Please, everyone, stop using Chrome. This is an easy vote with your wallet that doesn’t even require your wallet.
Complacency means the internet gets worse, ads get worse, nickel and diming gets worse. It’s the easiest chance to take a stand you’ll ever have.
Serious question: let’s say I continue using Chrome and Privacy Sandbox becomes the norm. How does my internet experience get worse?
One key change in the short term is the Topics API. This is the replacement for 3rd-party cookies in Privacy Sandbox. Basically, it allows sites to query your browser directly about what topics you enjoy, and Chrome will respond with topics based on analysis of your browsing history to allow for targeted ads. If it seems strange that a new “privacy” feature is still serving up data about you for targeted ads – it is. And in fact, a lot of the proposed changes potentially just give Google more sway to act as a middleman, which ultimately gives them more data.
Will your experience change immediately? Likely not, but as with many things in this space, it’s about the dangers of the path and its longer term implications, specifically here about corporate controls and softening the definition of “privacy”.
Here’s a decent overview with more far more details.
I know what the Topics API does. I’m asking for a concrete example of exactly how it’s going to make my internet experience worse. (That Register article doesn’t provide one.)
Losing privacy makes your internet experience worse. That seems pretty clear to me, but if you don’t care about corporations being better suited to target ads to you, then I don’t think anyone would be able to convince you that these changes are bad.
I’d love to debate this with you properly but I’ve got COVID right now and don’t have the energy to put together a decent response, sorry. Basically I just don’t see how the specific features in the new Chrome build let advertisers do anything they can’t already do. I don’t see how they contribute to ads getting worse, or where “nickel and diming” comes into it.
Firefox is the way to go.
What’s Opera based on? My friends mostly use Mac, so they all use Opera and Chrome, but I have gotten them to stop using Chrome.
Nearly every browser is Chromium-based. Additionally, Opera is Chinese-owned.
So? It isn’t google. Also google and Mozilla have Asian employees so I guess you’ll have to be not racist.
I do agree that the Chinese government is problematic though.
I’d like to point out that they said nothing about it being a bad thing and that all they did was say it was Chinese-owned, hence making your comment a pointless attack of nonsense.
Hooray pointless-nonsense-spew!
Chromium is owned by Google. That should be bad enough
It uses Chromium as its base, so is essentially Chrome with fancy things attached to it. It uses Blink, Chrome/Chromium’s rendering engine.
We need fewer Chromium-based browsers out there. The greater marketshare they have, the easier it will be for Google to push W3C and everyone else around to conform to their desired business model.
For example, when Google inevitably pushes WEI into Chrome, WebKit and Gecko (Safari-based and Firefox-based browsers) won’t be affected at all.
If, however, 90% of all users end up on Blink (whether it’s Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Brave, or whatever) then Google can do whatever they want to the web.
Opera was bought by a Chinese data analytics company, and once that happened, they scrapped their engine and used chromium to save money.
They have questionable CCP ties too.
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Maybe use that information to try and influence the public in the same way that cambridge analytica did for the 2016 elections.
Someone having that data is a problem in itself
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lol. This thread is about people mad that google is doing it, and you’re saying so what if a nation state does it?
The answer is the same either way - to either sell the data to a party who want to manipulate you into doing or thinking what they want or by directly manipulating you into doing or thinking what they want.
Same with Reddit and lemmy. It doesn’t take a whole lot of investment (on a state level actor basis) to manipulate small and large communities or individuals into thinking something is normal or mainstream. Or convincing them that everyone loves this product or it’s so popular or whatever.
The CCP censors their entire internet for their people and collects all sorts of information to root out dissidents. What good thing do you think is going to come from them having that data?
Opera has unfortunately given up and switched to Chromium as its backend.
At least its not chrome
Give it time. Greed is greed, just a matter of time. Personally I’m back to use the old carrier pigeon. Kinda slow but probably still better than dialup
Edit: Either y’all don’t get this was a joke, or haven’t been alive long enough to watch your hero’s die.
Either way, fuck Google, sorry to rain on the parade
And soon, the carrier pigeon breeders will start tagging them with tracking chips…
Stooooop 😂😂😂
Or they just didn’t think it was funny…
Absolutely not. I’ve seen what you people think is funny.
oR mAyBe I JuSt got DowNvoTe brIgaDeD
Carrier pigeons are still faster than the internet, tested again this year to prove it
Bandwidth, maybe, but that latency…
Firefox gets like 90% of its revenue from Google.
Keep Firefox independent and donate: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?form=donate
But donating your money can not make firefox independent.It will only make firefox more revenue.
Google wants to keep mozilla afloat to stay out of anti-competitive allegations.
If mozilla gets market share, google will defund them. That mozilla have a money will help.
Also mozilla’s other projects are also good ;)
Also big CEO wallets.
Nothing in comparison to others but there is some special pay going.But it’s definitely the lesser of the evils.
Some of Mozilla’s other projects are good, iirc there was a journalist a few years ago who chronicled how Mozilla had donated a lot of money to other charities unrelated to it’s goal rather than reinvesting in the business so that it can try to ween off of Google reliance.
And the money won’t go to Firefox, but Mozilla’s other projects.
This is true. I am unsure why this comment is getting downvoted more.
Firefox has been my go-to, but I’ve left Chrome installed just to have on hand incase some website fuckiness could be solved with a browser change.
Naw. It’s not worthy of staying around even for that. Time to completely scrub my devices of google.
Feeling the same, it’s surprising how many companies are just leaning towards screwing users for a few more pennies on the dollar. Eventually, Google with be the next AOL.
Just need their Time-Warner to put the last nail in the coffin
We can only pray, the ghouls.
Eventually, Google with be the next AOL.
I am anti-google all day, but that’s ridiculous.
I’ve been doing similar; been using Firefox, but Chrome is installed for its browser-wide automatic captioning. Not something I need often, but I rely on it for the occasional remote meeting here and there. I’m sure free automatic captioning applications exist for my operating system, but I’d have to actually test each one to see if they actually work, and it’s just been so convenient keeping Google’s around.
(Speaking of which, if anybody happens to have recommendations for free automatic captioning software that works on Ubuntu, I seem to be in the market…)
I suggest to use chromium as the backup “in case a webpage doesn’t work on Firefox” browser. All the compatibility but no telemetry.
But why use chromium or any chromium based browser since google disabled ad blocking plug-ins?
I suggest it as the backup browser. Use Firefox and if you need to open something that only works on chrome, I’d rather use chromium, so Google doesn’t rape your computer when trying to use the internet.
So my takeaway from this is to never use Chrome again? Gotcha.
If everyone who said they were going to do this actually did this, Chrome wouldn’t do this, if that makes sense.
Or, idk, regulators could like, do their jobs.
Unfortunately, if the government had one single source to secretly control/monitor the world wide web from then they would gladly stand back and do nothing.
Having said that, I truly hope I’m wrong. And they are probably already doing what I described upstream from the browser anyways.
It’s really irritating but some websites only work on Chrome for me. They range from work related to Google Meet instances. I only use it then but yeah.
Have never had an issue with degoogled chromium not working on any sites that don’t work with Firefox.
I don’t think I’ve used Google Chrome itself for over 3 years now (excluding on other people’s devices). I don’t plan to ever use it again either.
At one point I was switching back and forth, because I’d see a general decline in Firefox for some reason. I don’t know if it was just getting overloaded with extensions that were hitting its performance or if my machine itself was having problems or if Firefox’s performance was shit for awhile, but I’d switch from Firefox to Chrome, try going back to Firefox, then back to Chrome, but I’ve been with Firefox for a good few years now without issue. The browser “market” is even crowded now, there’s no reason to go back to Chrome, since there’s so many other choices out there (though avoiding Chromium might be a little bit trickier).
The site you’ve linked to literally uses Facebook and Google browser trackers. Pretty hypocritical of them if you ask me.
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For people who roll their eyes when someone mentions Linux and all of the free and open source projects adjacent to it (including Firefox!), this is exactly why many people value those things. We actually can have freedom in computing and it’s worth pushing for. We don’t have to roll over simply accept what Google, Microsoft and Apple want.
But there are a few specific hardware configurations and specialized jobs that Linux doesn’t work for, therefore nobody should use it!
My workplace is transitioning a bunch of their data and processing to the cloud. When I look at what software makes the cloud work, there is soooo much open source software there. Big business is quite comfortable with FOSS
Why not be happy both OS options exist? Both have a place and a use and in various ways an ease of use
That’s the point. We want options for OSs to exist, instead of one company monopolizing the entire market.
Linux with 100% market share can’t monopolize the entire market because it doesn’t have a centralized distro
You see similar to Google with Redhat/Canonical. If everyone was with them then it would be a problem
Woosh…
What use is there for the others?
Sure but Google also uses tons of open source - android is built on the linux kernel, and even chrome is or is based on open source:
I’m aware, but ultimately they’re still an ad company that uses technology to sell more ads. Any minor aspects of altruism (if it can be called that) can’t wash that away.
We have firefox, iceweasel, fennec (android). Anything else not firefox based is chrome based. Don’t get tricked by opera and similars.
You can still change browser.
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There is an issue with monoculture of rendering engines. Developers assume every browser have the same things implemented and start to build around this assumption. Also Google can dictate how the web looks like.
Exactly, we’ve seen this previously with Internet explorer.
And Netscape before that, it had reached 90% market share.
You’re missing the point. Netscape implemented the html standard, they didn’t introduce new, proprietary “features” to gain that market share.
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There are two things to consider here:
- Adherence to Standards
- Creating artificial “feature” based defacto standards
Chrome offers adherence to standards as one of their features. But it also introduces new features that look like standards, meant to increase profits for the parent company.
Chrome offers adherence to standards as one of their features. But it also introduces new features that look like standards, meant to increase profits for the parent company.
VB.Net was exactly that. Difference being Microsoft’s interest was locking companies and governments onto Microsoft’s enterprise products vs Google’s user tracking. Easy, quick internal web app put together in half a day? Would never work right on Netscape. It takes work to make them work to standards.
Using chromium based browsers keeps power over web standards and such in google’s hands, i.e enforces their ever growing monopoly. So if you want a competitive/fair environment on the web, it’s best to avoid them altogether and stick to firefox or safari.
Aren’t Firefox funded by Google in order to present a false sense of competition in the browser market?
Google pays to be the default search in Firefox, it was Bing for a while.
Also it pays to keep mozilla alive.It helps in defending anti-competitive lawsuits.
Sad to say there are only two engines available for the open web.(Not considering Safari as that is only available on apple)
The WebKit engine Safari uses is still open source, Gnome Web and Konqueror use it. It definitely has a small non-apple userbase but it’s an option
Funny you mention Safari, because you know, Safari is the only browser allowed on iOS. Every other browser has to use Safari to render web pages if they want to be in App Store - once again the only allowed source of packages.
Safari on iOS is literally worse than IE and Chrome combined.
Unfortunately for Android, Chromium based browsers are, at the moment, significantly more secure than Firefox based ones.
Edit: For the people down voting me, feel free to make a principled stand to avoid Chromium browsers on Android, just understand the risks. Again, specifically for Android. Here’s some reading:
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Unless the developers of other browsers take specific steps, the ad engine will get pulled on the next update of their Chromium engine, that’s the problem.
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It’s in Chromium, the other browsers have just disabled/patched it out: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/components/privacy_sandbox/privacy_sandbox_prefs.h
// Un-synced boolean pref indicating if Topics API is enabled.
inline constexpr char kPrivacySandboxM1TopicsEnabled[] = “privacy_sandbox.m1.topics_enabled”;`
e.g. Vivaldi:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/heads-up-googles-going-off-topics-again/
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They have forked it though? That’s why almost all the other Chromium-based ones don’t have this enabled by default or completely disable it (even if you tried to turn it on).
If you’re talking about forking the entire project and using it as a base that diverges from what Google does, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Not even Microsoft with their billions had the desire to maintain a totally separate engine anymore and I don’t see the other Chromium-based browsers redirecting efforts from useful things like better UIs, privacy enhancements, etc into just keeping feature/performance parity.
They’re based on Chromium, Not Google’s altered version of it.
Safari isn’t Chromium based! But I’m not a fan of it on Desktop, just iOS.
Firefox for all my other devices.
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Been using it exclusively for a few years now, I’m pretty happy with it
It’s the only search engine i use.
You guys are way to late to quit chrome, and you probably won’t at this point. This is what happens when you don’t swap, you enable this anti-consumer monopoly behavior.
All the people saying to just use Firefox have zero fucking clue how screwed we are with google implenting the forced attestation for the removal of ad blockers too. Chrome will be the internet. Its already been initially deployed in chromium.
Please don’t confuse Internet with WWW, it’s making discussion like this even harder, thanks.
Okay, still use Firefox
Lol nice. People using chrome be like
That’s clever meme template usage if I’ve ever seen one
does this happen on Linux too?
i have to keep chrome around for sites that breaks with ff / ublock, but i only open it when i need it.
I have a chromium install lying around for that. Bizarrely the online conferencing tool my bank uses has issues with Firefox despite advertising Firefox support which is pretty much the only thing I need the Chromium browser for
Use brave
Use brave
Rather, use un-googled chromium. Brave is kind of bloated with all of the extra “features” they have.
Where can I download it from ? Can you please share the link for windows? . Ungoogled chromium for android is not maintained anymore.
Thanks bro
Chromite is quite good its the successor of bromite and has increased adblock functionality I’ve used it for a little bit and it is quite nice.
Back in the old days when a software contains these crap, considered as adware/malware and people get their pitchforks.
Now: its normal.
Modern software: Please insert anal probe.
Average user: OK 😀
It’s sickening.
there’s a whole class of users born with smartphone, those were not techie or concerned, then you have the other class who don’t know really anything about these things which only use smartphones.
even discussing with family about privacy is difficult. “but everyone use it”… gosh. then you have some of my IT colleagues - there for the good money job - which don’t care with the motto: I have nothing to hide.
anyway, stay true to your principles no matter what.
I blame these “tech youtubers” who don’t understand anything technical and keep repeating the script which the company provides them. I saw this idiot MKBHD telling his viewers how a phone has a “beast mode”. Wtf is a beast mode? ! Non technical guys eat shit like this and proceeds to buy because the phone has beast mode lol.
These are exactly my thoughts about tech YouTubers. They have no idea what they’re talking about and encourage mindless consumption. Glad I’m not the only one who’s thought about this.
I work in tech, and I’m still using Chrome. I don’t like it, and I know a lot of other tech people are in the same boat, but I can’t just switch. That’s what I’m working towards, but the amount of tooling we use every day that depends on specifically Chrome is, significant to say the least. This is tooling we built internally to help ourselves, that depends on Chrome-specific APIs that are either different, or do mot yet exist in Firefox.
We’re working to port this stuff over to Firefox, but that takes time, and not everyone can just drop what they are doing to reimplement the tooling they already have in a different browser. On top of userspace tooling, we also have tens of thousands of unit tests based in some part on chrome (through tools like jest and puppet) to validate certain aspects of massive distributed web platforms that cannot easily be unit tested in normal code (though we have high coverage where we can). These also need to be ported, and are VERY specific to Chrome (or Chromium in some cases) in particular. We’re talking entire teams of people, and tens of thousands of man hours.
A lot of users truly can just switch at the drop of a hat. The UI switch is annoying sure, but its doable. For a lot of users in the tech space though, it’s just not feasible to drop Chrome overnight. We’ve started the process to be clear, but it’s going to be a very long transition.
So, you are not using Chrome for the web? if it is not for the web, it’s fine you don’t have to switch :)
Every single thing about Google sucks nowadays. Great job Sundar, you successfully turned one of the former most exciting companies on the planet into one of the absolute lamest.
It was shit even before Sundar Pichai became the CEO
He did a great job shitting it up further, also.
Switched back to Firefox. Easy transition. Fuck Google.
Except websites that will tell you “Use a modern browser, switch to Chrome to view this page”.
This sort of thing is becoming more and more pervasive. I’m genuinely worried that between this and web DRM, there will be no where to hide from corporate America ducking everyone over with their greed.
I’ve been using Firefox for over 5 years now and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this message?
There has been a handful of times when a page just won’t work correctly and I have to switch to edge, but that is super rare and has probably been less than 10 occasions
the feature they just implemented will start to trigger this. there is a hardcore push for corporate to go all in on chromium for tracking/drm reasons similar to how IE had that market in the past. as a firefox user im kinda terrified were out of options.
were not talking about what the experience was, but what it will be
I never switched from Firefox. Why anyone used Chrome in the first place is beyond me.
It was much faster, and firefox was slow as shit for a long time. It’s much better now
Time to uninstall chrome. Can I move my passwords, bookmarks and saved data there? How do I do it?
The only reason I use chrome is for the passwords feature and realising that it is a separate service to android password manager has made it pointless. I thought changing phones would be easier as it had my bank apps and everything in chrome but it never promoted.
to manage passwords, use bitwarden
is not tied to any browser, it sync between devices and it’s free.
there are clients for Android and desktop, most likely ios too.
