since Mozilla doesn't do anything similar when not signed into
| their sync service, this is plainly false.
|
| > _If you want to fix things, then build your own tools to
| abstract syncing, bookmarks, and other features from the
| browser. They exist, whether you 've ever taken the time to
| look or not._
|
| If you're not highly technical, you're not entitled to privacy?
|
| > _Somehow it is easier though for people to simply say... The
| government will fix it for me, rather than fixing things
| yourself._
|
| It's simple. Some of us believe that a base level of privacy is
| a human right. And the _only_ entities capable of facilitating
| those human rights are governments.
| markawesome wrote:
| > The author posted elsewhere in this thread that they were
| signed out of Google entirely. So sync was disabled.
|
| I once had an issue similar to this, and it turned out to be
| an issue with my profile. Once I manually deleted the site
| data the problem didn't come back. They admit that this may
| be a bug and I wouldn't be surprised to find out it is, but
| regardless there are plenty of other options including
| ephemeral profiles that you can use by setting a policy. If
| they aren't signed into sync, then I also suggest they
| disable syncing from the settings and the policy as well.
|
| > Since Mozilla doesn't do anything similar when not signed
| into their sync service, this is plainly false.
|
| They _just_ install Pocket and a bunch of other unrelated
| services and send your DNS queries to third-parties, as well
| as opting you into recommendations and telemetry.
|
| > If you're not highly technical, you're not entitled to
| privacy?
|
| You don't have to be highly technical. There are a lot of
| options for Google accounts to disable ad personalization,
| history, third-party access, etc. In fact, I find it much
| easier than almost every other company I come across. The
| documentation is easy to follow and is so easy my kids could
| do it. I'm all for privacy, but at the same time the rules
| need to be applied equally to all companies. Just attacking
| Google isn't going to fix the issue, in fact it will make it
| worse by giving a politicized government the ability to go
| after anyone that they feel doesn't represent their political
| goals.
|
| > It's simple. Some of us believe that a base level of
| privacy is a human right. And the only entities capable of
| facilitating those human rights are governments.
|
| We don't live in a socialist society that believes that
| humans have fundamental rights to basic necessities. I'm all
| for privacy being a human right, but shouldn't housing,
| healthcare, etc also be human rights? Google gives a lot away
| for free. Until we start addressing other issues, privacy as
| a human right will never be on the table and when it happens
| you can't just apply the rules to one or two companies. It
| has to be equal.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Mozilla does not have other websites and an advertising
| platform tied to your browser history, and bookmarks. Firefox
| Sync is basically a standalone service.
|
| Pretty big difference.
| nunodonato wrote:
| It's amazing the amount of crap people put up with in exchange
| for some comforts and conveniences these days (google, apple,
| amazon). Sad that so very few people put values first
| red_admiral wrote:
| Apple seems to me, if not perfect, at least a couple of levels
| up from google or amazon.
| mabbo wrote:
| The difference is their business model. Google offers you
| free things, in exchange for showing you ads. Same with
| Facebook. This incentivizes them to find more ways to get
| more data about everyone.
|
| Apple mostly makes money by selling you goods. Privacy can
| become a feature of those goods, increasing its value. They
| are incentivized to protect privacy.
|
| This doesn't make Apple better. It's just that they're in a
| different market.
| smichel17 wrote:
| The different market is (mostly) better. (My opinion)
| vbezhenar wrote:
| If you have enough money to pay. For many people watching
| ads is preferable payment method.
| _dibly wrote:
| Apple is the one looking to expand into health and wellness.
| The data Apple can harvest is going to become more and more
| valuable. They're rolling out home speakers and the Apple
| Watch is increasingly becoming a DYI diagnostic tool. I think
| it's a bit naive to think that Apple is somehow more
| altruistic than any other big tech company.
| jtbayly wrote:
| > DYI diagnostic tool
|
| I'm not familiar with that term. Does it mean a "Do
| Yourself In" diagnostic tool?
| faitswulff wrote:
| Ah yes, the notorious Do Yourself In category of
| diagnostic tools.
| jskdvsksnb wrote:
| What are personal health metrics but the inverse of
| personal mortality metrics?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It's not altruism, it's just their business model happens
| to be more compatible with people's rights: Apple sells
| hardware at a premium price. Google monetizes data to push
| ads. Ads aren't a big part of premium experiences, Apple
| recognizes nobody likes them.
|
| Which is why Apple devices generally only have ads in third
| party experiences, and Google shoves ads right in the
| default mail app.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Exactly. Which is why I buy iPhones rather than Android
| handsets. I'll support Apple as long as their business
| model is privacy orientated but once they pivot (and I'm
| sure they will at some point in the future) then I'll
| switch to the next platform that supports my privacy --
| assuming by that point that there are any such platforms
| left...
| circularfoyers wrote:
| Which is why I think projects including PinePhone and
| Librem 5 are important, as they are privacy orientated
| and they need community driven support now to be usable
| in the future. The only other projects that get close are
| ones that use AOSP as a base like GrapheneOS or LineageOS
| with MicroG. But this introduces the same issue that
| Chromium forks have, which is the increasing maintenance
| burden.
| syshum wrote:
| Apple's business model is more compatible with rights YOU
| care about, but it is false to say it is compatible with
| "peoples rights"
|
| Apple is more compatible with Privacy rights, but wholly
| not compatible with ownership rights, portability rights,
| free speech rights, etc.
|
| Their draconian ecosystem policies around payment,
| hardware lock in, and platform lock in are IMO just as
| bad if not worse than Google draconian policies around
| data privacy
|
| It seems however you do not place any value on anything
| other than privacy
| Shared404 wrote:
| This is an important point. There are no good guys in
| cell phones right now, at least none that are large
| enough on the stage to really scare Apple/Google.
|
| EDIT: I feel like I should give a shout-out to Pinephone,
| LineageOS and GrapheneOS as some better options, although
| they are all obviously not mainline.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I don't use Apple devices often, but last time I did I
| saw insanely annoying ads in the default apps you can't
| replace.
|
| For Apple services, of course, which raises some pretty
| intense anti-trust concerns.
| dijit wrote:
| This is just completely untrue.
|
| There have never been third party ads in any default
| application on MacOS or iOS and I feel completely
| confident saying that.
|
| You could make an argument of upselling, the music app
| prods your for a subscription to Apple Music or to buy
| songs on itunes- you could argue Apple TV shows content
| from providers you're not subscribed to (next to ones
| which you are)- but those are first and second party ads.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > the music app prods your for a subscription to Apple
| Music or to buy songs on itunes- you could argue Apple TV
| shows content from providers you're not subscribed to
| (next to ones which you are)
|
| That's what I mean.
|
| > but those are first and second party ads.
|
| But ads are ads.
| dijit wrote:
| I guess I see a difference because the BBC does not show
| ads except for itself. So ads are not sold.
| devenblake wrote:
| On what apps? I've never gotten any advertisements like
| that.
| m463 wrote:
| I personally think that the whole "privacy" thing started
| because their ecosystem is in trouble.
|
| They created the app store and made apps ubiquitous.
|
| Honestly, computers used to have so much promise. They
| helped us, and made us better.
|
| But nowadays how many people have you heard say "I don't
| WANT to install an app". (I know, lots of people don't
| care)
|
| And apple is trying to restore (a little) trust by saying
| they're for privacy.
|
| Thing is, they have to play both sides. And they really
| can't be for privacy (like allow a firewall or block
| network access for an app) because then developers won't
| do anything on their platform.
| simonh wrote:
| They don't have to be altruistic as long as their interests
| align with those of their customers. So far on privacy
| they've spent billions of dollars building a reputation for
| protecting user privacy, fought court cases and probably
| given up billions more in potential revenue from user data
| monetisation. I'm not about to give up using a smartphone
| or online apps, so given I need to make a choice, I'm happy
| with the one I've made so far.
|
| All you have given is possible reasons Apple might
| compromise, but those have applied for many years. If they
| do start compromising then sure, let's re-evaluate.
| politelemon wrote:
| They have spent on _marketing_ privacy. Their court cases
| were a great exercise in PR. They still have the highest
| compliance rate with US government for turning over user
| data, which they hold the keys to, and the Chinese
| government. User data monetisation is not the only danger
| to be wary of, it just happens to be the one that gets
| trotted out most often.
|
| The time to re-evaluate is already here, it's just hard
| to do so when you're already locked into their ecosystem.
| simonh wrote:
| I don't understand how complying with the law and not
| criminalising their employees is a ding against them. I
| don't think I've ever seen that used as a criticism of
| any other company, but it's regularly used against Apple.
| It's really bizarre. If you dont want companies complying
| with the law surely what we need to do is change the law
| and challenge governments. What matters is what they
| choose to do within the law, and as a customer I'm
| satisfied.
| Xylakant wrote:
| It's not as simple as taking the compliance rate. The
| question is, how much data do they hold that they can
| tune over. How much of it is client-side encrypted.
|
| Twitter handing over the DMs for a user: very much
| problematic- they're plaintext. Apple handing over the
| iMessage history for a user: much less problematic, it's
| E2E encrypted. (though still an issue - metadata may
| still be plain)
|
| Fundamentally it boils down to some trust level - how
| much of what apple says about their data storage is true?
| hu3 wrote:
| For starters, Apple can turn in all iCloud backup data
| since they ditched strong encryption plans after FBI
| complained.
|
| > The question is, how much data do they hold that they
| can tune over.
|
| https://www.androidcentral.com/apple-may-have-ditched-
| encryp...
| [deleted]
| briandear wrote:
| > They don't have to be altruistic as long as their
| interests align with those of their customers.
|
| Exactly. You just summed up why capitalism works in a
| single brilliant sentence.
| m463 wrote:
| they invented iBeacon for instance
| ksec wrote:
| Except in the name of privacy they are now using it to expand
| its services to other sector. Payment, Cards, TV, Music,
| Wellness, what's next?
|
| (Especially true when you see people continue to think their
| business model is still to sell you iPhone, Apple is no
| longer just an iPhone company anymore )
|
| Many of these makes me uneasy. Especially when we have caught
| Tim Cook lying multiple times.
| ec664 wrote:
| No thanks. I'm steering clear of their increasingly closed
| ecosystem
| tupputuppu wrote:
| Could it be it's just peoples values are like that? That
| regular consumers are ignirant and short-sighted and care more
| about funny games and easy apps instead of privacy or quality?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| It's not either this or that. It's simply that people really
| don't care about privacy on the internet, apart from
| situations they have been taught to be careful (eg internet
| banking).
|
| They simply don't think about their internet browser, their
| privacy and Google, in the same way most people don't care
| about how toilet paper is made. Sure you can make a strong
| case why something is bad, but in the end people just keep
| buying the same brand of toilet paper.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Exactly, and the people that are aware of the data
| collection see it as payment for getting so many things of
| value (Gmail, YouTube, chrome) for free.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| It's just exceptionally difficult to quantify what "privacy"
| is. The trade off is between something very tangible vs the
| intangible
| Razengan wrote:
| No.
|
| > _It's just exceptionally difficult to quantify what
| "privacy" is._
|
| No, it's really not difficult:
|
| Don't try to learn more about me than what I explicitly
| choose to tell you myself.
| izacus wrote:
| That's _your_ definition which may have pretty much
| nothing to do with how other people see it. We won't be
| able to have a clear conversation about privacy until
| every person is on the game page about that.
|
| Until you understand that, you'll continue to be
| "surprised" when people say they care about privacy but
| not the pet peeve you have.
| Razengan wrote:
| How about this then: ___Consent___
|
| Is that exceptionally difficult for you to quantify as
| well?
|
| As someone else said: It isn't that hard at all. Unless,
| of course, your paycheck is reliant on you not
| understanding it.
| klyrs wrote:
| ... and don't go blabbing about what I've said, unless I
| asked you to.
| salawat wrote:
| Privacy:
|
| We talk, and you don't go telling other people what we
| talked about, or keeping ledgers, or training models, etc.
|
| It isn't that hard at all. Unless, of course, your paycheck
| is reliant on you not understanding it.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| "Ah okay, thanks for the clarification. Sounds like that
| doesn't apply to the internet then, because I'm just
| loading websites in a browser, I'm not talking to anyone.
| Thanks again for clearing that up!"
|
| defining privacy in a contextually relevant and concise
| manner is hard.
| salawat wrote:
| Yep. Your problem is you're hiding all the inconvenient
| logging and generation of metadata propagating knowledge
| of my communication with your website beyond the scope of
| what was intended every time you propagate out metrics
| logs, or transaction data out to other third parties.
|
| If you stop at "oh, an HTTP session happened", you're
| being a disingenuous maker and perpetuate of strawmen.
| It's almost always what happens with data by actors you
| invite into that "seemingly private HTTPS transaction"
| that violate the simplestsocial precept of the technical
| exchange.
|
| Things branch off from there. If you can't see that as a
| fundamental breach of privacy and professional
| discretion, then again, it's likely you have a vested
| interest in not seeing it. It's damned obvious to anyone
| who doesn't.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _defining privacy in a contextually relevant and
| concise manner is hard._
|
| How about asking the users what privacy means to them.
|
| Why is the concept of "consent" so hard to user-hostile
| devs?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Maybe if apple or google or FB or any of the massively
| profitable big tech cared to pay back fairly to creators
| there would be quality content. Right now with things as they
| are nobody seriously wants to join the crowd of beggars.
| rvba wrote:
| Add steam to that too. So many people are angry that there are
| alternatives...
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Well, depends on how you define "alternative". If they were
| browsers, then perhaps NYTimes would only work in Firefox and
| WSJ would only work with Chrome. Technically, you can treat
| either as a replaceable commodity good as well...
| mahkoh wrote:
| Is it amazing? Even on here you have people saying that they
| _have_ to use Windows or Apple instead of Linux because of some
| minor issues.
| m463 wrote:
| Personally, I think there's a market opportunity for someone
| who actually treats people with respect and decency.
| eitland wrote:
| There's a huge, billion dollar niche where Google used to be
| :
|
| 1. A box on a web page
|
| 2. Customers write words
|
| 3. Your software return a list of web pages that contain said
| words plus relevant ads.
|
| Since sometime 2007 - 2009 and Google has dropped the
| requirement that results actually contains the word and it is
| extremely annoying.
|
| I use DDG these days. They are just as bad, not better or
| worse but it is faster to add !g to a DDG search than to
| retype the query in DDG aftee first trying Google.
|
| First other search engine to recreate the Google experience
| from before 2007 can charge me $10 a month and show ads on
| top of it and still get me as a happy customer.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| From my experience the majority of non-tech people do not
| value software or online services and will balk at paying
| even a couple bucks for an app.
|
| The other problem is that every service out there will
| pretend to treat you with respect and it's only when things
| go wrong that you learn the truth, by that point it's too
| late.
|
| So you need to 1) look beyond the price and 2) know which
| companies lie and which don't when it comes to their
| marketing (or have a previous experience with them),
| otherwise they all _pretend_ to treat their customers with
| respect.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
| djhaskin987 wrote:
| Do your part to fight the monopoly.
|
| Endure the broken sites and sometimes poor support and download
| Firefox.
|
| If that doesn't work, like it kind of won't for me either, go
| with Microsoft Edge. They're currently based on Chromium but
| that's only because they're trying to embrace and extinguish
| Google Chrome. It's another big giant but at least we're giving
| Google a run for their money.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| But for real, what sites are broken? I've been using Firefox
| for years and haven't found one.
|
| Some are broken by my tracking protection, but toggling that
| off for one time access generally yields a working site.
| djhaskin987 wrote:
| doxy.me purports to support Firefox but it doesn't work when
| I try to video call my doctor.
|
| Sococo, a remote working tool, doesn't even try and tells you
| to switch browsers.
|
| PluralSight Flow is used at work and presents random blank
| pages on FF where content should be.
|
| Nutanix Prism Central's page has been broken in Firefox.
|
| All of these are our could be mission critical apps used on a
| daily basis to perform my job.
|
| In general, an attitude is strong among developers themselves
| that you should use Chrome because it makes their jobs
| easier.
|
| I filed a bug on an internal company site years ago in
| Firefox and was told to stop using Firefox.
|
| With that said, the real way devs can do their part is to go
| out of their way to support Firefox.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Also, if a page doesn't work, and it's not _essential_ to you
| (like, 99% of news sites) simply close the tab. And leave a
| ranty comment on the HN thread for bonus points :P
| n1vz3r wrote:
| I use Firefox since 2005 as my main browser (I had a brief
| affair with Chrome between 2009 and 2012), and never
| experienced broken sites and poor support. Firefox works just
| fine.
| iwalsh wrote:
| There is an ancient (created in 2012) bug report about this
| general issue; it appears broader than the report's title would
| indicate:
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=127340
| or_or wrote:
| Do chromium derivatives have this problem? Specifically brave?
| tsjq wrote:
| Looks like Yes. Please see this other comment and links :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24817723
| dartharva wrote:
| That's weird, I've been having a hard time using Google Classroom
| and Drive because it actually _is_ respecting cookie
| restrictions.
|
| I have to temporarily disable third party cookie blocking or
| Google Drive videos don't play in my browser.
| sam_goody wrote:
| "I am shocked, shocked... "
|
| Chrome creates a unique ID for each user (there has been much
| discussion about the entropy vs the uniqueness for the install
| key), they have been found to give a pass for Google Analytics
| when visiting from Chrome, etc. And what else do you expect when
| it is in their interest to track you (and to have a excuse to
| justify their knowledge when found out in other grey areas).
|
| EDIT: The quote above is from Casablanca, was once very famous
| [1]
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME
| bofenbref wrote:
| To be filed under Not Even Pretending Anymore.
| Tipewryter wrote:
| To avoid this type of thing I start Chromium via a script that
| replaces all settings with their defaults when I quit Chromium:
| chromium-browser \ --password-store=basic \
| --enable-dom-distiller \ %U rm -r
| ~/.cache/chromium rm -r ~/.config/chromium/Default
| cp -r ~/chromiumDefault \
| ~/.config/chromium/Default
|
| ~/chromiumDefault is the dir as it was created when I started
| Chromium for the first time and set all settings the way I like
| it. I update it every once in a while when I tweak a setting.
| simias wrote:
| Seems like an interesting method but at this point why not just
| use Firefox?
| Nacraile wrote:
| So, honest question, because I'm genuinely bewildered: why
| would you bother doing this, when Firefox exists, is perfectly
| functional, and isn't made by Google?
| cperrine wrote:
| I have an intermittent issue in FF across platforms/networks
| where I can watch in network console as I enter a URL, and I
| can see it not even trying to send the request. All I can
| find is a fixed issue from 2017 and I don't have the time nor
| inclination to try to figure out why this would be happening.
| Searching for a cool new browser for the Linux box but I
| might just install Chromium and be done with it.
| rexf wrote:
| I'm having a similar issue with FF. When I open FF and go
| to gmail.com, it doesn't load. I filed a bugzilla some time
| ago and it's still not fixed yet. FF is not usable for me
| so I switched back to Chrome.
| defnotashton2 wrote:
| Because ff extension management is utter useless garbage and
| there are many missing but useful extensions.
| superasn wrote:
| For me sadly it's the WebSpeech API. A lot of sites that use
| speech-to-text and text-to-speech break on FF and also the
| voices FF aren't nearly as good as Chrome.
|
| This bug has been pending for many years now and I don't
| think it ever going to be on their priority list soon.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| I have had some problem with Firefox for many years, maybe 5
| years since I've tried to use it.
|
| The problem is whenever I start FF it hangs for 30 seconds
| before I can type the first url in. That duration and the
| fact that it's consistent means it's clearly a network
| timeout.
|
| I have a locked down computer, layers of security
| enhancements so I kind of understand something I've done is
| causing it.
|
| However, why should it lock up for 30 seconds if it can't do
| some background thing! On startup! It's an atrocious UI
| failure. And it's been this way for 5 years that I've been
| counting, through their Quantam speedup etc. Major flaw and
| unfixed for aeons of 6 week release cycles.
|
| Btw it's not updating as it still updates ..
|
| It's actually really bad design to have a lockup like that,
| and especially on the critical hot path of the first time you
| use it! It's a sign actually of bad user experience design,
| and it's one of a number of bad anti-user things I've found
| about it. Things that Chrome gets so right!
|
| I want to ditch Chrome because of the many Google anti-
| features, but UX is also very important to me I use the
| browser all day every day and I'm extremely fast at the UI
| with advanced shortcuts etc. Firefox locking up for 30 whole
| seconds before I can use it not only destroys my flow but is
| actually an eternity - I could have about 40 chrome tabs
| opened with urls types and autocompleted or pasted into the
| url bar in that time ..
|
| Sadly Firefox blows on a large number of design decisions. I
| get the impression that user experience is down the list at
| Mozilla, below either Google donations or SJW antics.
| Whatever, but they consistently fail on important points. I
| wish it wasn't so I truly do. I'm in the process of moving to
| Brave in anticipation of uBlock finally being sabotaged by
| Google.
| t0astbread wrote:
| Have you actually tried looking for the issue (i.e.
| determining where the network request goes and if you can
| disable it in the settings)?
| [deleted]
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| This is absolute fucking nonsense, FYI. You're complaining
| about UX in the context of a bug triggered by your
| configuration. You could probably have identified the
| request that causes it in the time it took to write this
| comment.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I'm slowly cutting the cord with nearly all social media
| sites and other sites that track me for any reason, and as
| part of that, I'd like to get away from Chrome and use a
| truly open and privacy-focused browser. Every time I start
| Firefox, I'm turned off by how unpleasant it looks. The UI is
| just bad. Sharp corners, asymmetrical margins, crowded menus,
| lack of whitespace. The rendered colors don't match Chrome.
| Fonts aren't as smooth. It's like switching from MacOS to
| Linux. Things just don't look good, and that matters.
| circularfoyers wrote:
| As for the fonts, you can easily change them in the
| settings. The other nice thing about Firefox is how easy it
| is to change it's look. I used this
| https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox for some time to
| make Firefox look like Chrome (I've been using this
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-
| chrome... at the moment), but there are loads more tweaks
| you can make. There's even a subreddit dedicated to it
| https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS
| nickthesick wrote:
| Now this has me interested in using Firefox, I've tried a
| couple times but always preferred chromes UI.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Mozilla's "Firefox Color" extension is another way to
| easily customize your Firefox theme colors:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-
| color...
| bloodorange wrote:
| I am not entirely confident in this but from my
| perspective, a simplistic reading of what you say appears
| to be "I want privacy but only if I don't have to endure
| even minor inconveniences for it."
|
| This may never happen unless privacy was as profitable as
| selling data on people's behaviour.
|
| My apologies if I have misunderstood you.
| xeromal wrote:
| You put a gram of sarcasm on your simplistic reading, but
| I think you need to realize that anything people use
| daily, even hourly, needs to make them feel comfortable.
| For whatever reason, the poster you're replying to is
| bothered by him but for something he has to deal with so
| often, it's hard to override that feeling.
|
| I guess what I'm really saying is that frequently used
| things probably involve human phycology and emotions just
| as much as someone's intelligence.
| mechnesium wrote:
| That's awesome. I took that cord cutting one step further.
|
| I completely stopped using all products and services from
| FAAMG and committed to a complete digital detox plan. Using
| my devices with a clear intention in mind, rather than
| getting sucked into a dopamine driven vortex of dark
| patterns, has changed my life for the better.
|
| For email, I made a protonmail and I'm still in the slow
| process of changing my email over on all the critical
| websites I depend on. For my phone, I got a Light Phone II.
| For my desktop and laptop OSes, I use Linux distros (Solus
| and Manjaro are my favorites). For GPS, I use a Garmin, and
| for reading, I use a Kobo e-reader.
|
| It's ironic that devices that do everything for us, instead
| of specializing in one important thing, have negatively
| impacted our lives when they were supposed to improve them.
| tartoran wrote:
| Im back to FF for almost a year now. I am experiencing a lot
| of hiccups, freezes and crashes. I think FF should
| concentrate to improve the browser first and foremost.
| They've been adding a lot of useless (to me) features but the
| broswer is still buggy. It's their time to claim their market
| back from chrome, or it will start happening soon and I think
| they should just concentrate on the browser.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Do the crashes occur without any addons enabled?
| rocho wrote:
| Are you on Windows by any chance? I experience that with
| Firefox only when I use Windows (i.e. almost never,
| fortunately). I switched to Firefox on my main computer
| (Linux) a year ago and I could not be happier. It consumes
| much less memory than Chrome, it's _way_ faster (that 's my
| impression, I haven't measured that in any way) and it is a
| lot more customizable. I removed a lot of stuff from the
| context menu for example.
|
| As a bonus, it isn't made by Google. I was a hardcore
| Google fan a few years ago, but after seeing what they are
| doing with Chrome and the internet, I just could not keep
| using Chrome any longer.
| annilt wrote:
| I'm back to Firefox after many years, it's quite good and I
| don't miss anything from Chrome other than one click
| translate page button. Also looks like FF has caught up
| Chrome performance-wise. It's fast, it respects your privacy,
| very nice!
| lallysingh wrote:
| Same here, faster. Especially on mobile. Part of that had
| to be the built in ad blockers.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I've been using Firefox as my daily driver for perhaps a
| year or more now.
|
| As well as the translate page button, the other great
| feature chrome has that I miss dearly is the highlights
| chrome has in the scrollbar when doing a ctrl-f find-in-
| page. That is super-useful and a real pain in the arse that
| Firefox does not support it.
|
| I played around with prototyping an extension to replicate
| it (or as close as I could get) but it was hard to nicely
| override the ctrl-f hooks.
| ffpip wrote:
| > As well as the translate page button, the other great
| feature chrome has that I miss dearly is the highlights
| chrome has in the scrollbar ...
|
| FYI, you can press the enter button to go to the next
| highlighted word in Find-in page.
| striking wrote:
| Yeah, but it's nice to be able to identify high densities
| of matches at a glance.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Yep - I will often just scroll down to the "densist"
| area. Keyboard shortcuts are not the problem.
| trwired wrote:
| It actually feels faster than Chrome to me. I've been
| primarily on Firefox for the past few months and was really
| surprised to find Chrome not feeling as responsive when I
| tried to use it recently.
| input_sh wrote:
| Just search for Google Translate in add-ons. You'll find
| some that provide you with that behaviour on right-click.
| m463 wrote:
| I do not use chrome and use firefox but chrome has better
| support for accelerated video/codecs/videoconferencing.
|
| Also, I block firefox myself. It phones home a lot, even when
| you tell it not to.
| cdubzzz wrote:
| > Also, I block firefox myself. It phones home a lot, even
| when you tell it not to.
|
| Do you have sources on this? I use Firefox on Mac OS with
| Little Snitch and have never had Firefox try to phone home
| with analytics disabled (a one click decision on first
| start of the app).
| m463 wrote:
| Here is the stuff I couldn't shut off:
| firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com
| shavar.services.mozilla.com aus5.mozilla.org
| cpeterso wrote:
| Shavar is the server from which Firefox downloads update
| to its Safe Browsing and Tracking Protection site lists.
| "Shavar" is the name of the differential update protocol
| Google designed and uses for Chrome Safe Browsing site
| list.
|
| aus5 is the server from which Firefox downloads new
| Firefox updates. "aus" stands for Auto Update Service.
|
| I'm not exactly what data is downloaded from
| firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com.
| cdubzzz wrote:
| Settings one is interesting, it does appear that you
| cannot block it[0] and that is sad.
|
| The other two appear to be safe browsing and automatic
| update related. Those two services can be disabled form
| the regular settings UI, I think? Have you found that to
| not work?
|
| [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-
| firefox-making...
| m463 wrote:
| It did not work for a long time
|
| Then I blocked it and got this constant nag pane "Firefox
| cannot update to the latest version". all. the. time.
|
| I finally found out some magic on macos:
| sudo defaults write
| /Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox DisableAppUpdate
| -bool TRUE sudo defaults write
| /Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox
| EnterprisePoliciesEnabled -bool TRUE
|
| that got rid of the nag pane
| danlugo92 wrote:
| I really really really tried to give Firefox a chance, but
| gmail and some other sites are unusable, 40% are slower and
| admittedly the other 50% work just as fine as in Chrome.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Huh? I've been using Firefox almost exclusively for five
| years and have been a gmail user the entire time.
| lallysingh wrote:
| When did you last try? It's gotten very good in the last
| year for me.
| Tipewryter wrote:
| There are some convenience issues with Firefox that bother
| me:
|
| - It starts slower then Chromium.
|
| - Right click and "Open in new private window" actually opens
| in a new private window. I prefer how Chromium does it,
| grouping all sites opened like this as tabs in one window.
|
| - In Chromium, I can easily set any URL as a custom search
| engine with whatever parameters I like. In Firefox, I can't.
| singron wrote:
| While I dont think you can set any url as a "search
| engine", you can set any url as a parameterized keyword
| bookmark. Create a bookmark, then edit its properties, put
| %s in the url, and assign it a keyword. This behavior is
| more straightforward to setup in chrome but it at least
| exists in firefox.
| smichel17 wrote:
| > It starts slower then Chromium.
|
| In my experience, Chromium _renders_ and is interactive
| ~~faster~~ earlier, but they have about the same time
| between launch and browse. On Chromium, I launch, type in a
| site, hit enter, and wait and wait as it finishes
| _actually_ starting up. FF takes longer to appear but is
| ready to browse as soon as it does. Or at least it did
| until some time in the last year or two, at which point it
| started taking a page out of Chromium 's book. But
| honestly, I don't do cold starts that much so it doesn't
| bother me much one way or another.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| I can't remark on the first two (I don't start my browser
| that often, it just status open, and most of my private
| browsing use cases are covered by the temporary containers
| extension), but the search engine issue (which is super
| annoying) can be solved with an extension:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/add-custom-
| se...
|
| No, an extension shouldn't be necessary, but it works (I
| use it to search with searx).
| rightbyte wrote:
| As easy as setting up Emacs.
|
| It seema like a losing battle trying to make Google products
| not act as malware when they are designed for that purpose. It
| is so much easier to just use Firefox.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| That's a little unfair. Emacs has bad defaults because some
| person, somewhere, fourty-ish years ago, honestly thought
| they were good (probably correctly for their use-case).
| Chrome has bad defaults intentionally, to benefit a
| corporation.
| tjoff wrote:
| To avoid this type of thing I start firefox.
|
| Seriously, if you care about the internet don't use any webkit
| browser.
| low_key wrote:
| I do something similar with chrome (have to use sometimes it
| for testing compatibility), but just create a fresh profile
| every time with: chrome_dir=$(mktemp -d)
| echo "Using temp dir: $chrome_dir"
| /usr/bin/google-chrome \ --incognito \
| --user-data-dir="$chrome_dir" \ --window-
| size=1280,1280 \ --no-referrers \ --no-
| pings \ --no-experiments \ --disable-
| translate \ --dns-prefetch-disable \
| --disable-background-mode \ --no-first-run \
| --no-default-browser-check wait $! rm
| -rf "$chrome_dir"
| Tipewryter wrote:
| Nice.
|
| I think --incognito makes no difference if you throw away the
| data dir anyhow.
| teddyh wrote:
| And on the day that "mktemp" fails for some reason, that
| script will then delete your entire home directory.
| papaf wrote:
| _And on the day that "mktemp" fails for some reason, that
| script will then delete your entire home directory._
|
| That's a good point but an incredibly lazy comment. I think
| the possible failure of 'mktemp' could be protected against
| by using 'set -e' at the start of the script.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Relevant Brave (Chromium-based browser) bug discussion on exactly
| this:
|
| https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/1127
|
| They merged in a (partial?) bug fix in 2019:
|
| https://github.com/brave/brave-ios/pull/883
|
| The underlying problem isn't that Google sites are _directly_
| excluded, it is that Local Storage, Database Storage, and Service
| Workers aren 't cleared by that setting, and that Google uses
| those for persistence.
|
| Is this being evil or was support just not added when those were
| introduced? I have absolutely no idea. But I agree with fixing
| the underlying bug in Chromium either way.
| tonetheman wrote:
| If you right click inspect and go to applications you can clear
| all of the site settings. But the end user UI should support
| this option.
|
| You could argue that a Service Worker should not be cleared
| since that is more than likely not personal data exactly.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Not _exactly_ this: according to that bug-report, it happens to
| non-Google sites as well, if I 'm reading it right.
| [deleted]
| sildur wrote:
| In the article you can see chrome deleting Apple's local
| storage, but not Google's.
| super_mario wrote:
| I guess their motto is now "Be evil".
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Why is anyone using Chrome at this point? I use Firefox and
| honestly, I wouldn't even know the difference if it weren't for a
| few unique UI features. Old habits? If that's the case, you
| deserve what you get for your laziness.
| SimeVidas wrote:
| _pretends to be shocked_
| whack wrote:
| Break up Google into the following companies, each with its own
| independent shareholders, board, and CEO:
|
| - Search
|
| - GMail
|
| - Drive/Docs
|
| - YouTube
|
| - Android
|
| - Chrome
|
| - GCP
|
| Until that happens, these shenanigans are destined to continue.
| anticensor wrote:
| Instead of breaking it apart, which would cause extraneous
| expenses, turn it into a non profit: Pay out all creditors
| (regardless of immediacy of the debt), executives and
| shareholders in the process. Then turn it into a non-profit
| with a primary purpose of "furthering the public access to
| knowledge of mankind in any suitable manner, including web
| search and cloud computing".
| n1vz3r wrote:
| Love the idea. Also let's put "do no evil" back as part of
| the company mission
| Mxs2000 wrote:
| Why would there be independent shareholders? If I own GOOG
| today I should be entitled to an equivalent share of all its
| parts when broken up.
| tehlike wrote:
| You would be given those shares yes.
| driverdan wrote:
| Android and Chrome do not make any money directly themselves
| and you ignored Google's core business, advertising.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Over the last few months I have had ~30,0000 visits to my
| website, almost entirely from HN, and I was disheartened to find
| that 52% of visitors were using Chrome[1].
|
| Given the pro-open-web and anti-FAANG sentiments that's shared on
| HN I had expected slightly different results.
|
| [1]:
| https://simpleanalytics.com/vishnu.tech?start=2019-10-18&end...
| tzs wrote:
| Firefox can be kind of annoying to use on HN, at least if you
| post often.
|
| I use Firefox for most of my personal browsing other than
| Fastmail's webmail interface, and most of my general work
| browsing.
|
| I use Chrome for a lot of testing and development at work and
| for dealing with PayPal. These things all get separate
| profiles, and Chrome handles multiple profiles better than
| Firefox. Yes, I know about Firefox containers, but I need
| separate bookmarks and history. Containers just deal with
| cookies and maybe cache.
|
| I've been tempted to switch to Chrome for at least HN and
| Reddit because I tire of dealing with Firefox's spell checking.
| It regularly tells me things are spelled wrong that are not
| (such as "webmail" in this comment). It's not just that it is
| terrible that irks me--it is that it is _inexplicably_
| terrible.
|
| What I mean by inexplicably terrible is that they are using
| Hunspell. That's the same open source spelling engine that is
| used by Chrome, and LibreOffice, and MacOS. Those all have
| great spell checking. I thus infer that Firefox's problem is
| not an engine problem. It's a dictionary problem. So why don't
| they they grab the ones LibreOffice uses?
|
| Here are some words that came up in comments of mine either
| here or on Reddit that Firefox incorrectly told me were spelled
| wrong. Each one interrupted my writing flow as I had to stop
| and go look it up elsewhere to make sure that I had it right.
|
| > all-nighter auditable automata blacksmithing bubonic cantina
| commenter conferenced epicycle ethicist fineable inductor
| initializer lifecycle micropayments mosquitos pre-programmed
| preprogrammed prosecutable responder solvability spectrogram
| splitter subparagraphs subtractive surveil tradable
| transactional tunable verifiability verifier
|
| There's an issue in the Bugzilla for reporting misspelled
| words. I've reported all of those there so they should
| eventually be fixed. I'm not sure how long that takes.
|
| Here's a bunch I indirectly reported earlier, that are now
| fixed:
|
| > "ad infinitum" anonymized backlit bijection commoditization
| else's handwrite heliocentrism merchanting natively photosensor
| plaintext pre-fill preload prepend resizable scoresheet
| surjection unrequested
|
| (Indirectly because I asked about them on /r/firefox, and
| someone responded telling me about the Bugzilla issue, which he
| had already added them to).
|
| Here's my list of ones I have not yet reported:
|
| > ballistically chewable counterintuitive exonerations mistyped
| phosphine programmability recertification shapeshifting
| tradeoffs webmail
| shadowgovt wrote:
| People say one thing and do another. That's the most consistent
| rule of human behavior prediction.
| polote wrote:
| From my figures on 100k visitors from a few days ago it is 21%
| for Firefox an 40% for Chrome, not bad
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm surprised that it was so low. I work in tech and I don't
| know anyone who uses anything other than Chrome.
| reader_mode wrote:
| I'm using Safari by default simply because Chrome is a CPU
| hog on my machine and I can notice my PC heating up
| considerably faster when running it.
|
| I considered Firefox and tried to switch for a month before
| but the recent reorg + the stuff about their top officer pay
| makes it seem like it's a cushy position some people
| entrenched themselves in and the org is completely lost - the
| browser experience was inferior and I don't have sympathy
| towards them so why bother.
|
| Chrome has plenty of forks so I try to run those on other
| platforms.
| mrgordon wrote:
| Yeah I'm amazed how many Mac users use Chrome when it's
| such a resource hog. Safari has better privacy and battery
| life as well. Maybe people use Chrome syncing or something
| and that's why I don't understand but it seems like they
| went out of their way to get a worse experience.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| A ton of sites work better with Chrome than Safari
| because engineers often don't put in the 20 min it would
| take to fix minor issues with Safari and build only for
| Chrome on the Mac.
| mrgordon wrote:
| It happens occasionally but "a ton" is probably
| overstating it. Any major website that doesn't work on
| Safari for Mac and iOS is going to get bug reports pretty
| quickly unless it's a Google product and they just don't
| care
| treis wrote:
| Lots of people can't test Safari because they don't have
| Macs.
| eli wrote:
| Chrome arguably is more secure with better sandboxing.
| mrgordon wrote:
| It goes back and forth. As of a couple years ago, Safari
| sandboxed the network process which Chrome did not do.
| Chrome also sends a significant amount of personal data
| and usage data to Google and potentially other parties
| which significantly harms the supposed security. Having
| an always on data feed of the users actions (to enhance
| your advertising business) is not good security practice.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I could see using Chrome on a desktop Mac maybe, but yeah
| it obliterates the battery on my MBPs so badly that it's
| impractical to use unless I'm alright with being tethered
| to the wall.
|
| It's kind of exasperating how low of a priority
| efficiency is with both Chrome and Firefox.
| vincnetas wrote:
| I was trying to switch my wife to use safari on chrome
| (because battery usage), but her argument is that "safari
| does not display favicons near here bookmarks" and it's
| big no-go for her. Makes you think about reasons of
| regular users when choosing browsers.
| armagon wrote:
| That's so interesting. I'm very computer literate, and a
| huge reason I couldn't stand Safari is because it didn't
| show it didn't show favicons in the tab bar. I typically
| have dozens of tabs open, and really need some way to
| tell them apart quickly -- such as favicons showing up.
| (I did find a hack to do it, but didn't love it.)
|
| You might ask her to try again. Safari 14 actually shows
| favicons, and that is such a welcome relief.
| xrisk wrote:
| Chrome has such a myriad variety of extensions that using
| Safari is simply not feasible.
|
| 1. uBlock Origin - the content-based blockers on Safari
| are not nearly as good 2. Zotero connector - for my
| academic work 3. Session Buddy - for saving sessions 4.
| Proxy switcher - for selectively using my uni proxy for
| academic resources
|
| and so on...
| mrgordon wrote:
| Do you really want to allow a myriad of extensions access
| to your web browser data? I can understand if you have a
| couple you like but personally I find extensions only
| make Chrome slower and I don't trust most of them because
| of the deep access you need to grant. I'd just as rather
| turn my proxy on for a minute at the OS level and not
| have a permanent extension running in every single Chrome
| tab.
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| The only thing that annoys me about Safari is that there's
| no way to disable or configure alternate search engines for
| the omnibar. Sending mistyped intranet urls directly to
| Google (or DuckDuckGo) search is a huge privacy hole.
| reachtarunhere wrote:
| Lots of us do. Firefox is my browser on all my devices. I do
| use Chrome when visiting Google Docs which I assume is
| deliberately sabotaged on Firefox though.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's not deliberate; it's lack of investment. Docs is
| complicated enough that the small deviations in browser
| implementation add up---to make something as complex as
| Docs not work in Firefox, all you have to do is be willing
| to publish without hating new features on FF end-to-end
| tests.
| subhro wrote:
| I have never used Chrome and use Safari with GDocs. It
| seems fairly functional to me. What is the sabotage scene
| you are talking about?
| Sebastian_09 wrote:
| I have a different experience with that: on a current
| MBP, Google office suite software (docs, slides, agenda,
| mail etc) regularly uses 100% cpu in safari for no
| apparent reason, and clearly also has some memory leaks
| were single tabs bloat to 2-3 gig memory... Have to kill
| the the threads manually. I would say it's fairly
| unoptimized / pushes you to chrome
| reachtarunhere wrote:
| I second the experience of the other commenters. Keep it
| open long enough and it sucks up all the resources in
| non-chrome browsers. I also include Google Slides in my
| experience btw. It is more severe with Slides than docs.
| SafaT wrote:
| I strongly agree with you, most of the time I feel that
| non-Google browsers including Safari is somehow blocked or
| slowed down.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's more lack of optimization. We could alternatively
| put the blame on Mozilla's doorstep for not optimizing
| FF's engine to run Docs better.
| lettergram wrote:
| I found Firefox to work fine on google docs tbh. It used to
| be slower, but haven't had an issue in probably a year
| tedivm wrote:
| It really depends on which part of google docs you're
| using. Trying to use the presentation system with Firefox
| is an awful experience for example.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| On my 2015 Mac, both Docs and Maps perform significantly
| better on Chrome, and I keep it around for these 2 use
| cases.
| chefandy wrote:
| Almost everybody in my office of designers/developers uses
| Firefox.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| One can be anti-Google and still use Google products. The
| browser is an exceedingly important piece of software. For some
| people, the cost of switching to something other than Chrome is
| too great. Maybe Firefox doesn't work well. Maybe they hate
| Safari. Maybe their favorite extensions aren't available.
| Whatever the reason, the cost of switching is greater than the
| price they put on their anti-Google stance. And that's okay.
|
| Personally, I switched from Chrome to Firefox a long time ago.
| But I still use plenty of other Google products. I'm overall
| anti-Google, but I'm not a religious about it. I disconnect
| from Google where I can, and support products that match my
| views when I can.
|
| If anything, I'm surprised the percentage of non-Chrome users
| your site encountered was as high was it was. Makes me kind of
| hopeful.
| bgorman wrote:
| Aren't Opera, Edge and Brave pretty much drop-in de-googled
| replacements for Google Chrome?
| freedomben wrote:
| Worth remembering is that the commenters on the site are the
| minority. There are a lot or lurkers on HN (possibly orders of
| magnitude more lurkers than commenters), so "the pro-open-web
| and anti-FAANG sentiments that's shared on HN" may be a vocal
| minority.
| bosswipe wrote:
| There's no reason to believe that lurkers have substantially
| different behavior than commenters. More likely is that those
| who use firefox are more passionate and informed about
| browser issues.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Commenters are extreme outliers. Only a tiny single-digit
| percentage of forum readers online ever comment. HN is also
| a highly regarded, particularly alienating site with a
| strict tone expected from commenters. I'd imagine the ratio
| of lurkers to commenters is 100:1.
| SpecialistEMT wrote:
| I imagine the ratio is even smaller. HN is a often a
| particularly uninviting place to comment on.
| anm89 wrote:
| Lurking is a substantially different behavior than posting.
| bosswipe wrote:
| Wow this comment is getting downvoted a lot. I think I
| wasn't clear with what I meant. What I meant is that
| there's no reason to believe that lurkers have big
| difference in which browser they use.
| Zak wrote:
| Commenters by definition have substantially different
| behavior than lurkers: they comment.
|
| Furthermore, people tend to be louder about things they
| perceive as threats, such as corporations dominating the
| internet. Those who comment about those threats are likely
| to be the same ones taking active steps to mitigate them.
| underdeserver wrote:
| A lot of people likely use a work laptop and have to use Chrome
| at work - due to internal apps that only work on Chrome.
| nuker wrote:
| Safari is healthy 31%, nice
| f311a wrote:
| I think this test should be performed when you logged out from
| the Chrome profile. Youtube, Google Docs and Google search
| automatically pick it when you logged in.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > I think this test should be performed when you logged out
| from the Chrome profile.
|
| It was.
| amelius wrote:
| Sadly, one of the few ways to fight back is to make your website
| perform slightly worse when viewed on a Chrome browser.
| cute_boi wrote:
| google knows it should do these things slowly. Nice in future my
| insurance company will show me ads on basis of how much fit i am
| by watching my computer usage. If i see computer for more than 8
| hour they think i am unhealthy and will not give insurance. Good
| job google. And to all those people using chrome you are reason
| this is happening.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| Wow, that UI looks deceptive. Maybe if an organization like the
| FTC "nudged" Google with fines, or DOJ looked at other options,
| the smart folks at Google would get better at these sort of
| things once they'd had the proper _incentives_ given to them.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Presumably related to their linking of browser sync with the
| site-level Google login. That was an unnecessary change, and this
| is a good example of why a separation of concerns is important.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Along with sign-in-to-sync, AMP, URL hiding, upcoming manifest
| v3, Google is doing their best to benefit advertising and data
| collection. As the market leader in ads, it is textbook anti-
| competitive behavior, but the courts will have to decide if it is
| legally.
| superasn wrote:
| I'm kinda happy they are doing it more and more. Just waiting
| for the last straw that breaks the camel's back.
| a_imho wrote:
| There were plenty of last straws. The missing piece is a
| powerful enough entity that has interest in regulating them.
| No, despite the GDPR the EU is not that.
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| This actually seems to me like a fairly blatant breach of
| multiple important aspects of GDPR on the part of
| google.com and youtube.com
|
| Are there not serious fines for companies saying they opted
| you out of this kind of data collection and then not
| actually abiding by your requests?
|
| France Sweden and the UK is already in on that action, Im
| sure others will follow.
| a_imho wrote:
| Exactly, compared to what could be the maximum fine,
| there are no high profile cases. This is the point, GDPR
| is as useful as much as it is enforced, which is
| lackluster at best. We are not talking about a one off,
| for example Google has been continuously violating GDPR
| for years at this point.
| xxpor wrote:
| GDPR entrenches big tech. Costly regulation always benefits
| the incumbents.
| ignoramous wrote:
| I'm afraid the lobby money will keep buying them extra
| straws.
| tupputuppu wrote:
| This isn't the highly visible anticompetitive behavior which
| might cause a backlash. Regular people, or even journalists
| or judges won't even understand what cookie clearing on exit
| means.
|
| If there's antitrust sentiments towards Google, it needs to
| come from some where else.
| ezoe wrote:
| Although politicians and the court does not understand the
| cookie, That doesn't mean we won't have a backlash. It just
| doesn't guarantee the backlash is technologically sound.
| EU's cookie law, for example, is just stupid from the pure
| technical standpoint.
|
| It's your computer that store a cookie to local storage.
| It's your computer that decide to send back previously
| stored cookie. And they're crying like they don't have a
| consent.
| [deleted]
| lima wrote:
| > _It 's your computer that store a cookie to local
| storage. It's your computer that decide to send back
| previously stored cookie. And they're crying like they
| don't have a consent._
|
| Fortunately, EU regulators understand that non-technical
| users exist and need protection from abuse.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I disagree. This sort of double standard is a very clear-
| cut and easy to understand case of abusing a dominant
| market position.
|
| I wager that Google will be very quick to declare this a
| bug and fix it ASAP.
| Retric wrote:
| Yep, though specifically because it's harming Google's
| competition rather than users.
| Zak wrote:
| People understand perfectly well when you abstract it by
| one level: Google's web browser ignore's some of the user's
| privacy settings on sites Google owns.
| nojito wrote:
| Chrome is one thing the DOJ is using to push its case
| against Google.
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/10/feds-may-target-
| goo...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Antitrust action against Google is much more likely to come
| from the EU than from the US.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> Regular people, or even journalists or judges won 't
| even understand what cookie clearing on exit means._
|
| It's been almost 30 years since the Cypherpunks. When
| billions of dollars or existential business threats are at
| stake, regular people are motivated to find a technically-
| knowledgeable peer for advice. There have now been several
| generations of financially successful tech entrepreneurs,
| some of whom move in non-tech circles.
| feanaro wrote:
| On the other hand, a corporation cannot be allowed to
| continue its anti-competitive practice just because the
| subject is too complex for an average person to comprehend.
|
| Techology isn't going away and is becoming ever more
| important. It seems obvious to me that we will need cross-
| domain specialists to handle cases such as this in the
| future -- someone with both a legal and computer science
| background.
| walterbell wrote:
| From https://scienceandsociety.duke.edu/learn/ma/ &
| https://scienceandsociety.duke.edu/learn/ma/jdma-program/
|
| _> Many of the most important challenges confronting the
| legal profession lie at the intersection of science,
| technology, law, and policy. Emerging science and
| technologies, such as AI, big data, social media,
| genomics, and neuroscience, demand an interdisciplinary
| approach and visionary leadership. Students in the JD /MA
| in Bioethics and Science Policy program spend their three
| years at Duke focusing on these intersectional problems
| and preparing themselves for a seat at the table in these
| discussions for decades to come and earn an additional
| degree while doing so._
| WilTimSon wrote:
| I'm, sadly, not so sure that straw will come any time soon.
| Major tech companies have been under fire for years now and
| nothing managed to break them. Not saying it'll never happen
| but monumental shifts like that can take decades to pass.
| [deleted]
| swalsh wrote:
| Combined with the latest twitter bout of censorship, the
| hammer is going to hit tech soon... very hard. They are
| running out of friends on both the left and right.
| peteretep wrote:
| What are some ways in which Twitter is anti-competitive or
| acting like a monopoly?
| stevehawk wrote:
| twitter isn't doing those, they're losing friends through
| censorship. which they legally have every right to, but
| the powers that be are now campaigning to change that
| legal protection (exemption? sinve no one understands the
| second amendment)
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| I agree that the second amendment is often debated as to
| its intended (or proper) meaning, but I think you're
| talking about first amendment protections here.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The powers that wont be are complaining about censorship
| but as we all look back on the last 4 years and all the
| dead people the people running the government for the
| last 4 years are more apt to ask social media why they
| didn't do more.
| trident1000 wrote:
| They have every right to do it legally and you're right
| that the rules will probably change. People say "just go
| and make another platform" but Google literally tried and
| failed to make their own (Google+). If they cant do it
| who really can? Its not happening or it will take
| centuries/enormous resources to gain traction and
| compete. So we are left with an oligopoly that is
| censoring in lockstep and that's an issue for all sides
| because eventually its not them, its you, with time
| (amongst other issues). I think the platforms are a huge
| threat to democracy personally and I hope the new rules
| are meaningful and not just a knee jerk makeshift
| reaction.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| Social media platforms are mature enough that half
| hearted efforts like Google's won't work.
|
| But tiktok and Snapchat work. You know: real sustained
| efforts. Instagram launched 9 months before google plus.
| That should give you an idea of the landscape that google
| operated in. Instagram-- with 13 employees at acquisition
| in 2012- works.
|
| Google isn't a determiner of what works. They're one of
| the laziest implementers of new services/startups.. they
| literally throw something out there and try to coast off
| their name. In markets where the customers are mostly
| satisfied, lazy stuff like that doesn't create a winning
| product.
| trident1000 wrote:
| Sometimes a narrow lane is found in social media in
| general, but I would argue the competition is still
| minimal or non existent for crossing lanes. For instance
| Twitter and snapchat and Tiktok are very different. I
| view the social media landscape as an oligopoly rather
| than monopolistic and they rarely cross into each others
| territory. Also the rate of new meaningful competitors
| just is not occurring fast enough when a democracy like
| the US has elections every 4 years. Theres a mismatch in
| competitor lane crossing and the rate at which democracy
| operates. Theres been what...2 or 3 major new social
| networks with limited scope that dont really compete with
| each other in 20 years on the western side? Its just not
| enough to make an impact and give people choice
| especially as we see them act in tandum.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| That argument of "just go and make another platform" is
| misled anyways: Even if I build another platform: Twitter
| is still the primary communication channel of the US
| President. Which means that all secondary users
| (interested citizens, journalists, ...) hang out there as
| well. Thus whoever they block there or not has an impact,
| even if my competitor has a few hundred million users.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Google+ just wasn't very good, the argument that no one
| else can do it doesn't sit right with me because google
| was half assing that from the beginning.
| trident1000 wrote:
| I think those are the optics because it never took off so
| it looked half-assed but they made an effort (Google+ was
| also launched a long time ago so it looks antiquated by
| todays standards). Maybe a better argument is that its
| been decades and nobody is meaningfully competing with
| facebook or Twitter in their respective categories even
| though there is tremendous economic incentive to do so.
| Network effects are very difficult to break. When the
| president is on Twitter nobody wants to be on Bob's
| basement network. Its locked in a feedback loop.
|
| Follow up comment here because Ive apparently reached my
| limit for a while: I believe you. I still think a Google
| half-ass is going to be a stronger effort than another
| start ups full out stab at it. Facebook is the biggest
| "country" on earth almost by a factor of 2x with 2.7
| billion people. Its just other worldy large and difficult
| to compete with especially today. But I get what you're
| saying.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| I was following pretty heavy at the time, and
| unfortunately "made an effort" looked pretty poor to me.
| You are right network effects are difficult and if google
| wanted to throw it's full weight behind the problem
| instead of just dipping their toes they had the capital
| to shift opinion. I think this is far more likely google
| didn't have the will to make that a fully focused
| problem.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| A separate platform requires a compelling story. Google
| proves merely that money and dev talent aren't enough no
| matter how much you have of either or both.
| aristophenes wrote:
| You're allowed to say whatever you want and I'm allowed
| to sue you if you tell lies about me. Twitter and other
| social media platforms are made exempt from this because
| they are hosting other people's content and they'd be
| sued into oblivion if they could be held responsible for
| what everyone posts on their service. But as soon as they
| start censoring whatever they want, they aren't a true
| public platform anymore, the content you see is what they
| want you to see. So they should also be liable to civil
| suits if the information they allow to disseminate is not
| true. This isn't about the second amendment, IMO.
| DominoTree wrote:
| It's DEFINITELY not about the second amendment.
| bigbubba wrote:
| I don't know, maybe content recommendations systems could
| be considered weapons...
| michaelmrose wrote:
| They were NEVER a public platform they were always a
| private company. Its a commonly repeated untruth that as
| soon as they start moderating they cease to be protected.
| Nothing could be further from the truth 230 specifically
| protects their right to moderate.
| Zak wrote:
| People advocating that position usually have a very
| specific idea about how they want sites to be moderated,
| but section 230 is about not treating platforms as if
| they're the speaker when one of their users posts illegal
| speech, regardless of moderation. Of course, politically
| biased speech is not illegal, so it's really about
| punishing platforms for moderation somebody doesn't like.
|
| A more reasonable target for a 230 carve-out would be
| recommendation algorithms. Those aren't merely passively
| hosting user-generated content, but actively selecting
| what they think you should see to keep you engaged with
| the platform. Featuring content rather than showing it
| ordered by some simple criterion like time should be
| treated as editorializing rather than moderation. If a
| human editor decides to feature lies I tweet about you on
| their "best tweets of the week" page, you may be able to
| sue them for libel. If twitter's algorithm shows lies I
| tweet about you to a large audience, you currently can't.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Arguing that the recommendation algorithm is
| editorializing is an argument for the choice of algorithm
| being an instance of free speech which would be protected
| from such meddling.
|
| I don't think current law and understanding of same
| allows any major changes to how we treat platforms. I
| tend to think that any major changes in the law are
| liable to be for the worse because even well meaning law
| makers seem to possess a mostly incompetent perspective
| on tech.
| Zak wrote:
| The algorithm _would_ have free speech protections under
| such a scheme, and it 's likely courts in the US would
| conclude that it does under current law. Those do not
| necessarily extend to repeating lies that I have
| published about you, which are _not_ protected as free
| speech.
| afiori wrote:
| What twitter is accused of is of applying its rules
| unfairly and with bias.
|
| Section 230 protect the right to moderate within bounds.
| afiori wrote:
| Based on what I see people complain about in twitter the
| criticism is on a different axis: selective and
| inconsistent application of rules to appease whatever
| group they are worried at the moment.
|
| In terms of regulations this is within reach of possible
| changes to how the notorious section 230 is applied.
|
| I recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1OhE4w0TAU
| for a competent commentary.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I don't think he understands the Streisand effect in this
| context. It was inevitable either way that the majority
| would hear about the fake Hunter Biden story the ideal
| case for both the truth and for Biden is that people hear
| about it in the context of it being fake crap being
| propagated by an unreliable source instead of having it
| laundered through a million and one personal contacts who
| can rightfully claim to be sharing a legit piece of news.
|
| "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its
| boots on."
|
| C. H. Spurgeon,
|
| Whereas a truth is may be amplified by ineffective
| blocking a lie may be irreparably damaged if the truth
| gets there first.
|
| Regarding 230 the primary author of the statute disagrees
| with Thomas.
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200625/11032444780/au
| tho...
|
| Justice Thomas is the Giligan of the supreme court.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/clarence-
| thomas...
|
| >Why was this? It is because Thomas is not a conservative
| but, rather, a radical--one whose entire career on the
| Court has been devoted to undermining the rules of
| precedent in favor of his own idiosyncratic
| interpretation of the Constitution.
| afiori wrote:
| Personally this sounds like an intensely editorial
| decision on Twitter side then.
|
| Anyway what I was referring to was how Twitter's
| moderators decided to restrict this news based on it
| being obtained through hacking, but few days ago had
| nothing against Trump tax story that was based on
| illegally obtained documents.
| neya wrote:
| This may not directly relate to monopolistic behaviour -
| but I remember once (pretty recently) when Jack/someone
| in his team revealed a screenshot of an interface in
| their backend that literally allows them to control
| public mood and opinion- such as trends, shadow banning,
| etc. To me, that is scarier than just being a monopoly.
| Imagine, you pull the right switches during an election
| campaign that could sway public opinions in the last
| minute (regardless of the political party you support).
| How they aren't under serious scrutiny after releasing
| such interfaces to the public is a grave concern to me.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| I have even stronger concerns about Murdoch's media
| empire. Whatever Twitter might or might not be doing is
| child's play compared to what Murdoch is _definitely_
| doing.
| tomcam wrote:
| Yikes--what are some examples?
| briandear wrote:
| Except Murdoch has significant competition.
| 8note wrote:
| Is competition enough to avoid that manipulation?
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| These types of social interactions aren't fungible. There
| are a finite number of viable social interactions to be
| discovered. Once discovered, network effects push towards
| consolidation to one platform offering that experience.
|
| If you consider "social media" as a market, it has
| healthy competitive landscape. If you consider different
| styles of social interaction as separate markets, they've
| cornered markets. I don't see competition in these
| spaces. Facebook != Twitter, and I feel that is why both
| can exist. Behemoths in neighboring spaces opt to buy a
| social experience instead of trying to compete with their
| own.
|
| The missing piece, IMO, isn't regulation around
| "censorship" for these platforms. It's regulation that
| results in a rich market of products around a single
| style of social interaction. Example: regulation around
| interoperability.
| jjeaff wrote:
| The social media companies are arguing that "social
| media" is not an industry by itself. They certainly
| aren't going to have to argue that they don't have a
| monopoly on a specific genre of social media.
| d0gbread wrote:
| This 100%, well put.
|
| Within businesses, people have evolved far past market
| definitions where widget x1 competes with widget x2. Our
| political savvy as consumers would improve if we could
| see that as well.
|
| For example, why would Google approve a product like
| Stadia? What does it compete with? Nintendo, yes but not
| really, since so many Stadia players have a Switch
| also... just like most of us have Facebook and Twitter
| accounts. But maybe they're true competition is Netflix?
| Social media? Users are giving Google their time = data =
| insights = further monopolistic advertising power.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I think they put a small fact-check badge on one of
| Trump's tweets. Classic monopolistic behavior. Basically
| 1984.
| josteink wrote:
| > What are some ways in which Twitter is anti-competitive
| or acting like a monopoly?
|
| You don't have to be anti-competitive or abusing a
| monopoly to be the target of regulation.
| smokebutnofire wrote:
| If the election goes to Twitters preferred candidate they
| might just find that they have a very friendly
| administration to work with in a few months.
| chris_wot wrote:
| That twitter "censorship" is them finally applying their
| user acceptance policy to even the most powerful.
| theon144 wrote:
| Heh, way to make this a political issue and shoehorn in a
| completely unrelated topic.
|
| And who even is "they"? The entire tech sector? FAANG? Or
| just whoever makes the rounds in the news at any given
| point?
| rocqua wrote:
| In general, the issue of "Big tech companies have very
| large influence and are unchecked"
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Twitter and Google are not the same... At all.
| monadic2 wrote:
| Congressmen may not realize this.
| wdn wrote:
| As long as the political "contributions" still flowing into
| the right politicians, you can bet if there is any change, it
| will be adding more regulation that is too expensive for
| small players comply.
| whydoineedone wrote:
| I think that's the reason they're doing it; they realize it's
| just a matter of time before regulation comes so they're
| throwing caution to the winds until then to maximize profit
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| If that's the case, why is Safari already worse than manifest
| v3, already hiding URLs, already promoting Apple News (more
| anticompetitive than AMP), and not even offering the ability to
| clear storage on exit?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Because Safari is a niche player. Anti competitive behavior
| matters a lot more when you have a stranglehold on a market
| than when you are just a bit player.
| cageface wrote:
| Safari is far from a niche player on mobile. The last few
| US projects I've done were over 50% iOS safari.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The question is why would Safari do those things if they
| help advertising giants?
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's not for me to answer, but for Apple I guess. Maybe
| someone who works there can shine a light on this.
| Speculation about the URL bit would probably center on
| Apple tending to put form over function. Promoting Apple
| News -> because it cost them a lot of money to get it in
| the first place and they are trying to recoup that money.
| Not that I would ever even look at it, I don't think a
| hardware manufacturer is the best place to get my news
| fix.
| saagarjha wrote:
| The URL hiding thing is probably because it looks pretty
| and they think it reduces phishing.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| As far as I can see, Manifest v3 addressed all the major
| concerns. It was a developmental spec and they adapted it based
| on feedback. What problems still remain that you take issue
| with?
| AaronFriel wrote:
| Where have you seen any source that isn't Google or Microsoft
| say that it "addressed all the major concerns"?
|
| And what exactly has changed in the past year to do so?
|
| My understanding is that webRequest blocking is deprecated
| and a limited size static list will replace it. No?
|
| Edit: spec still shows ~35,000 total block entries, far too
| few. A medium sized marketing firm could, on their own, set
| up 70,000 distinct s3 bucket URLs, or a large one could
| easily justify that many distinct domains. Many existing
| block lists and uBlock's dynamic (uncountable) behavior far
| outstrip these limitations. This spec will break the back of
| ad blocking for good, and Chrome engineers and PMs know it.
|
| Spec: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/declarativeNetR
| eques...
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Google is the one that made the changes in response to
| feedback. If you're rejecting them as a source of those
| changes, then you're setting impossible goal posts.
|
| The changes included greatly increasing the rule list size,
| allowing dynamic rules, not requiring the list be included
| in the manifest (for independent updates), and the ability
| to adjust some network headers.
|
| As I said, they addressed all the major concerns that I saw
| raised.
| saagarjha wrote:
| How about the (fairly critical) ones raised by the
| authors of uBlock?
| AaronFriel wrote:
| uBlock currently has ~75,000 rules. That list isn't
| getting smaller, so which 50% of the rules would you cut?
|
| In a few years, which 2/3 of the rules would you cut?
|
| How is this a win for consumers? How have they addressed
| those major concerns?
|
| Edit: That was stock, I just added a few lists and passed
| 100,000 network filter rules. Please explain to me
| slowly, as if I were a child, how a static limit of
| 30,000 rules is a bigger number than 100,000, and why my
| computer with 128GB of RAM memory can't possibly support
| more than 30,000 rules?
| dsissitka wrote:
| > It was a developmental spec and they adapted it based on
| feedback.
|
| I wonder what they've actually addressed. It looks like this
| was just lip service:
|
| > Additionally, we are currently planning to change the rule
| limit from maximum of 30k rules per extension to a global
| maximum of 150k rules.
|
| Source: https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/web-request-and-
| declarativ...
|
| 16 months later the limit is still 30,000.
|
| Source: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/declarativeNe
| tReques...
|
| To give some context, it looks a clean installation of uBlock
| Origin would require nearly 80,000 rules.
|
| > 79,972 network filters + 39,856 cosmetic filters
| sildur wrote:
| Not being able to set a "home" in maps unless I consent to be
| spied is another shitty behavior from Google.
| alyandon wrote:
| I worked around that by briefly enabling history, setting the
| Home address and then immediately turning history back off.
| Obviously not ideal but it solved the problem for me.
| svnpenn wrote:
| Just did this. Thanks
| nuker wrote:
| > turning history back off
|
| What does that achieve? They still receive your data,
| unless you are logged off and not using any google
| software.
| amelius wrote:
| And another shitty thing is that I can't tell them to omit
| certain websites from my search results, while at the same
| time they insist they need my information "to improve my
| experience".
| blibble wrote:
| there used to be a google provided extension to do this,
| personal blocklist
|
| they stopped providing it for some reason...
|
| I liked it for blocking quora/pintrest/w3schools/...
| reaperducer wrote:
| Does DuckDuckGo have this capability? If it doesn't, it
| should, and that would be awesome.
|
| Filter out: Pinterest, YouTube, WikiHow, and all the other
| garbage SEO farms.
| dastx wrote:
| Duckduckgo doesn't have builtin. It wouldn't be easy
| without essentially tracking you, which is the opposite
| of their claims.
|
| However there is a browser extension you can install.
| It's either endorsed or developed by duckduckgo.
| jannes wrote:
| Why would you want to tell Google where you live anyway? Can
| you not just save your home as a regular starred place?
| codegladiator wrote:
| Google already knows anyways, using the map to set home is
| just for user convenience.
| bt1a wrote:
| Yes. Imagine thinking you can hide your place of
| residence along with using google location services.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| UnifiedNlp for the win :)
|
| https://github.com/microg/UnifiedNlp
| amelius wrote:
| Do you think that solves the problem? What if 4G
| operators sell your information to data brokers, which
| then sell that information to Google?
| zo1 wrote:
| Home and work are very "special" cases in that it's
| someplace most people regularly go to and from. So the app
| sends you personalized driving alerts/reminders, traffic
| updates, etc. There are definitely _reasons_ for it, it 's
| just not worth it to some. Others just have no idea that
| some of these nice goodies are helpful and not eerie and
| "privacy invading". So what if Google knows where I live
| and work? Frankly, that's something the government should
| know anyways, and it's failing abysmally judging by the
| amount of crime it's missing.
| robin_reala wrote:
| A better question is "why should Google be allowed to use
| your self-assigned home for purposes that you as a user
| haven't consented to?"
| codegladiator wrote:
| > user haven't consented to
|
| User consented to "personalization of experience", and
| that's all it is. Personalised ads.
| AlphaSite wrote:
| Those aren't related things though?
| codegladiator wrote:
| Tongue in cheek
| daveFNbuck wrote:
| I want to tell Google where I live so I can say "ok Google,
| navigate home" and get directions home without having to
| touch my phone. If there's a phrase that gets hands-free
| directions for starred items without having to say the
| whole address, Google doesn't make that easy to figure out.
| mPReDiToR wrote:
| I know you said Hands Free.
|
| My solution is a shortcut on my homescreen to my address,
| or somewhere close.
|
| One click is worth it and for someone who pays more
| attention than most to the windscreen, safe enough for
| me.
| daveFNbuck wrote:
| Everyone who uses their phone while driving thinks
| they're one of the few who can do it safely, whether
| they're fully engrossed in a text conversation speeding
| down the freeway, or tapping an icon while stopped at a
| traffic light. Deep down, I think that too. That's why I
| can't give myself excuses to do it.
| csunbird wrote:
| The location of the "Home" could be stored in the device
| locally.
| briandear wrote:
| Apple Maps doesn't do that thankfully.
| lima wrote:
| I like declarativeNetRequest and think that the tradeoffs are
| reasonable, especially after the last revision[2]. Ad blocker
| extensions are a major security risk, and this fully eliminates
| the risk without breaking most of the functionality.
|
| Adblocker extensions need full access to all network traffic
| and all it takes is a single person's account or machine to be
| compromised to get access to millions of browsers. Chrome
| extension compromises are a somewhat common occurrence - see
| [1] for a recent example.
|
| I _want_ ad blocking without giving the extension access to my
| cloud accounts, bank statements or company intranet.
|
| My current solution is to use the ExtensionSettings[3] Chrome
| policy to blacklist extensions from particularly sensitive
| domains like accounts.google.com, my bank and the company
| intranet, but it's a clunky solution - I still want tracking
| and ad scripts blocked on those!
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803740
|
| [2]: https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/web-request-and-
| declarativ...
|
| [3]: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9867568?hl=en
| throwaway189262 wrote:
| Chrome is a security risk. Blocking extensions because
| "security" is just taking away control from the user. Why
| should Google be the arbiter of whether something I install
| is secure or not?
| [deleted]
| kudu wrote:
| > _Ad blocker extensions are a major security risk_
|
| This is only true in the sense that an all-purpose browser is
| "a major security risk". That is to say, it's not true in any
| coherent sense.
|
| Yes, the ad blocker needs to be trustworthy, and there are a
| variety of approaches for furthering that goal.
|
| > _Adblocker extensions need full access to all network
| traffic and all it takes is a single person 's account or
| machine to be compromised to get access to millions of
| browsers._
|
| Again, you could say the same about the browser itself. Even
| if it were infeasible for extension developers to implement
| more security safeguards, that would be a flaw in the Chrome
| Web Store, not in the concept of web extensions.
| stefan_ wrote:
| A trivial "backspace to go back" extension needs access to
| all sites. Fraudsters buy semi-popular extensions and load
| them up with tracking and link rewriting malware, unhindered
| by Google.
|
| Their continued "refinement" of the core ad blocker APIs
| while all these abuses and deficiencies go unaddressed is
| extremely suspicious.
| lima wrote:
| > _A trivial "backspace to go back" extension needs access
| to all sites._
|
| Yes, this is bad and a big security risk. I don't use any
| extensions that request this permission. My company even
| pushes a Chrome policy that outright blocks them.
|
| Manifest v3 fixes this by taking away blanket <all_urls>
| permissions. This would break ad blockers, so they add
| declarativeWebRequest and remove the blocking webRequest
| API that would be useless anyway.
| codedokode wrote:
| Almost any browser extension is a security risk, because it
| can inject JS code into web pages.
| blibble wrote:
| the other way to keep extensions away is to use chrome's
| profile feature
|
| I have one for banking, for example, with zero extensions
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| There's a lot of hyperbole and exaggeration thrown around the
| subject of manifest v3 and declarativeNetRequest, but
| everything we've seen so far suggests that it really is an
| attempt to restrict ad blockers to a level Google is
| comfortable with (the level of Google's existing partner,
| AdBlockPlus).
|
| Some relevant points:
|
| - Google still hasn't raised the rules count like it
| announced last year in the blog post you linked. The current
| API is still limited to 30k rules. (the dynamic rule count is
| ridiculously low too)
|
| - Even if the rule count were unlimited, having a static list
| of rules handicaps more complex algorithms like those used in
| uBlock Origin, that aren't limited to "if URL in URL_LIST
| then block". For instance, a Levenshtein-distance-based
| algorithm can't be implemented with declarativeNetRequest.
|
| - Manifest v3 doesn't seem to prevent extensions from
| examining traffic, just blocking it. So Google's stance that
| its API is against data mining, not ad blockers in particular
| seems hypocritical.
|
| - Similarly, its stance that the proposed API is more
| efficient is extremely dubious. Modern WebAssembly has close-
| to-C++ performance, meanwhile ads and analytics are one of
| the biggest source of slowdowns of the modern net. The idea
| that restricting adblockers would improve performance in the
| general case is absurd.
|
| Overall I have the same view of adblockers as I have of
| pirate sites: they're very convenient for me and I like to
| have them, but I don't begrudge corporations for doing
| everything they can to get rid of them. In a world where most
| of the internet is funded by ads, I understand why Google
| would want to find ways to make adblockers just a little less
| powerful.
|
| But Google's insistence that it isn't doing exactly that, and
| that its API is technically motivated, reads as corporate
| nonsense. They haven't responded at all how I'd expect them
| to if the whole controversy was just a misunderstanding.
| throwaway189262 wrote:
| > Even if the rule count were unlimited, having a static
| list of rules handicaps more complex algorithms like those
| used in uBlock Origin, that aren't limited to "if URL in
| URL_LIST then block".
|
| Google is deeply afraid of machine learning based ad
| blocking. You can only camouflage ads so much before they
| don't serve their purpose. Forcing ad blockers to use a
| primitive blocking method prevents smarter ad blockers from
| being built.
| lima wrote:
| > _- Google still hasn 't raised the rules count like it
| announced last year in the blog post you linked. The
| current API is still limited to 30k rules. (the dynamic
| rule count is ridiculously low too)_
|
| Manifest v3 is still in development, so I'm assuming that
| this simply hasn't happened yet. It definitely needs to fit
| uBlock Origin's default rule set and I don't see them
| backtracking on the 150k announcement.
|
| > _- Even if the rule count were unlimited, having a static
| list of rules handicaps more complex algorithms like those
| used in uBlock Origin, that aren 't limited to "if URL in
| URL_LIST then block". For instance, a Levenshtein-distance-
| based algorithm can't be implemented with
| declarativeNetRequest._
|
| This is the explicit trade-off that is being made. I'll
| gladly accept this limitation in exchange for not having to
| trust the ad blocker extension.
|
| > _- Similarly, its stance that the proposed API is more
| efficient is extremely dubious. Modern WebAssembly has
| close-to-C++ performance, meanwhile ads and analytics are
| one of the biggest source of slowdowns of the modern net.
| The idea that restricting adblockers would improve
| performance in the general case is absurd._
|
| The blog post explains this - the issue isn't the (in the
| case of uBlock, carefully written and very fast) extension
| code, but the IPC overhead in routing all requests through
| the extension. The Chromium teams loves metrics and they
| wouldn't make this claim without having substantial data to
| back it up - it's not a matter of opinion, but objectively
| quantifiable.
|
| > _- Manifest v3 doesn 't seem to prevent extensions from
| examining traffic, just blocking it. So Google's stance
| that its API is against data mining, not ad blockers in
| particular seems hypocritical._
|
| The blocking version sits in the critical path, the non-
| blocking one can be called asynchronously. This is
| consistent with their reasoning.
|
| With Manifest v3, blanket host permissions are going away,
| which addresses data mining extensions and would make the
| existing blocking webRequest API impractical:
| https://twitter.com/justinschuh/status/1138889508512866304
| fouric wrote:
| There's no good reason for us to not be able to have 150k
| (or unlimited) rules _now_. The fact that we have this
| completely arbitrary and far too low restriction clearly
| shows that Google is not making even a passing attempt to
| enable adblockers to do their job.
| twhb wrote:
| One point, Google regularly makes false announcements
| about unpopular changes. When they changed search results
| to better hide which ones are ads they announced they'd
| backtrack on it, then didn't. When they started hiding
| parts of the URL they backtracked on it, waited a few
| months, then re-implemented it. When they decided "don't
| be evil" isn't really appropriate for them any more they
| said it'd only apply to Alphabet not Google, then waited
| a few months, then applied it to Google.
| usrusr wrote:
| I doubt that there can be much of a legal angle: the defense
| would be to think of Chrome as a client software for Google
| services. That client software can additionally interact with
| many third party services if they follow open web standards,
| but why should that have legal implications on how it interacts
| with their own services? It's a very dissatisfying situation.
| anuila wrote:
| Would you like your car to follow some laws or anything goes?
| What if it's nearly the only car you can buy in the US?
|
| We're talking about access to the internet, something that
| people are increasingly acknowledging as a primary need.
| Regulations will follow.
| usrusr wrote:
| Web standards are not laws. Would I be outraged if a car's
| design language would follow some aesthetic conventions
| (another set of "rules" that are not laws) but not others?
|
| I'm certainly not happy with how Google is using their
| position, but is it illegal? Should it be? Even a Pixel
| phone can install and use Firefox. You _might_ perhaps make
| a case out of how all SDK WebViews end up being Chrome
| (-ish), but as long as a third party app embedding their
| own web view would not be rejected by Play, that 's still
| more open than significant other parts of the smartphone
| market. Sure, Google is using a position of power and
| everybody who isn't a major shareholder shouldn't exactly
| be happy about it, but itvit _ab_ using? In a way
| assailable on legal grounds?
| Closi wrote:
| Rather than ask "is it illegal" you can ask "is it anti-
| competitive" and it almost certainly is.
| bambam24 wrote:
| Surprise !!
| coding123 wrote:
| I just switched to Firefox. Haven't used it in a long time. The
| one feature that helped me switch that wasn't there in the past
| was the Password import feature. Done and done. Goodbye Chrome
| after 12 years.
| driverdan wrote:
| Use a 3rd party tool like BitWarden or 1Password for password
| management. It prevents browser lock in.
| proto-n wrote:
| I would be curious how chrome engineers rationalize this one
| away.
| anaganisk wrote:
| "We put a lot of thought in implementing our APIs" - Google
| Chrome team while their peers violate their own APIs.
|
| Sheer arrogance of the devs in chrome related threads, I hate
| it.
| minikites wrote:
| Imagine if we paid programmers like teachers so only the
| dedicated and thoughtful ones stuck around.
| hrktb wrote:
| Making conditions crappier won't help. Imagine reducing
| accountants salary expecting them to be more ethical as a
| result of the change.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Best argument for paying teachers better I've heard in a
| while!
| baq wrote:
| Money and more money, also 'if it wasn't me, somebody else
| would do it for this much money'
| vehemenz wrote:
| ::cashes $20k monthly paycheck::
|
| I just do what I'm told.
| cute_boi wrote:
| a corporate strategy. We cannot blame engineer because we are
| made to believe they made it because of their manager. And we
| cannot blame those manager because we are made to believe
| higher manager did it. And ultimately we cannot blame anyway
| and just say Google did it. And now nobody cares because people
| think google is very large organization we cannot blame whole
| organization for small things.
|
| I will blame them for making such system. If we blame them I
| think ultimately this issue is going to be solved?
| calimac wrote:
| Antitrust
| geogra4 wrote:
| The us government has not successfully prosecuted an antitrust
| case since att in 1984. This is a pretty clear cut case
| fmajid wrote:
| You can blame Justice Robert Bork for that (yes, he of Nixon's
| Saturday Night Massacre and failed Supreme Court nomination):
|
| https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/robert-bork...
|
| The Chicago School invented the "free markets can do no wrong"
| ideology that denies the possibility of monopoly, but Bork is
| the one who weaponized it to cripple antitrust, in plain
| violation of the statutes. The article is from a right-wing
| site, BTW.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| [Article author here] A few notes:
|
| 1. I tested with many different sites and configurations in order
| to narrow down the issue. The screenshots in the article are just
| a small sample of my tests, for illustration.
|
| 2. I'm not logged into Chrome or any Google services. I've gone
| through chrome://settings and disabled everything Google-related.
| Nonetheless, although I'm not using those Chrome features, this
| issue obviously could be related to the existence of those
| features in Chrome.
|
| 3. My goal in publishing the article was to get the issue fixed
| ASAP. I'm a browser extension developer, so I'm constantly
| testing with different browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and
| Safari. It wasn't my intention to start a browser war.
|
| 4. I believe that Chrome is entirely open source, so I hope that
| someone familiar with the code base will take a look at this
| issue. The sheer size and complexity makes it a bit daunting for
| an outsider, but since Chromium has been adopted by other
| browsers such as Brave and Edge, there are outside developers
| already working on it.
| [deleted]
| noisem4ker wrote:
| 4. Chromium is open-source, while Chrome is not.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| Hmm. It seems to be mostly open source though? I found a
| document about differences on Linux, and I didn't see much. h
| ttps://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs..
| .
| tedivm wrote:
| Chromium is the open source bit, Chrome is Chromium plus a
| bunch of proprietary changes that google adds. You can run
| Chromium- it is a browser by itself- but it's not the same
| thing you'd download and run if you grab Chrome.
| lima wrote:
| The "proprietary changes that google adds" are API
| keys[1], branding, and external plugins like
| Flash/Widevine. Other than those, the source code is
| identical.
|
| [1]: https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys
| tedivm wrote:
| > Other than those, the source code is identical.
|
| How do you know, and how can we prove it?
| irrational wrote:
| TIL. Are there any downsides to running Chromium instead
| of Chrome?
| snazz wrote:
| Chromium has no auto-updater on Windows and macOS. Unless
| you have a package manager that compiles updated versions
| for you, you're better off using Chrome.
| dhms wrote:
| I was wondering about number 4. Does Chromium currently have
| the same behavior?
| aarchi wrote:
| Yes, Chromium has this same behavior.
|
| ungoogled-chromium is a project that removes Google
| integration from Chromium. Here is the patch they use to
| remove this special treatment of Google sites:
|
| https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
| chromium/blob/master/pa...
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| Thanks! That's surprisingly short.
|
| Now the question is how those IsGoogle functions are used
| in storage handling.
| jug wrote:
| Eh, so doubleclick.net, ad network extraordinaire, gets
| special treatment as a "Google host" as well? Eww.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| Google owns Doubleclick since 2007, shouldn't be a
| surprise.
| leeoniya wrote:
| > My goal in publishing the article was to get the issue fixed
| ASAP.
|
| could be "by design"
| cicciop wrote:
| Of course it is, and the naivety of webdevelopers that
| continue justifying a "chrome first" workflow is beyond
| irresponsible at this point.
| cpmsmith wrote:
| Not that I agree with it, but I think the argument is that
| any workflow _but_ Chrome-first is naive. Hacker News '
| righteous fury won't do much to change the fact that 2 in 3
| people use Chrome.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Looking through the Chromium source code, it looks like it may be
| related to this?
|
| https://blog.chromium.org/2020/02/samesite-cookie-changes-in...
|
| The reason I say this:
|
| This test case appears to suggest that Google intentionally adds
| google owned domains to
| `managed_legacy_cookie_access_allowed_for_domains`:
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/b9c645c0b16...
|
| The Chrome source code shows that this settings adds
| CONTENT_SETTING_ALLOW to these "legacy" cookies
| (LEGACY_COOKIE_ACCESS):
| https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:c...
|
| Elsewhere, it seems that `CONTENT_SETTING_ALLOW` causes cookies
| to be persisted even when you enable "Clear cookies and site data
| when you quit Chrome".
| [deleted]
| gundmc wrote:
| Doesn't look like it's working as expected, but it seems like a
| leap too far for the author to make the assumption that Google
| sites are somehow specifically excluded from that small of a
| trial. Several others have posted chromium bugs that indicate
| it's an issue with the file system more generally affecting many
| sites.
| wnevets wrote:
| Is this to make sure their browser sign sync feature works? I
| recall that being a thing years ago.
| mqus wrote:
| To me it seems to be that way if you logged into chrome (and
| therefore into all google services). It seems reasonable that it
| does not log you out(e.g. delete cookies) when restarting the
| browser, even when setting it otherwise.
|
| But those things are why i don't use chrome anymore so I can't
| verify it.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| [Article author here] I'm not logged into Chrome or any Google
| services. I've gone through everything in chrome://settings and
| disabled all of the Google-related settings.
| varispeed wrote:
| We need to start lobby governments to make this data collection
| and processing business illegal. I think all the platforms like
| Google, Facebook, Instagram and so on should be forbidden to
| collect the data they don't need to conduct business. That is
| they should not be allowed to package the data and sell or
| develop new products using this data. Otherwise we should
| consider whether people using their products could be considered
| their employees and had to be paid appropriate wages? In the end
| entering data to their systems is a job.
| briandear wrote:
| Or just stop using those services. Privacy can be a competitive
| advantage.
| frankzen wrote:
| Did anyone really expected better from Google?
| greatgib wrote:
| Wake up, welcome the real world Neo!
|
| It's the perfect kind of example needed by the anti trust
| authorities to justify breaking up Google in parts.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Why? Because they can. And we can, although in a very small part,
| blame also Mozilla for this.
|
| Firefox back then had a bright future since any Windows user
| comparing it with IE could immediately notice how it was leagues
| beyond in features, security and stability. There was a problem
| though: it was slow as molasses on normal machines, so when
| Google published the first Chrome version, it was like someone
| turned on the afterburner on web surfing. That was back when "do
| no evil" was still part of Google's mission and when I and many
| others would gladly do crazy things to work there, so it wasn't
| much of a problem to migrate to it, which I did and kept using
| for a few years. I don't know the reasons behind Firefox
| slowness, probably the XUL engine and/or the lack of
| optimization, but alas this was very noticeable, especially in
| multitab sessions which for me are the norm. Then Google
| completed its transition from a techies heaven to a corporation,
| with the inevitable changes to their politics, which made me and
| others migrate back to Firefox even before it was rewritten to
| become much more snappy. The rest is recent history.
|
| Nowadays Firefox and Chrome are pretty much equivalent wrt speed,
| although Firefox seems still faster and better suited to sustain
| lots of active extensions (currently I have 24, 21 of which
| enabled), but of course privacy plays a major role here, and I
| wouldn't go back to Chrome even if it still was much faster than
| Firefox. Lots of people's mileage will vary of course.
|
| What I wonder is however what would have happened, had back then
| Firefox been already written with speed in mind; could Chrome
| easily take the top position in an era when Google wasn't today's
| Google? I think not. At least not that easily. The bottom line
| should be: optimize your damn code even if a 10% slower
| competition doesn't make it a top priority, before a new
| unexpected 20% faster product catches you unprepared.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| Related: The web is unimplementable.[0]
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819130
| wombatmobile wrote:
| "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."
|
| -- George Orwell, 1984
| input_sh wrote:
| Wrong book mate.
| smichel17 wrote:
| - Guy Montag, 1953
| eznzt wrote:
| Surely that's a quote by Winston Churchill.
| Seb-C wrote:
| It is not as bad as Google, but mozilla also does some shady
| stuff that I find annoying and eroded my trust in them.
|
| When I go to the extension store (as a developer) and click on
| "Manage or submit extensions", they automatically get my email
| and credentials from my Firefox sync account (the one registered
| in my browser). I understood that by trying to use this store
| with multiple accounts in multiple containers, but it is
| impossible. You cannot get the normal and neutral connection
| screen to login to any account, they grab your credentials
| without your consent anyway.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/developers/
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| True, but I think a better argument can be made that an addon
| website is an integral part of the brower itself, as opposed to
| an unrelated website like Search or YouTube.
| m463 wrote:
| I turned off everything I could in firefox and it still phoned
| home all the time.
|
| Finally I just firewalled it off:
| firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com
| shavar.services.mozilla.com aus5.mozilla.org
| eCa wrote:
| It's like they _want_ to be broken up at the rate they are going.
| allie1 wrote:
| Has been the way its done for years
|
| How else will they monitor cloaking etc and warning of phishing
| etc?
| pgt wrote:
| I was thinking about The Fall of Google in the shower today and
| how it could happen while seemingly more evil Amazon is
| flourishing.
|
| The reason I think comes down to Google's unwillingness to let
| engineers talk to customers. If even 10% of the engineers at
| Google were talking to customers inbetween sitting on multi-
| coloured bouncy balls and having political in-fights with PM
| competitions for who could destroy and relaunch Google Chat the
| fastest, they would still be winning instead of me typing this in
| Mozilla Firefox on an iPhone with DuckDuckGo as the default
| search engine.
| nuker wrote:
| Google customers are corp's marketing departments, not people.
| People are natural resource for Ad data mining, which usage
| should be taxed or licenced by govs, btw, like oil. Amazon just
| sells stuff, so customers are people.
| rocqua wrote:
| You still gotta 'manage' your natural resources. Lumberjacks
| try and keep the forest from burning down. Miners keep their
| tunnels from collapsing. Similarly, google should manage
| their users better.
|
| 'Should' here is not meant as a moral imperative. It is meant
| as "If you want decent profits, you should do this".
| nuker wrote:
| They do, they insert "privacy" in all comms, fancy new
| switches in apps, trying their best to look concerned. And
| it works, people feel good after flipping off yet another
| "privacy" switch.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| phkahler wrote:
| Stop complaining about Google and start using Firefox. Simple. If
| it's not simple and you find yourself tied to Chrome then you dug
| your own hole. This type of thing has been going on a long time.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| Firefox has been great for me lately. I use iOS, so I can have
| password synced cross platform, and I honestly feel like
| Firefox performs better than Chrome on my PC. Chrome eats up
| RAM, and it runs in the background unless you manually
| configure it otherwise.
|
| I won't try to sell anyone on it, but it's awesome. Politics
| and Mozilla's laughable behavior aside, it's still a damn good
| browser.
| cvrjk wrote:
| I am sorry, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Both
| on Windows and Android. I've noticed that Firefox eats up far
| more memory than chrome with way lesser open tabs on both the
| platforms. I've had tabs die on me multiple times that I
| simply could not recover. At this point I am very conscious
| when I am using Firefox because I don't want too many open
| tabs or leave them open for too long.
|
| I'd love to use Firefox and ditch Chrome completely, but I
| don't think its there yet.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| You can use Firefox (or Brave) and still point out Google's
| privacy violations and self-dealing. These positions aren't
| mutually exclusive, and are more productive than 'stfu n git
| gud. git f1r3f0x.'
|
| 1.) Not everyone is going stop using Chrome. It's better to let
| Chrome users know what they're getting into.
|
| 2.) Pointing out Chrome's privacy issues gives an extra push to
| stop using it. This post may be just the push someone needs to
| overcome the inertia built by using the same program for years.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Chromium works better. Those who care should build a better
| browser. People will not migrate to inferior products. If
| privacy is the concern you can use brave.
| bretpiatt wrote:
| I'm down to using Chrome for Google Properties that I use
| (Gmail, Drive, Meet), then Edge for regular browsing on my PC,
| and Firefox for browsing on mobile.
|
| It's a reasonable amount of work to manage your privacy these
| days even for someone with the knowledge. So many users either
| (1) don't know, (2) find out and don't really understand how to
| fix it so they don't, or (3) find out and don't care.
|
| Without some level of accountability at the public policy level
| we won't see a level playing field. Google is doing with Chrome
| what Microsoft did with IE (back in the IE4/5/6 days). If they
| continue while public agencies move slowly they'll catch up
| eventually and I believe we'll see some level of enforcement
| action.
| jimueller wrote:
| Agreed, good to call them out, if this is intentional, but
| about the only way to stop this stuff is to stop using their
| browser.
|
| I switched back to Firefox a few years ago. I know they've had
| their issues recently but still probably the least evil
| browser.
| d0gbread wrote:
| Since I see some agreeing comments, I'll throw out a bit about
| why I disagree.
|
| Like shopping on Amazon, or buying from China, I'm going to do
| what's best for me as an individual. It's government's job to
| step in and tweak the playing field to keep it competitive, and
| I'll happily vote to regulate the very things that serve me
| today, whether that's breaking businesses up, preventing
| mergers in the first place, having businesses pay for their
| externalities, etc.
| [deleted]
| pfortuny wrote:
| Well "best" is defined as an outcome of a value order.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| If these things are good for you as an individual (cheap,
| convenient), why would you want the government to step in and
| mess them up?
| 2T1Qka0rEiPr wrote:
| I would guess the OP is making the argument that as a
| _single-mover_ he wouldn 't see much benefit. But where
| institutions and governments intervene, they can encourage
| competition, and so _improve_ the state of the lesser
| player, in addition to potentially crippling that of the
| dominant one.
|
| An example to which I could relate in terms of this line of
| thinking is plane vs. train travel. Were subsidies to flow
| towards the train rather than the plane, it would make it
| more affordable for me to the environmentally better thing.
| However, as things stand, I frequently find it hard
| _individually_ to justify the often much higher cost AND
| longer duration of the train over the plane.
| BeeOnRope wrote:
| Game theory: see prisoners dilemma, tragedy of the commons
| etc.
|
| You might think you'll be better off of the tax rate went
| up by 5% (say) but you'd certainly be worse off of you
| _alone_ started paying 5% more.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> If these things are good for you as an individual
| (cheap, convenient), why would you want the government to
| step in and mess them up?
|
| I can't speak for that commentor but from what I've seen
| most people who say things like that just dont want to take
| any responsibility. The attitude is: I do what I want today
| based on my immediate wants. Its maximum freedom! But I
| want the government to protect me from others bad behavior.
| And if they do try to regulate or break up a company that's
| giving me what I want, imma complain about it because it
| may interfere with my choice.
|
| It's a combination of narcissism and lack of personal
| responsibility.
|
| Edit: and that last part sounded really shitty. Maybe I
| need to change who I hang around so I see less of that.
| quadrangle wrote:
| This question cuts right to the heart of
| individualist/libertarian ideology.
|
| All sorts of ramifications of the current system are
| _awful_ for me as an individual. I don 't want pollution,
| slavery, and all sorts of other problems, some of which
| directly affect me. But ___within_ __the existing system,
| it might be my best individual choice to still buy a
| product that has those problems in its production because
| the alternatives available give me a worse experience.
|
| The whole _point_ of government intervention is to change
| the situation so that we don 't have this dilemma.
|
| I don't want the externalized _costs_ of certain cheap
| conveniences! But if everyone _else_ keeps doing that and I
| refuse to go that way individually, I _still_ get the
| externalized costs anyway! I don 't HAVE an individual
| choice that will eliminate those costs. If I did, I
| actually WOULD choose that over the cheap conveniences.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The problem with this sort of liberal belief in the
| functionality of the current iteration of representative
| democracy is that pollution, slavery, and all sorts of
| other problems are _not awful_ for you as an individual
| if they give you slightly more comfort than the
| alternatives. If you 're not willing to be inconvenienced
| in any way[$], your material actions are going to be to
| support polluters and slavers. Polluters and slavers will
| then be put into the position to determine the
| government.
|
| Liberal ideology requires a god-blessed sovereign that
| lives outside of the system and has no motivation other
| than the common good for his subjects - whether that's a
| king, a magical computer that makes provably optimal
| inhuman (i.e. objective) decisions, or an army of
| biracial, bisexual, ungendered university professors who
| were in the top 2% of their class in elite colleges.
| _There is no government, and no means of governance, that
| lives outside of the human struggle for power._
| Governance is the wielding of power.
|
| You can't just wait for power to be placed in the hands
| of the just. The just are the ones who are willing to
| forgo power for the sake of the good. There will never be
| a magic button that you can push to make everybody stop
| benefiting from the bad thing at the same time. The kind
| of government intervention you're asking for is divine.
|
| You have to take a risk, to be weak on purpose. Hobbes
| said it best in Leviathan: you have to make a "covenant"
| with the world, a contract that you will follow for the
| sake of others _whether or not others follow it_. An oath
| that obligates you and no one else, with the hope that
| others will be inspired by your vision for the world and
| live the oath themselves. The combination of you and
| those others creates power.
|
| [$] Everybody is willing to be inconvenienced in some way
| for some value, everyone has some value that when
| violated will effect their personal comfort more
| negatively than some marginal degree of convenience will
| improve it.
| moogly wrote:
| This looks to be the Chrome team just sneakily continuing with
| old ideas/changes:
|
| 2 years ago: "Chrome 69 will keep Google Cookies when you tell it
| to delete all cookies"[1]
|
| 1.5 years ago: "Chrome 'clear cookies on exit' feature does not
| work"[2]
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18064537
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19475254
| Animats wrote:
| Is this in open-source Chromium?
| ButWhatFor wrote:
| It's almost like that's their business... thanks for pointing it
| out
| Maha-pudma wrote:
| From the outside looking in I always wonder why anyone uses
| chrome. I'm not a web dev but do use devtools. Why use Chrome
| over something like Firefox, Vivaldi or one of the other
| browsers? Genuine question, what makes it so good.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's faster. I've tried switching several times. Firefox is
| slower for the sites I visit.
| macinjosh wrote:
| If this isn't anti-competitive, anti-trust behavior I don't know
| what is anymore. Obviously, my opinion does not matter and courts
| would have to decide that. But I've been saying it for years. If
| you care about the open web please stop using Chromium browsers.
| arusahni wrote:
| Non-Chrome user here - does clearing Google cookies on exit sign
| you out of the browser-level account? If so, I could see some
| world where they wanted to avoid that UX. Of course, there are
| more honest ways to present this: e.g., a toggle in the same
| settings screen that gives you enough context to be able to opt
| in/out.
| sidyapa wrote:
| A tangent but, a lot of google's sites disobey browser standards
| and rules like for example sound autoplay on load. When you visit
| https://santatracker.google.com/ or youtube, it automatically
| plays sound without any user interaction, which is impossible for
| non Google sites to do
| silexia wrote:
| Wow, this is terrifying. I am a big supported of Google and
| dislike the recent attacks on FAANG, but this is shocking to
| me. If they are exempting themselves from this, what else could
| they be doing?!
| liveoneggs wrote:
| they have always had whitelists for friends inside of chrome
| Hurdy wrote:
| The comment implies that this is somehow hardcoded just for
| Google sites, which is not true. Autoplay is allowed for
| sites with a high enough media engagement index. You can
| check chrome://media-engagement.
| teraflop wrote:
| The media engagement index is based on a user's past
| activity on a site, but Chrome has a special list of
| "preloaded" sites that are allowed to autoplay video even
| without any prior media engagement.
|
| The preloaded list is in the source code (https://github.co
| m/chromium/chromium/blob/master/chrome/brow...) but it's
| encoded as a finite state automaton that makes it a bit
| difficult to enumerate the list of whitelisted domains.
| neatmonster wrote:
| I made a small Python script to unpack the DAFSA in
| preloaded_data.pb.
|
| Here is the code: https://gist.github.com/NeatMonster/e9c
| db01441a3cd842e6a20fd...
|
| And here is the plain-text list: https://gist.github.com/
| NeatMonster/e9cdb01441a3cd842e6a20fd...
| ignoranceprior wrote:
| If it's a FSA can someone at least convert it to a
| regular expression or some other more readable format?
| moneywoes wrote:
| Is there no way to decode it
| cpeterso wrote:
| neatmonster wrote a script to decode the list and then
| shared links the results here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819473
| verroq wrote:
| Take a list of top X websites and enter it in every one.
|
| The preimage space is finite and easily enumerated.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| One has to wonder whether they intentionally obfuscate
| this list. It sounds like they "trained" a browser, and
| captured the resulting state. I'm sure you can argue this
| makes things more fair (we trained it using real world
| behavior!), but I really can't give them the benefit of
| the doubt anymore.
| kaszanka wrote:
| It's generated by a Python script [0] from a list of
| URLs, but the input list doesn't seem to be included in
| the Chromium source (only the binary output of this
| tool).
|
| [0] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/615d5eed47c
| 10d8890...
| lima wrote:
| > _The pre-seeded site list is generated based on the
| global percentage of site visitors who train Chrome to
| allow autoplay for that site; a site will be included on
| the list if a sizable majority of site visitors permit
| autoplay on it. The list is algorithmically generated,
| rather than manually curated, and with no minimum traffic
| requirement. With the implementation of the autoplay
| policy for Web Audio in M71, Web Audio playback is also
| included in calculating the MEI score for a given site._
|
| https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay/autoplay-
| pre-s...
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Will this not have some kind of self-reinforcing
| behavior, as the measurements are biased towards sites
| that are currently unmuted by default?
|
| According to the MEI it actively measures user behavior
| and one of the most important measures is that a video is
| unmuted. From the document:
|
| "The MEI is meant to allow media heavy websites (e.g.
| YouTube, Netflix) that rely on autoplay for their core
| experience. It is a non-goal to allow websites with a
| "good media behaviour" to autoplay without restrictions"
|
| It doesn't sound too good, and still doesn't really
| explain how everything is seeded.
| kerng wrote:
| Well that's a nice way to say that its allowed for youtube
| and very few other sites... possibly none.
|
| These are the kind of tricks a shady company would do. So
| disappointed what Google is doing to the web the last few
| years.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| I'm not so sure of that. My top sites by media engagement
| are: Spotify Twitch clips Youtube Twitch Eurosport
| Netflix The Independent Discord
|
| It isn't obvious to me from this that Google are
| privileging their own sites above others here
| spencercw wrote:
| For what it's worth, Netflix has a higher score on my
| machine than YouTube.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Amazing. I once built a web app with autoplay, which worked
| for me, probably because I was using the app a lot which
| gave it high media engagement, but didn't work for others,
| and I never figured out the problem until now.
| orf wrote:
| I loaded the page and went through a few actions, but I
| cannot see anything in chrome://media-engagement about it
| yreg wrote:
| I do see Santa Tracker in mine, it gave it a score of
| 0.05, the same as the web of my high school and less than
| say knowyourmeme.com which sits at 0.1
| drawfloat wrote:
| And media engagement is based on an opaque set of factors
| that just so happen to give top authority to Google sites.
| [deleted]
| eznzt wrote:
| The source code is public.
| rurp wrote:
| That doesn't mean it's easy to parse.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| vaccinator wrote:
| That site doesnt even load in my browser... I only see the
| Google wave (Firefox mobile v6x)... but on the other hand,
| there are Firefox extensions that make websites load as if you
| were using Chrome.
| circularfoyers wrote:
| Loads for me on Firefox 81.1.3 on Android. It did take a
| little bit to load, so might just be your internet
| connection.
| vaccinator wrote:
| It did load this time but no sound
| m463 wrote:
| outlook (via web) also seems to be able to play sounds, like
| meeting notification sounds in firefox.
| geofft wrote:
| This is not actually true. There are no shortage of random news
| sites that auto-play sound. Reddit does too. Does Google own
| all of them?
| speedgoose wrote:
| Reddit and Twitter starts video with muted sound on my
| browser (Edge).
|
| My guess from someone who had to develop a web video player
| at work, many websites will attempt to autoplay the video
| with sound and if it fails, it's easy to catch the failure
| event, they will mute the video and try again.
| geofft wrote:
| I'm talking specifically about Chrome. There's no web
| standard that says what a browser must do about autoplay
| requests, and Chrome permits a large number of sites to
| autoplay with sound on.
|
| Web browsers are also capable of determining that autoplay
| on technically-not-load-but-automatic counts as autoplay.
| (There's even text in the spec about it.) In particular,
| they can tell whether it is in response to a user
| action/gesture on the site or not.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Chrome has some special logic about autoplay. The
| following page describes them, but I feel like it's a bit
| more complicated in more recent versions of Chrome.
|
| https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autopla
| y-p...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| When you visit a Netflix content URL it automatically plays
| sound and moving pictures without any user interaction!
| Evidence of Google owning Netflix?
| nosianu wrote:
| I read somewhere - I believe on HN actually, some time ago -
| that a number of high profile sites were exempted from this
| restriction, Netflix among them. Really, wasn't this a thread
| right here on HN, saying that this was anti-competitive,
| oligopoly essentially, making any other sites of smaller
| competitors and upstarts automatically worse off? I'm sure
| someone will be able to provide a link...
|
| There are other examples where only the large sites benefit
| while everybody else has to play by stricter rules: "EU
| Parliament bans geoblocking, exempts Netflix and other
| streaming services" -- https://www.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-
| bans-geoblocking-exempts...
|
| EDIT: User teraflop posted a link to the list of _" sites
| that are allowed to autoplay video even without any prior
| media engagement"_ right here in this thread
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818178
| lima wrote:
| > [...] _which is impossible for non Google sites to do_
|
| No, they don't. This is false. It's a mechanism called Media
| Engagement Index, Google properties have zero advantage, and
| any site can get a high score.
|
| Chrome ships with a preloaded MEI assembled from global
| telemetry data, which is then trained locally:
|
| https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay/autoplay-pre-s...
| hrktb wrote:
| You are technically true. It just happens that Youtube is the
| dominant video platform and gets pre-loaded in the default
| seed.
|
| Would they have made the same choice of preloading a default
| seed if they had no properties in the seed ? who knows
| lima wrote:
| The whole point of Chrome is to push the web ecosystem
| forward such that Google can build better products on top
| of it.
| andrenotgiant wrote:
| Google disobeys their own standards in MUCH worse ways. This
| year they are pushing a reduction in Cumulative Layout Shift
| (CLS). https://web.dev/cls/
|
| But they purposefully use CLS in Search to increase clicks on
| Ads https://twitter.com/andyhattemer/status/1262564268890820609
| andypants wrote:
| The android gmail app is horrible with this. They load a
| couple of your emails above ads so that the ads start on the
| second or third row.
|
| And the re-ordering happens as your mails and the ads are
| loading! You might be about to tap your email, then the ads
| load in and you suddenly click on an ad. Or you want to tap
| the top row, but the app decides to put a different email
| above the ads and you end up tapping into the wrong mail
| because it was reordered just before the tap.
| tsbertalan wrote:
| I've also never seen ads in the Gmail app. Maybe it's
| because of G Suite.
| Madzen__ wrote:
| You get ads in gmail app? I have never seen ads there.
| lima wrote:
| > _But they purposefully use CLS in Search to increase clicks
| on Ads_
|
| You present this as a fact, but it would be absurd that
| Google would use such a cheap and easily detected trick to
| increase CTR. It would be bordering on ad fraud and I'm sure
| that Google, of all companies, knows better than that.
|
| Occam's Razor says that this is a stupid async content
| loading bug, which they subsequently fixed. I've never seen
| this happen and when I just tried it without adblocker with
| that exact search term, it didn't - the page loaded with the
| ad.
| miskin wrote:
| Similarly, thanks to async ad loading, gmail replaces first
| two items in my email list with ads with such a convinient
| delay that I accidentaly click on the ads more often than I
| would like to. Occam's razor would say that if it can bring
| more money, it is not accident.
| lima wrote:
| Accidental clicks are invalid clicks according to
| Google's own documentation[1][2].
|
| For this to not be an accident, one would have to assume
| that Google actually makes more money from those invalid
| clicks, and that someone decided that yep, rendering ads
| asynchronously was a decent and legal approach at
| increasing advertising revenue, and requested the GMail
| team to implement it.
|
| This kind of corporate misbehavior is not unheard of, but
| I just can't imagine it happening at Google.
|
| It's much more likely that this is just unfortunate UX
| design to "improve" rendering performance without
| considering users on slow connections.
|
| (I can reproduce this one just fine in desktop GMail - on
| the first render of the "Promotions" tab, the ads render
| asynchronously)
|
| [1]: https://support.google.com/google-
| ads/answer/42995?hl=en
|
| [2]: https://www.blog.google/products/ads/preventing-
| accidental-c...
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| "No you don't understand: invalid clicks are things that
| happen on other peoples properties. You definitely meant
| to click that ad in gmail. We know, we're google, you can
| definitely trust us about this"
|
| 'Unfortunate UX design to 'improve' rendering' is the
| plausible-deniability they can use to justify this.
|
| > This kind of corporate misbehavior is not unheard of,
| but I just can't imagine it happening at Google.
|
| I definitely can, I don't think anywhere is immune to
| this once you reach a certain scale. They have a profit-
| motive to make money, they will absolutely try and get
| away with as much as they possibly can.
| tsbertalan wrote:
| For example, the scourge of "people also ask" at the top of
| search results, that appears synchronously where the top
| result was a second ago, and has a randomly-generated
| container ID to prevent easy blocking. Not an ad, but,
| equivalently, content that I didn't ask for but that
| Google, for some reason, clearly really wants me to click
| on.
| hugey010 wrote:
| Happens to me all the time, it's either complete UX heresy
| or ad fraud.
| eitland wrote:
| > You present this as a fact, but it would be absurd that
| Google would use such a cheap and easily detected trick to
| increase CTR.
|
| 3 years ago and I wouldn't believed it at all but around 2
| years ago I saw it happen consistently with a colleague at
| the desk next to me.
|
| I cannot say for sure that it wasn't an extension in his
| browser but I can say for sure that I think Google has been
| really busy tearing down the mountains of trust they had
| before 2007 - 2009.
| _def wrote:
| This shows why it is so important not to speak of just cookies
| when you're talking about privacy.
|
| Cookies aren't the problem. Tracking is.
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I wonder if they short-cutted the logic because the Google domain
| stores state for the Google account, which Chrome itself tires
| into as a browser feature?
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