I use Chrome at work and Firefox on personal devices (including my Android phone).
As a heavy user of both browsers, as far as I can see there is really no downside to Firefox.
In fact, even though presumably there are way more engineers working on Chrome than on Firefox, I guess most of Chrome's engineering effort goes towards benefitting advertisers, not users. While Chrome seems entirely stagnant since I adopted it 4 years ago, Firefox gets a steady trickle of improvements and fixes.
Chrome Mobile is the largest reason I would not recommend an Android (specifically Pixel) device to friends or family. I bought one, and I found myself actively avoiding browsing the web on it.
Even after installing Firefox you can’t get rid of the Google Chrome web search bar on the home screen, and in-app web views are Chrome, so you’re never really free from Chrome.
I do understand the why of ads, and I’m okay with _some_ ads. On 99% of websites from a Google search you get a sticky top and/or bottom bar, and interstitial ads between paragraphs and they’re a little annoying but not so bad. But then on about 30% of search results one of those sticky ads is an autoplaying video, which means I can’t actually read the content (since 1/3 of my screen is video) and the “X” icon is 0.5mm wide so I can’t close it without clicking the video. Then there’s the email subscribe pop up on scroll, and after 15 seconds you get prompted to allow notifications for this website.
Using the web without an ad blocker feels like you’re being attacked, it’s aggressive and stressful.
I had hoped the ubiquity of ad blocking would result in advertisers going “hmmm, maybe we can drive fewer people to install these things by acting better”, but instead it’s been a race to who can exploit the smaller pool of users for clicks.
Of course you can get rid of the "web search bar". Not sure what launcher the Pixel is using, as I have a Samsung device, but you can install a different launcher if needed.
The in-app views can be Firefox by just setting it as the default browser. Lest we forget, at least Android has an actual Firefox implementation, versus iOS which does not. Not sure what you're talking about, but if you bumped into certain cases where a Chromium web view would be better for compatibility, you can use a Chromium-based fork, like Bromite, Vivaldi, or Brave, all of which can fit the bill.
The only exception I can think of is Facebook, which comes with a highly customized web view meant for tracking users, but it's not using Chrome directly. And on Android it is the custom to also allow opening links in the external browser, and even Facebook has this option (Settings -> Preferences -> Media -> Open links in external browser).
The only edge that Chrome has is the deeper integration on the "Install app" menu option for websites that integrate with SSB/PWA. Otherwise you can safely uninstall or disable Chrome completely (which I do).
I have a Samsung S21 Ultra, with 512 GB of storage. I can download torrents straight to my phone via LibreTorrent. The other day I downloaded 3 seasons of Star Trek Picard and started playing them on my TV. But first, I used Firefox with uBlock Origin installed to navigate a Pirate Bay mirror. The entire scenario is only possible on Android.
On Pixel devices, the default launcher is the Pixel launcher, and you can't remove the search bar on the homescreen. But like you said, you can install a different launcher.
I don't think I've ever had the search bar on the home screen for more than a couple minutes after getting a new phone.
My in-app web views are also in Firefox. I'm pretty sure just changing the default browser changes this, though there may be a second setting I'm forgetting about.
This is actually my main sticking point on refusing to try iOs. You can't even install Firefox on an iPhone, their "Firefox" is just a wrapper around Safari.
The search bar on the home screen referenced by OP is a Pixel launcher exclusive, which is the default installed launcher on Pixel devices. You can't remove it. You can install an third-party launcher however. You can also use a widget provided by a browser app to put a search bar on the homescreen (all major browsers have such an option).
For the most part, my webviews are in FF (selected as my default browser), but it depends on what app launches the webview. Sometimes it defaults to Chrome.
I was wrong about the web views, I didn’t realize they updated because it seems like app developers can choose to use specific web views instead of the system one.
Also wrong about the launcher, I’m relatively new to Android and hadn’t seen any settings for it.
I haven't played with the default launcher, but you can absolutely get rid of it with other launchers (as many sibling comments noted).
As for the chrome//android web view, you can disable the chrome app and 99% of apps that use android web view have an escape hatch option to just open it in your default browser, so that's also a non issue.
> Chrome Mobile is the largest reason I would not recommend an Android (specifically Pixel) device to friends or family. [...] Even after installing Firefox you can’t get rid of the Google Chrome web search bar on the home screen, and in-app web views are Chrome, so you’re never really free from Chrome.
Meanwhile, on pretty much the only competition, you can't even install a different browser, they're all just reskins of Safari. You'd be better off recommending Android...
Firefox on Android with adblockers is better than Safari with adblockers, but since Safari supports adblockers easily I would recommend it to family and friends over Chrome which doesn’t.
I have been corrected on removing the launcher and how web views work in this thread.
I mean, you bought a hardware device from the same company that sells ads. Of course it is going to be encumbered with mechanisms to get those ads in front of your eyeballs. That's like complaining about getting bit when trying to pet the snarling foaming at the mouth dog.
I use DDG's browser too, especially when I need to access site and don't care about cookies or saving history of that site (the private address generating feature is nice too).
On my Pixel, I use FF mainly, but also have DDG and Chrome (for Google-specific sites only).
I use Firefox on both Android and desktop. It's much better in many ways, and I love it. I do get compatibility issues sometimes, but I'm unsure whether it's because of all of the add-ons I use, or websites being buggy with Firefox.
I suspect it's your add-ons. I've been using Firefox mobile for years and I don't think I've ever had a site that worked better in Chrome.
Caveats: Sometimes launching apps from the browser only works in Chrome and some demos of bleeding edge experimental Chrome features obviously don't work in Firefox.
There are definitely sites that don't work in Firefox, although they are pretty far and few between.
Mailgun is one of the worst offenders. when I mentioned to their support that auth among other things was broken in Firefox, their response was "use chrome"
Yes that is good advice. I wouldn't use Mailgun again if I was starting from scratch today. The email sending infra is pretty solid, but their web UI is really fragile and routinely has outages. And of course, does not work in Firefox.
Here's an example that just got me: the Tesco mobile prepaid login has a hidden recapcha field that isn't filled in on Firefox mobile. It's rare, but happens enough I increasingly try and use chrome for multi step things that will be annoying or problems if they fail near the end, like government forms.
The Dutch national TV (NPO) videos do not play on Firefox for Android [1]. They do play on Chrome for Android and they do play on the Linux desktop firefox. Not sure if its some hidden setting that I need to find or something for the firefox team to look into.
Everybody and their dog want you to download "apps" - I wonder why?
Firefox on android is one of the few defence mechanisms we have.
Actually yeah this is something I'd forgotten about, that is indeed a downside to Firefox.
I had this problem with the British Film Institute's streaming service. I emailed them about it, they replied "please try with Chrome on Windows PC" and I replied "no thanks, please send a refund, I will pirate the film instead".
The other case where I ran into videos not playing was Twitter dot com. I tend not to click links into that site any more though.
Mozilla claims over 700 of their 750 employees work on Firefox. It's a bit harder to find out the number of people working on Chrome. The founding director remarks that there were 40 engineers working on Chrome mobile in https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-success.... That's obviously just a slice of the whole team. Search results suggest a range of numbers between 23 and 500. There appears to be about 12k in the whole department building Chrome, Android and the other software shipped to users. From all that you can extrapolate that there likely isn't a huge disparity between number of engineers on both browsers.
I genuinely don't believe that 700 people work on Firefox because if that were true the quality would be much different and things would be done faster.
If there's 700 active developers on Firefox then they sure as hell must be having a great time "working" remotely. The development pace of Firefox is atrocious.
One of the upsides to Firefox is ricing it to fit your flow. I got vertical tabs like some other browsers have and its great. People on reddit do alot crazier stuff
> as far as I can see there is really no downside to Firefox.
Profiles suck. Performance (specifically around video) has been ass for years. Many useful Chrome extensions don't have FF versions. Just off the top of my head.
I use Firefox containers as a replacement for Chrome profiles and I find them to be quite good. The Sidebery addon adds sidebar tab groups where each group can have a different default container, I use it to maintain different sets of sessions for personal and work stuff (GitHub, etc)
Containers are really great. Even my non-technical spouse uses them (She isn't quite ready for the temporary containers add on yet though). However, there are some downsides to containers vs profiles, mainly that you can't have different settings.
She is in grad school, and the online learning platform requires 3rd party cookies to work. With containers, this means enabling 3rd party cookies every where, which isn't good.
I set her up a separate school profile that has a different theme. Only that profile has 3rd party cookies enabled, and she knows to only do school stuff in that profile. It is clunky to say the least, even with the profile extension.
I'd really like to see better support for profile management!
I have a unique profile directory for each project -- in both Chrome and Firefox. I use a python script to wrap it -- so when I click links in a non-browser context that will launch the python wrapper, which prompts for the browser/profile combination. It's a extra click on launch -- and each profile needs to get configured (add uBO, etc). But I've got full isolation on those things.
Performance has been even or better than Chrome for roughly half a decade every time I’ve tested, especially if you consider much lower memory and energy usage.
Extensions are complicated because they’re also one of the top sources of compatibility and performance problems. Every time in the last decade or so that I’ve known someone to complain that their browser was broken or slow / using too much memory, uninstalling extensions fixed it. It annoys me because I like the concept but I’m not sure it’s really something developers can be trusted with.
If enough people switch these settings off, Google will just re-enable them "accidentally" during the next auto-update. Or hide them altogether. This is their business model. They didn't create Chrome out of the goodness of their hearts: it was created to impose their rules on the internet. And since their business model relies on tracking people, that is what they will do. Refusing by deleting Chrome is the only way to oppose this.
Incidentally, I think people working on these features should be ashamed.
> They didn't create Chrome out of the goodness of their hearts: it was created to impose their rules on the internet.
IIRC, it's the opposite: Chrome was created to prevent other browser manufacturers (in particular, Microsoft) from imposing their rules on the Internet in a way which affected Google websites.
It's the same thing. Google needs to track users, and anything that prevents them from tracking users is a problem. Their rules (that they want to impose) are that user information is advertising material, to be tracked, profiled, processed and sold.
They've done a very successful job of masquerading as a cool hip tech company, even coining the totally ridiculous (given the context) "don't be evil" saying.
A quick googling says Firefox makes most of its money by making Google the default search. While I'm not suggesting they are doing the same, it does make me feel they are aligned as a business.
Apple is the only tech company I know that's primarily funded by customers paying for a product directly. That's why I use Safari.
Another commenter already said it, but given that Google pays Apple $20 billion annually for the default search engine, it's accurate to say that Safari's development is entirely funded by Google.
That Apple has alternative sources of revenue are irrelevant for Safari's present and future. Just to give an example — both Firefox and Safari block third-party cookies, which has an impact on Google's tracking, but have you noticed that neither of them block ads by default? They couldn't even if they wanted to, given it has a direct impact on their cash cow. And Safari's ad-blocking capabilities is what inspired Chrome's limitations from Manifest v3, the latter being more capable, actually.
The more important question is: What happens to Safari if Google's payouts to Apple stop? And there's no good answer.
> turn off the toggles on each of the three subpages.
I'm trying to think, are there any downsides to this other than "you won't get custom ads catered to you"?
Like Google can see you requested this off and most of us are logged into a Google user account attached to Chrome. I wonder if they can "behind the scenes" label users who don't let them serve them as customized ads in a "less good" bucket? Too much of a stretch/conspiracy theory? Deny us features? Just spitballing...
Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies?
*If* this lets chrome remove third-party cookies, doesn't it effectively increase your privacy by putting that tracking data on the user's machine instead of having random third-parties involved in every page load to harvest that tracking info?
I understand that you can currently turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that. If chrome is able to turn off third-party cookies for a large swathe of people, I expect that most sites will be forced to make themselves work without third-party cookies.
I don't know a huge amount about it, but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data than have a network of unknown third-parties collaborate by sharing bits about me to build a profile.
> I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data than have a network of unknown third-parties collaborate by sharing bits about me to build a profile.
That’s a bit like saying you’d rather have cameras inside your house streaming your every move than have paparazzi at your door.
In the current model, the third parties have to fight and spend resources to get an imperfect profile of you, while you can make their life harder every step of the way. But your browser has access to information those third-parties could never have; it can make a profile from real data without you having the chance to block it.
Both are bad for privacy, but the new method is way worse and has the potential to become even more invasive. What if Chrome decides to share your bookmarks? Or settings from your extensions? Or specific pages you visit, including private GitHub repositories for your company? Or full URLs with sensitive keys in them?
I don't think it's fair to compare what might happen in the future.
In my mind the metaphor is more like "instead of having paparazzi at your door following around, you show everyone a card saying that you like dogs and video games and the steelers, and you tend to shop at big box stores out of town".
I'd rather know exactly what I'm presenting, which is possible in this model, than have the paparazzi all over me figuring most of it out imperfectly anyway.
> Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies?
How about thinking the other way around:
Can you, or anyone else for that matter, explain to me why this is better than commercial interests not following us around at all?
> turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that
Most of what breaks is just tracking for ad serving purposes. I'm fine with that breaking.
Some authentication services have trouble, but there are other ways of implementing that, so they could be fixed without needing to keep 3rd party cookies enabled.
> I expect that most sites will be forced to make themselves work without third-party cookies
As they should, if competently designed.
> … but naively I'd rather …
Call me dogmatic, but I'd rather not be followed around at all, even as a group. I don't trust that the data cannot be de-anonymised in any way, and I don't trust a company that would gain from that to do its best to make sure it can't happen.
I totally appreciate the desire not to want an advertising profile build for you at all! I think that in practice, interest-based-advertising is going to happen, and I think if chrome can provide a way for it to be done without involving so many sketchy third-parties then I'm for that.
I don't know a huge amount about the wider ecosystem here, but I can imagine that if chrome were to disable third-party cookies without providing an alternative, then advertisers will go to fairly great lengths to fingerprint you to build a profile.
Right now my guess is that Firefox users benefit from the fact that it's probably not worth investing all that much in alternative tracking techniques since you capture the vast majority of people with techniques which work in chromium browsers.
Again, I really don't know that much about all this, but my feeling is that this is moving in the right direction, even if it's not the solution I'd ultimately prefer as an individual user.
I think a big flaw of interest based ads is that my interests rarely line up with what I am in the market for. Say I am interested in some hobby. I probably have all my gear already, and if I buy new gear it means doing enough research to breach through the fog of marketing to see it for what it is. I might spend all my days reading about hobby x online, when I really ought to be advertised the differences of some other products y and z that I actually will buy, which I only see when I visit a physical store and see them together on a shelf.
What is lost in this discussion is that now my browser, software on my machine, using my resources is the agent that is acting against my own interests.
Never said they were, only that they both using your browser & resources "against your own interests", and this is not a good argument against tracking.
When just displaying a static banner add, your browser is a lot more passive than implied by "agent that is acting" in the GPP. Simply displaying an image (with a little HTML for the link) and perhaps caching it in local storage is quite different from collecting & collating logs about you and distributing that back out to the where internet.
You are right about the bit of the post you noticed though, both do use at least some resources. This system more, but the simple banner still some.
> Can you, or anyone else for that matter, explain to me why this is better than commercial interests not following us around at all?
Because people prefer free, ad supported content on the internet.
Once you accept that premise, then it's a matter of balancing privacy, volume of ads, and payments to creators (ad tech companies are going to get theirs). Do you think the majority of people would prefer fewer, better targeted / higher yielding ads as long as it is tracking them anonymously? Or more ads, with worse targeting? Or neither and less payments to creators?
I can see both sides of this. There's the side of me that looks at advertising and sees it as a necessary annoyance. It's the primary funding source for the open web today, and thus far that model has been very successful. Advertising has enabled the development of well polished, incredibly useful software like YouTube, Google Maps, search engines, etc without requiring users to directly pay a single cent for those services.
Then there's the Stallmanesqe, crypto-anarchist side of me that says it's my machine and it shouldn't do anything that doesn't directly benefit me. Tracking and ads don't directly benefit me, so my machine shouldn't cooperate in running them and if your business can't survive under those conditions then it doesn't deserve to.
I'm not 100% on how to resolve that tension, but I can't really fault Google for the way they're handling it. (As an optional, yet on-by-default feature that cooperates in serving relevant ads in a way that's more private than cookies but less private than just blocking everything.)
There is no paid-internet without ads -- so it's not that people prefer free we don't really have a group to test against. Maybe it's like the choice between water and no-water -- results show that humans like water.
But choices like: free water with punch-in-the-face VS paid water without punching would be better indicators of choice.
When there are few/no options then choice is an illusion.
> Because people prefer free, ad supported content on the internet.
I have no objection to adverts based on what I am looking at at the time, or more random blanket advertising⁰, as long as they are not too obtrusive or intrusive: flashing ads, auto-playing audio, and so forth, are out.
Unfortunately modern ad tech is apparently inseparable from following us around our online existence logging everything we do, which is on the list of things I consider to be too intrusive.
> as long as it is tracking them anonymously
Yes. But call me a cynic if you will: I don't trust that the proposed system is as guaranteed to be anonymous as is claimed (or at least implied).
> payments to creators?
Remuneration for creators is why I don't use sponsorblock and such. Sponsor segments aid the creators without having to track me wherever I go online.
--
[0] though I am getting tired of seeing adverts for Temu everywhere, anything broadcast en-mass to the point of annoyance¹ well never result in me buying a product or using a service
[1] I could name several others, Temu is just the most recent example
If there was only a single choice for advertisers to place a completely static banner on the page, they would still be happy. As long as no other advertiser had more capabilities.
Restrict them all and the money would still flow as the ads would increase sales just as much.
It boils down to greed. Targeted ads are proven to have larger profits, which increases the more precise the targeting is.
No advertiser wants to go back to dumb ad campaigns like they used to run on traditional media, simply because they're far less profitable.
Which is why they're concerned about the restricted and more general profiles the Topics API will give them. They want even more granular topics[1], and Google can do this at any point once the controversy has died down, and this feature gains traction.
Make no mistake that if this turns out to be less profitable, many advertisers will still resort to cookie tracking, fingerprinting, and any other shady mechanism, as long as the browser and lack of regulation allow them to do so.
> Some authentication services have trouble, but there are other ways of implementing that, so they could be fixed without needing to keep 3rd party cookies enabled.
not to mention that if the goal is to remove 3PC, this new ad tracking doesn't solve the auth problem at all.
Other browsers have shown this is a false dichotomy. You can disable third party cookies + surveillance AND not have this data still harvested by your browser.
Is this better than third-party cookies? Yes, probably. Does Firefox and Safari go better without surveilling your browsing history to serve you ads? Also yes!
This means that your browser starts spying on you, whereas currently, ‘only’ sites do.
If you use Chrome, it will use information about all pages you visit, even ones without tracking cookies to categorize you for advertisers.
Google says that will happen locally, but even if you trust them, I don’t think that makes much of a difference. You could even see it as “now I pay the bill for getting myself categorized for Google’s ad business”.
Soon, Chrome also will start blocking third-party cookies to protect you from evil Meta and its ilk (all because Google wants to protect you from them, not because Meta competes with Google in the advertising space, of course)
So, as before, Google won’t be able to see what users do inside Meta’s apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.), but now Meta won’t be able to see what Chrome users do outside them.
> but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data
It won’t all stay on your machine; a summary of it will be sent to Google so that they can sell targeted ads to advertisers.
I expect they’ll have quite a few different tags, including age, gender, and location, and shopping preferences.
And third-party tracking websites would load their websites up with a bunch of hidden anchors and then through JS read the visited state of these websites to get an accurate fix on a person's identity, or at least of their (relevant) browser history?
And how this modifier was removed ASAP once people realised its abuse potential?
Basically Google thought this was a good idea after all, and is bringing a "coarse-grained" version of it back.
>but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that.
not really, no. From my experience most stuff works fine (the thing that breaks websites the most is webgl and even then, only the few websites that really need it use it)
You would be surprised at what breaks. It also prevents local storage (not just cookies) from working at all when inside an iframe. That took me a long time at work to debug.
More importantly, instead of silently failing like localStorage should, the attribute on the window object is missing, causing page scripts that don't catch the exception (ie all of them) to crash and usually break the page.
I'm pretty sure Google is making disabling cookies as painful and breakage-inducing as possible to make sure
people don't flip the switch.
It's MUCH worse, because if this catches on in any significant way, it makes Google the main (eventually only?) provider of demographic data for audiences/tracking. Google already owns the browser market and almost owns the advertising market, but if you want to try to play outside with your own SEO/direct marketing strategy you may be able to make it work. But in a world where cookies/independent tracking is dead and the only provider is Google? you'll have to go through AdSense.
Google needs to be broken up and ground to dust --well, judiciously regulated by a democratically-elected legislature, but in the absence of that, I would take anything. I can't believe this is the "Don't do evil" company.
But the only provider isn't "Google". The browser will provide this data equally to any site asking for it, i.e. all the ad networks that the site is using. Not just to Google.
If anything, it is leveling the playing field. All ad networks will get the same interest data, rather than the ones with a higher reach 3rd party cookie having more information.
Wow, you are spinning this as a universal good? "Leveling the playing field." Ridiculous. Nothing to see here folks, move on, Google is protecting you.
> but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that.
I hadn't noticed, although I've heard this many times. I mean, I notice some broken pages, but nothing so important that I'd bother working out what's wrong with them.
If it's really that the site is checking that the 3d-party cookie they set really got set, and failing to load otherwise, that's an abusive site that I don't want to use anyway.
There are a few (not that many) things that break on the internet if you turn off third-party cookies, but "I'm no longer being tracked without consent" is not one of them. It's one of the big reasons to get rid of third-party cookies, not an unfortunate side-effect.
The third party tracking was dependent on someone else's processing power and system, this is sinisterly making the user's own software work against his best interest and instead work for a morbid advertiser's interest. Since it is all done in the browser and locally using much more of my data, that data being even more 'relevant' to advertisers, with its results presented as an API to every bloody page I visit, this will only make the tracking problem worse.
A related reason is my bookmarks are very much a private affair and this method feels much more intrusive. I dread to think of the security implications.
The only upside is that third party cookies will be less of a problem in other browsers, if this new API kills them.
> I don't know a huge amount about it, but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data than have a network of unknown third-parties collaborate by sharing bits about me to build a profile.
So, I've heard it said in another topic on `Topics` that a single list of topics, as far as it is an identifier for a specific person, is far less accurate than a tracking cookie (or similar technology).
Well, yes, maybe that is the case _right now_, but these are convenient arguments to push the technology through. There is nothing inherent to the technology that would prevent the `Topics` from being split such that 8 billion (current world population) unique combinations of topics exist.
If all topics are completely orthogonal to others, such that the existence of one topic for some user does not give extra information of another topic existing for the same user, we would expect a list of log2(8 billion) ~= 33 topics to suffice as a unique identifier for each individual user, _reported by the browser to every single website that is visited_.
So... obviously there is no technological limitation to this list of topics, it is completely feasible to design a list of 33 (or a little bit more) topics in this way.. so what will keep Google from not introducing more topics (as time goes on and people become accustomed to this feature)?
My point, in the limit, potentially a few years from now, this feature will be "pareto-dominant" of tracking cookies, or rather in all aspects better at tracking users than tracking cookies ever were.
We have a few options for monetizing on the web:
1. Sell stuff (e-commerce, subscriptions, services).
2. Sell ads (every website that's free except Wikipedia).
3. Ask for donations (Wikipedia).
I'm tongue and check for numbers 2 and 3. But with money coming in, people get paid. If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die.
To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people have clicked on ads, or else people will want to avoid buying ad space. Unless it's a huge brand like NFL, people aren't going to buy random ad space. You can do this in a walled garden logged-in app (a la Instagram or Facebook) or with _some_ form of tracking (every non-subscription publishing website).
We either roll out a way to do demographic tracking or every site will move into a logged-in method and sell data between one another on the backend. If you'd rather not get tracked, your best bet is to just not use the site to begin with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people have clicked on ads
Not really. You just need to look at any normal billboard; advertisers bought that billboard, even though it knows nothing about demographics or "attribution".
Tracking just makes advertising more cost-effective. To the advertiser, not to me. I'm not an advertiser; I gain nothing from the cheapness of advertising. It makes no difference to me whether an ad is targeted or not; I don't want to see it. Especially if it writhes and wriggles distractingly, or autoplays video.
> To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people…
Wasn't Google's initial pitch that it would provide ads selectively based on the content of the page? All this demographics and individual tracking part in modern metrics seems to be mostly misleading.
For decades, ads were sold based on media analysis – and it worked well. There is nothing that says that it would work unconditionally with tracking only. You may even miss your most important potential customers entirely with tracking, since your product may be lacking general exposure. You may be also missing a broader cultural feedback, which is what sells most products in the end. (Most ads try to assign a cultural vector to the product, or to associate a product with an existing one, this is a major mechanism. You may require a certain amount of social resonance and common references to achieve this. It may well be, that this dysfunctionality of targeted advertising is what gave birth to the phenomenon of the influencer.)
I think I agree with you, but I would add another option: buy subscription services. These services have a strong incentive to keep their userbase happy.
> If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die.
> Additionally, there are features such as Protected Audience that can serve you ads for “remarketing” (for example, Chrome tracked you visiting a listing for a toaster, so now you will get ads for toasters elsewhere), and Attribution Reporting, that gathers data on ad clicks.
Why is this actually effective? When you bought a toaster (which is a likely reason why you visited the listing), why would ads for other toasters still be relevant?
Because they don't know if you bought it or not. They are gambling that you didn't and are trying to capture a sale for the ad buyer. Presumably that is somewhat effective since it's so common.
Amazon still re-shows toaster ads when they know for certain you've bought one. Maybe the likelihood you're buying one for someone else as a gift is higher than their guess of what else you might buy?
One explanation is that targeted ads are so bad at what they claim to be good at, that they can’t use the added information that you bought a toaster to do any better than some tiny increase in likelihood of buying a toaster if you just bought one.
As shit as showing you ads for the thing you just bought is, it may be the best ROI they can manage. Which is pretty damning for the whole enterprise.
Maybe, but I'll suggest an alternative view that's probably unpopular: big ad companies walk a fine line between what knowledge they can share even from _inside_ the same company. Ad sellers cannot have perfect information for probably several reasons: auditing, privacy, safety, and legal. Evidence of this is that ads are reported as being encrypted between business units (e.g. if you work on ranking product listings, you may no idea what ad is injected at the top).
Obviously the result looks stupid to us as consumers which is quite memorable. I suggest it is a by-product of intentional choices. IMO this is a better explanation than "oh this company is just too stupid to do it right, but also they are all knowing about everything you do and are just so doggone evil." Maybe they are that evil, but I am sure they have learned how not to overturn their apple cart and this is an obvious result of that.
It doesn't make much sense in case of a toaster, but if you bought a pen (or socks, SSDs, lightbulbs, etc.), you may buy some more after you tried it and liked it, or maybe you will try another brand.
I guess it's more like a continuum than two discrete categories. On one end of the spectrum there's a family house, on the other, there's toilet paper. That's why they repeat ads even for a toaster.
I suppose I'm wrong because it appears not to exist. But, I can't get past the idea that there's just a lot of things very few people have more than one of. Many of them being big ticket items too, where the cost (or opportunity cost) for a wasted low-conversion-rate ad is high. Like bbq grills, most types of power tools, air compressors, automotive battery chargers, refrigerators, washer/dryer, dishwasher, lawnmowers, etc. And many of those have obvious companion items that would be a better use of the ad space than trying to sell someone a second bbq grill, for example.
I’ve always thought it was because you’re more likely that you’ll buy another toaster than something in any other individual category. More likely that your next purchase will be another toaster than a pitchfork, for example. Still stupid though.
I always opt for the toaster-pitchfork bundle with monthly subscription from Prime, because a toaster would be nothing without its accompanying pitchfork!
Me visiting a listing for a toaster means that I'm in the market for a toaster, doesn't necessarily imply I already bought one.
Also, with this data, they can potentially build a better model than Amazon's recommender model. Most consumers have a pattern when buying and there's a lot of money in figuring it out.
There is a likely chance that you didn’t buy it, so bombarding you with other toaster ads(preferably much cheaper) raises the chance of you actually buying it.
There might be other cases where you bought one and is really happy about the benefits and want your friends to enjoy too but may be they can buy a different brand/price/featured ones to compare experience.
There are lots of possible such cases ad and sales people think up.
Src: worked in adtech for few years and yes am not proud.
When I have my ad defenses down (no ad blocking, some random browser), I see ads for mobile cases for my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (released in 2012). I guess that was the last set of data points they have against my persona. That's the only relevant ad I see that I remember searching for.
I've had 3 other phones since then. Ads just show what they can. Still better chances for a click than random.
Because you'd likely want to buy a new toaster in a few months, after the one you just bought breaks due to planned obsolescence, or low quality parts, poor QA, and no possibility to fix it yourself. /s
Let's take the toaster out of context here and then if that's just a "product" and the brands/governments want you to purchase it frequently that's why.
That site is ran by a Brave employee[0]. The author claims that there's no COI, but one ought to be suspicious if Brave passes almost every single test barring the ones that no browser can pass.
I just don't understand this take. In every Chrome gripefest thread, there will be a comment about switching to Firefox that's at or near the top, and then a comment about Brave closer to the bottom. With half the replies to that comment being about crypto, or even smaller niche players like Vivaldi that are closed-source and don't even have an iOS version.
Look, I'm not into crypto. But it takes me about two clicks to turn off everything crypto-related in Brave (the main stuff that people complain about is opt-in and turned off by default anyway). The same amount of effort that it takes me to change Google as the default search engine in Firefox.
In both cases, those default settings are there because both browsers need SOME source of revenue. But in Brave's case, at least they are diversifying into different sources, such as a search engine and a Zoom-like video conferencing product. Whereas Firefox's entire existence is dependent on the Google dependency.
Nothing against Firefox. But I get far fewer (if any) website compatibility issues with Brave, the extension ecosystem is far better, and the ad-blocking is far superior (with Firefox I see YouTube ads on my phone with every ad-blocking extension I've tried, whereas with Brave I see no ads with the built-in blocker).
It just blows my mind that Brave gets dismissed by the HN crowd, on the basis of "crypto associations give me bad vibes", while Firefox's association with Google is completely hand-waved away. When my goal is to avoid Google, I get more bad vibes from Google. But that's just me.
Fairly easy to understand, for many Crypto is synonymous with 'bad actor'. Which isn't exactly without merit given the number of schemes, scams and outright law breaking elements that have surrounded the topic.
It doesn't matter if its legitimate, people will still understandably have issues with it.
It's a reflexive guilt-by-association instinct that many people have. Some people have used crypto in the past unethically, therefore everyone using crypto is unethical. I usually like to illustrate the problem with this fallacy by using it in a way that nearly everybody can quickly see: "do you have a dog? Hitler had a dog."
Brave gives me a strong negative gut reaction. I really doubt crypto goes well with ethics. Looking at some of Brave's past transgressions confirms it for me. Sure, you can turn it off, just like you can remove the pineapple from pizza, the pizza is still ruined though.
"ars technica: we don't know how they did it but google chrome now extracts a pint of blood every time you log on
chrome user, dizzy from blood loss: I swear to god I am like this close to switching to firefox
another chrome user, on the verge of fainting from severe blood loss: no need to resort to that, just switch to [insert today's trendy chrome fork here] and be smart like meeee"
I am against this and think it's pretty unconscionable, but I will say this in defense of Google collecting my data:
Google's entire business model is predicated on the fact that they and only they know who I am. As soon as they sell "me," they lose the value of my (so-far) collected data. They have to sell me in bundles, anonymized, otherwise they make no money in the long run.
That being said, it's been proven over and over and over that behavioral ad sales don't actually result in more clicks or sales for the advertiser.
I've been using FF with some privacy extensions and settings as my personal browser for a few years now, I'm definitely not going to change that now.
Also so they can basically shape web standards and ecosystems however they want. Websites will do literally anything to stay listed and relevant in google search. Google does this by shaping a web that serves ads and thereby makes them more money
I don't know if it is common knowledge, but only firefox offers application-level control Manual proxyis. (At least on win 10, I didn't check on others).
This feature alone makes Chrome / Edge unusable, at least for me.
The most important point to make here (and one missing from the article) is that Topics is reducible to (implementable using) third-party cookies. While one may argue browsers should have neither, enabling topics is not reducing user privacy if TPC is already enabled.
I stopped using Chrome two years ago. I deleted the Facebook app. I have blockers on my desktop and iPhone. I’m aware everyone’s PI info is already compromised, but I’m not adding fuel.
There are excellent alternatives to Chrome. I encourage everyone to adopt one.
There are people in the comments saying Firefox is super slow compared to Chrome but modern computers are genuinely so fast I can't notice a difference. At least on my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad T61 I use regularly I have to do some comparisons on what the best browser choice is but on my main PC with a Ryzen 5 7600 and 32GB of DDR5 RAM it hasn't even really occurred that one is faster than the other. I use LibreWolf.
I believe you're correct but and maybe it's placebo but there is some process of loading and viewing a web page that feels faster in safari. maybe safari does some sort of pre-fetching? i barely use it so even my anecdotal sample size is not large
In fairness, there's an arbitrary amount of "chrome" on top of Safari, so Firefox could very well be slower. There's also this new profile effect where switching browsers always seems faster. The reasoning is that you're comparing browser A, which is loaded down with all your history, cookies, etc. against browser B, which has a clean slate.
Just to join the chorus (as I'm listening to Agnus Dei by Barber)
Firefox + uBlock Origin (too lazy to use uMatrix) + privacy badger (because why not) + multi account containers + User agent switcher (for sites which want something else and refuse to load on FF, e.g. bing chat)
... does this article seem a little low quality to anyone else?
> By far the most private browsers are specialist non-tracking browsers that prioritise no tracking, such as DuckDuckGo...
wha???
> Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum.
Wha?! The technology google is deploying wouldn't even support that. Frankly the level of personal invasion required to achieve this...
Was this just like a bit of biting sarcasm or something? Dry wit that flew over my head?
ok. In my defense I did consider "DuckDuckGo made a browser"? and googled it before I posted this comment, but I did not find any results. Your comment made me dig deeper to find the Android one.
I still think that sentence is a bit stilted though, it's got some department of redundancy department vibes. But I yield the point on that one.
why not just have a simple survey and let the user pick or rate what they are interested in? Why the need to have the web browser actually track everything?
Also, there should be a permission API around this for each website (like camera/microphone), that explicitly states why the website is requesting this information and what information the browser will return to the website.
What’s crazy to me is how many people in the forum continue to run Chrome. There’s barely any mention of switching off Chrome in this thread until scrolling down towards the bottom of the comments. Why is that? It’s so obvious how this story is doing to end—Google will do everything in their power to shove ads down Chrome users throats no matter how many ad blockers people try to run.
What is it about Chrome that makes it so much better than alternatives like Firefox, Safari, or any Blink engine variants that aren’t spyware?
Can I just tell Google what I like and then they serve me ads for those things only? Because the current scheme seems like a whole lot of unnecessary subterfuge just to reliably serve me ads I will never click on. Wouldn't they rather have a shot in hell of serving me an ad I might actually click, while also not turning themselves into the poster boys for online privacy violations?
If I'm using Chrome only to test how websites render in it, what are the alternatives? Use another Chromium based browser or do they have the same issues as Chrome? Use a browser testing suite such as BrowserStack? Or will using a user-agent switcher in Firefox achieve the same effect as using Chrome?
Put a "best viewed in Safari" badge on it and stop testing in Chrome.
If you want to know how an average user will see your site, you should probably be testing with a default profile, with no adblocker. You could leave the browser signed out of your Google account, or have a separate one just for this.
And that had absolutely zero effect on the market share of the browsers.
No PC operating system that I know of aside from ChromeOS bundles Chrome, yet people still download it and it’s still dominant.
What makes you think the outcome would be different if given a choice?
Besides especially on mobile, I would be pissed if when I first used my phone I would have to use my (hypothetically limited) cellular data to download something like a browser.
And even if you don’t use Chrome on Android, you’re still using Android - by Google.
> And that had absolutely zero effect on the market share of the browsers.
Did it not help FF to gain initial market share?
> Besides especially on mobile, I would be pissed if when I first used my phone I would have to use my (hypothetically limited) cellular data to download something like a browser.
No difference from the status quo then as you have to download multiple browser updates per month anyway (and in fact as the first thing after initial setup), and the reason is the incredible bloatedness and lack of scope of browsers.
> And even if you don’t use Chrome on Android, you’re still using Android - by Google.
This is about the web as an open platform relied upon for essential public services by any citizen (payment, school, administration, health care, and so on); no idea what that has to with using Android or other Google products.
While there were early signs that the browser ballot screen was influencing browser usage in the EU, with Mozilla attributing some European Firefox growth to the selection page, long-term trends strongly suggest that it was next to useless. In spite of equally prominent placement on the selection screen, Opera's share even within Europe appears to have declined over the last five years. So too have Firefox and Internet Explorer. Chrome, however, has experienced significant growth.
> No difference from the status quo then as you have to download multiple browser updates per month anyway
I can’t speak to Android. But iOS updates (which include Safari updates) don’t happen that often and at least users have a usable browser at initial launch on both iOS and Android. You can choose when to update
> This is about the web as an open platform relied upon for essential public services by any citizen
I don’t know, maybe because the original submission is about Chrome’s privacy issues, not about the “open web”?
> While there were early signs that the browser ballot screen was influencing browser usage in the EU, with Mozilla attributing some European Firefox growth to the selection page, long-term trends strongly suggest that it was next to useless.
This isn't "zero effect", though. It might've been just the initial kick-off for FF's success, bringing users, bug reports, and developers. "Long-term" Chrome dominance isn't telling us anything here; in fact, Chrome's success is also in part a consequence of the browser selection screen.
From other articles I read - and my Google Fu is failing me right now - the browser market share was about the same in the US and the EU. There was never a ballot choice mandate in the US.
Chrome’s growth in the US grew because of bundling with other apps and because of advertisements on Google’s home page
Unrelated, but the other day, I searched something on DDGo on Firefox mobile in private mode, and a few hours later, I see a targeted ad related to that search.
Whats the deal with that? The only extension I have installed is Ublock mobile.
Well, it might be a coincidence, but it also wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't. Your identity was probably linked using fingerprinting. Private browsing mode offers almost zero protection against this. Even Tor isn't protected unless you enable the Safest security level (= completely disable JavaScript). This might even be done through multiple levels of indirection (mobile browser fingerprint -> Google account -> desktop browser fingerprint).
Is there a legal or data privacy angle here in enterprise environments where Chrome can be banned due to their sharing of private/internal browsing history with third parties?
Yep, and else with browser fingerprinting; https://amiunique.org/fingerprint says that even with adblock and some tracking measures turned off, my browser fingerprint is still unique among 2054475 others.
Ars' (and lobste.rs') take on this [1] is titled "Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome" - with Google cookies and ads on the page ofc.
> Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum.
It's actually worth reading the article to the end, because otherwise you'd be missing the amazing final paragraph:
> Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.
Ignoring the fact that this is not how it works - there are plenty of services where you pay and still are the product - the last sentence makes it clear that the author sees privacy as the problem, not tracking.
I don’t pay for bash yet I have plenty of excellent tooling in it thats free, and I’m not the product. Software can be released freely just like a poem can be. The people who develop popular software like one of the functions in bash I use for free probably aren’t hurting for work I’d imagine.
> The people who develop popular software like one of the functions in bash I use for free probably aren’t hurting for work I’d imagine.
I wouldn't assume that; I would donate what you can. I've been to two pay-what-you-can theater performances recently. How can I not give those people - who value every dime, who many others stiff, and where you know 100% goes to a worthy cause - more than the corporate productions, who couldn't care less about me or community and where the money goes to some billionaires and shareholders who couldn't care less about art and look forward to AI and cost-cutting layoffs. The last thing I want is the local artists, who do it for the art, to not see people's love and appreciation or to stop.
Around 5-10 years ago, IIRC the maintainer of a relatively well-known Linux distro moved home to (Minnesota?) because they had no health insurance and couldn't afford the Bay Area (or something like that, my memory is sketchy).
Also don't forget the sh-t-ton of abuse open source maintainers take.
Another way is to make it problematic for a commercial entity to provide high value services for free. Basically an anti-dumping law, but for digital goods.
The largely dominant browser is never "easily replaceable".
We could write PHD thesis about why, but we can take a meta look at it: there's reasons they became dominant in the first place, and those reasons need to disappear before it's easily replaceable (of course additional reasons will pile up the longer the browser stays dominant)
Maybe paying $10/mo for email or $199 once for a browser is a good thing. Maybe if people didn't feel like browsers and email and search were human rights that should be given to them freely, moral hazards be damned, the internet wouldn't be the clusterfuck that it is now?
There might be ways around the price issue. But if it really came down to that, I'd argue "there's no free lunch" should apply.
We already pay a price to have regulatory watchdogs intervene when companies cheat the market and or distort the rules and impact society as a whole, so it wouldn't be unprecedented either.
It's kind of funny to use that exact statement, but after you put profit seeking corporations in charge of our of our information you'll find they commonly find democracy 'not profitable enough' and will go about manipulating/controlling you via your own information to further increase their profits and control over you. I guess your option is becoming the cake to get ate.
Meanwhile over in "lets not cede all control to corporations" land, did we forget the the internet was actually funded by the government in the first place? Have we already tossed away ideas like the rural electrification project?
No matter how the internet was originally funded, most of the current infrastructure that gives us the speed and bandwidth we have today and the hardware was done by private companies.
Who is going to pay for the browser?
Do you really want the government controlling how you access information?
>Do you really want the government controlling how you access information?
You've already given that power to corporations, and corporations have far fewer regulations on actually performing said control (as in they are able to control you far more).
You are so deep into Reganomics "government is bad, corporations are good" that you don't realize these large (near) monopoly status corporations are effectively their own governments in amount of power and control they have.
It’s not reagonomics it’s just the opposite. Whatever party you align yourself with, just think of the power the other party would use to stifle speech that they don’t agree with.
I have a lot more power not to use Chrome or Android than not to be under the rule of a hostile government.
Whether it’s the religious right who are in control of one party or Tipper Gore going after rap music in the other party, do you really want the government controlling the web?
Reagonomics was about thinking the government is incompetent. I think the government is hostile.
> I have a lot more power not to use Chrome or Android than not to be under the rule of a hostile government
Yeah, you can choose between Google or Apple. Hooray.
It's practically impossible to avoid Google if you value having a social life. Enough people have tried.
> Reagonomics was about thinking the government is incompetent. I think the government is hostile.
Oh yeah great, so it's even worse than Reaganomics.
At least a government csn be kept in check by a construction and can be changed by elections.
On the other hand, corporations have no obligations towards you at all. It's the entire point of private enterprise that they can do what they want and don't owe any responsibility.
> At least a government csn be kept in check by a construction and can be changed by elections.
That’s cute in theory. But the way that the electoral college is designed, the Senate with two votes, gerrymandering etc that doesn’t work out too well in practice.
Democracy works fine if you’re in the majority - well not actually see all of the caveats above - but that doesn’t work if you are in the minority - any type of minority.
> It's the entire point of private enterprise that they can do what they want and don't owe any responsibility.
I could argue the same about law enforcement, imminent domain, civil forfeiture, and getting harassed because I “look suspicious”
If you don't petition your government to prevent monopolies, then you have just as little choice being under hostile companies. Of course I'm sure you think having the choice of Apple rather than Android completely makes up for this.
Enriching these large companies will ensure you live under a hostile government too. Once they are big enough to rent seek, they become the primary lobbying power, and you're back in the exact same position of being under a hostile government.
Next I expect to hear something out of you about private water companies and roads as the solution to all of our problems.
So instead I should let the government be in control? Without bringing in my own viewpoints. Just think about how the “other” party that you disagree with can and will abuse any power you give it.
> Once they are big enough to rent seek, they become the primary lobbying power, and you're back in the exact same position of being under a hostile government.
Can any of the corporations with power put people in jail or confiscate your property for disagreeing with them? Can they get you fired for teaching something that is “too woke”. Did you not see what the governor of Florida did with Disney because they had the nerve to disagree with him?
Are you really okay with giving government that power?
Show me the steps that would need to happen for Google to harass me for walking down the street because I don’t look like I belong in my own neighborhood.
You attempt to go to your local grocery store. They use 'Google Identity' which they are perfectly allowed to as a private business. You are accused of sending spam by Google (who the hells knows why, they never explain anything) and you are barred access.
Being the staunch libertarian you are, you leap over the public roadway afraid of catching communism if you touch it and go to the grocery store across the road. It turns out they are using 'Amazon Identity' and via an information sharing agreement with Google (private businesses can share information about you, right?), and you're also denied access to that store.
You'll go to another store, right.... Oops, turned out after we got rid of monopoly laws there are only two different stores in your community after consolidation of the industry. Luckily for you there is a toll road that you can take a 30 minute drive to another place that uses a different set of identifiers to let you in.
We busted monopolies and company stores years ago because businesses harassed and murdered people left and right!. Have you forgot the history of the Pinkertons, or are you just blindly ignorant of that part of US history?
> We busted monopolies and company stores years ago because businesses harassed and murdered people left and right!….
I’m sure I need to be more worried about Google murdering people than some yokels claiming they were doing a “citizens arrest” where the prosecutor covered up video taped evidence…
I like how you associate the police with the broadband part of the government like there all the same group.
Even better, we had your magical word where the police didn't exist in the past... It was not a pleasant place unless you were the strongman. The police state was just as bad back then, or bully state.
So you really think that a future President Desantis with his “War on Woke” wouldn’t love to leverage any power you give him to suppress speech he doesn’t agree with? He’s already doing that with Disney in Florida
I mean promoting a fundraiser still doesn't seem to make me a product, and Wikipedia is still pretty solvent regardless. Another example might be Linux software repositories.
>> If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product
> Ignoring the fact that this is not how it works - there are plenty of services where you pay and still are the product
That refutation of their statement is not how logic works. They made a !A -> B statement ("not pay" -> "you are product"). Your statement, ! (A -> !B), which is equivalent to B -> !A is orthogonal to their statement.
Google didn't write a press release that raises questions - insightful ones that I hardly ever see in other coverage - about their privacy practices and recommends competitors such as Firefox and Brave.
Give me a break. It is delusional to believe that corporations do not regularly float press releases to journalists, which then get recycled into articles, which sometimes include a tiny bit of original research.
I'm not sure if you aren't a native English speaker or are just being deliberately obtuse, but I wasn't asking for any consideration on your part. I was expressing disbelief at the apparent naivety of your previous comment where you started off by writing my post "passes for a comment" and then proceeded to argue this article is some kind of insightful work in the area of online privacy.
You never know what valuable things other people have to share, especially if you are curious and open to things you don't already think, if you give people a break; I am constantly surprised. What if we put aside the ridicule?
They raised the issue, which I hardly every see raised, that disabling the feature may not disable data collection. The gave compelling examples of both sides, rather than dismissing one or being inflammatory - the dental hygine example was great, a little personal. They clearly and efficiently spelled out the different modes. They brought up Firefox and the much more obscure Brave, and even more privacy-oriented browsers.
It was great. I'd give it to lay-people who were interested, and as a technical person I don't need to read more.
> the dental hygine example was great, a little personal.
It can be better solved with a calendar notification. No privacy violated and you can add your own information to your notification: you liked this toothbrush, your dentist recommended that toothbrush, you didn't like this store, blah blah.
Is there value in that? Sure. Does that mean that value must be extracted by a business? No.
I wouldn't use it myself, but I couldn't say what is 'better' for other people. Some will prefer Chrome helping them. Lots of people do things that I don't.
Regardless, that's a debate to have with Chrome devs. It's already in the browser and the article is reporting on the browser.
On the bright side, if something's gonna get your aunt to care about online privacy, it will be creepy and disgusting behaviour like an online advertiser based on the other side of the world keeping track of your mouth hygiene for your own convenience
I think it was rather obvious from the context of this thread that the quoted text indicates that the article linked is of very poor quality. It is not necessary to read the full article before knowing something is of poor quality which is trivially known by anyone who has started reading a book or article and then decided it was not worth their time.
I read the article that I suggested was better and I stand by that statement.
> I think it was rather obvious from the context of this thread that the quoted text indicates that the article linked is of very poor quality.
I read the article; it's actually one of the better pieces I've read in that domain (tech news for the general public) IMHO. People say those things (take-downs) about everything on HN. Don't trust the threads - why would you trust anonymous people writing one-sentence hot-take rants, some of whom probably also didn't read the article and are just repeating things.
The Internet tide isn't a reliable indicator of anything, any more than the tide at the beach.
I have my oral care products on subscribe and save. Automation does make my life better by offloading cognitive load. Such automation doesn’t require third party cookies but the article doesn’t make that claim.
The article seems pretty reasonable to me actually. It establishes what a cookie is, then contrasts that with what Chrome is doing, then explains the tradeoffs and Google’s claims, then gives the reader options to make their own choice.
But it's so obviously ideologically bent against privacy that it reads more like manufacturing consent than it does "giving the reader options to make their own choice."
Did we read the same article? It came across as very pro-privacy and anti-tracking to me. It’s well written in the sense that it explains the issue to a general audience without resorting to breathless scare mongering.
"We need to revolutionize how we think about our data and what value it holds" (last sentence)
reads like so much sleeper propaganda for The Selfish Ledger style abuses.
I don't think any discussion of the trade-offs between privacy and tracking is complete unless the horrifying abuses of tracking are also discussed, like government contractors spying on people without cause.
> "We need to revolutionize how we think about our data and what value it holds" (last sentence)
The last line of the article for me is different: “We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.” (Emphasis mine)
Which in context:
> Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.
Is a very clear pro-privacy statement to me. This is our data and is owned by us and we should revolutionize how we think about that.
This isn't even a realistic use case of tracking. Nobody needs tracking cookies to get reminders about buying birthday cards.
Online stores can (and do) remind us about this stuff via email. No third-party tracking cookies needed – you're already a customer of theirs. If they want to get in touch, they already know your order history and contact details.
Or, you know, we can add our own reminders to a personal calendar.
Now you gave me an idea: We gonna launch a start-up working on an AI-based reminder calendar app. And in order to improve the invest... ahm, user experience we gonna track them across the web to enable our AI to propose futire reminders!
I don’t think the article makes the case that tracking cookies are required. It only claims that automated reminders can benefit people, which is far less controversial.
The article gives instructions on how to turn this off and concludes with the classic warning about being the product.
Those benefits don't require us being stalked around our entire online lives: the online store already knows when I bought a toothbrush¹. Unless they are trying to argue that telling every retailer on the planet when I last bought a toothbrush, or other healthcare products, is a good idea?!
Same for the birthday card if I bought one online. This example is even worse: potentially not just tracking my personal information but that of another person too, much like Facebook's “shadow profiles” for people who aren't even using the service themselves.
If I were a millionaire, and still as bitter at the world as I am while currently not being one, I might have a PI follow that writer for a bit, so I can helpfully send reminders, to illustrate how badly ill-conceived this take is…
> I might have a PI follow that writer for a bit, so I can helpfully send reminders, to illustrate how badly ill-conceived this take is…
That’s not a healthy fantasy. The “following” part is especially creepy. There’s a contact the author link on the site. If you care to contact her it’s just a couple clicks away. No reason to hire a stalker.
Why are you so angry at the author and not at the people who actually made Chrome do this?
I think that the point is to make the author understand exactly why it's creepy, so that next time they write something like this, they actually see the problem.
I'm not advocating this approach. But it's not entirely off base.
It’s way off base because it’s unacceptable in civilized society to pay stalkers to harass people to make a point. Do you seriously think it is ok to hire a PI to follow someone to “make a point”? I find that horrifying.
Further this is a pro-privacy article. The author seems to have a good grasp of the situation and has communicated it well to a general audience. It even concludes with how to turn the feature off and a call to reconsider how your data is being used.
- Therefore the behavior is ok to use on the author
It's not actually ok, but nobody actually did it either. They just made a snarky comment on the internet to make a point, which has a much lower bar than actually doing the thing.
Top two readings on my end are that this is either a person who really didn't want to write this article that was ordered to, or someone who is trying to be maximally defensive of google without actually lying (possibly someone with nostalgia for the 2000-2005 era when they were the internet's good guys).
That'll teach me¹ the folly of badly using irony and hyperbole on the Internet!
You have simultaneously completely missed and directly stated the point I was trying to make. Yes the following part is creepy, and that is exactly what the author is extolling the benefits of in an online context.
Maybe for you² or I the collection of personal & habit data poses little risk when³ it leaks out. My life is too boring and on the beaten track to have much juicy to hide! But there are people for whom the collection and subsequent leaking of data about their habits could be significantly harmful. I do not trust that this system is safe from un-de-personalisation. And from a more selfish & mercenary PoV, if Google are going to use my device to serve their business plan⁴, they aren't doing it for free.
--
[1] no, it won't, if I was going to learn the lesson I would have done so on one of several past occasions…
[2] I presume
[3] not if, when
[4] by blocking third party cookies in their browser and replacing with a system they control, they would gain an advantage over other ad-tech businesses
You need to re-read the article. The author does not extoll the benefits of the tracking Google is doing. It’s actually a pro-privacy article. At least read the final paragraph:
> Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.
You made some edits. It’s strange to me that you seem to be interpreting my position as somehow ok with what Google is doing. I am not ok with that. I don’t think the author of TFA is either.
I think an important point is the data that is sold by these aggregators are leveraged by PIs and will go to show how vulnerable this tech makes everyone. One should consider if they should promote something that they don't also want to be made a victim of.
These things don't change unless someone important becomes a victim, otherwise its just collateral damage.
Sure, the stalker fantasy might be a bit on the nose. Having someone follow you around in a 'physical' sense seems kinda creepy.
But; there is now the robot equivalent of a PI stalker in your browser. It's not a person, but it's still reporting all your browser activity. Except for the 'physical human', that seems like a pretty similar analogy, right? Because for me, it's equally creepy.
You can’t seriously consider an actual human being following you around to be the same as advertising tracking. Those aren’t the same and Google isn’t doing it to “prove a point”. The fantasy was clearly about intimidation in the real world of a real person.
You should really re-read the article. It does not support the change to Chrome or the tracking that Google does.
Chrome is not installed on any desktop computer system by default except for ChromeOS that has 3% market share. Everyone that uses Chrome, went out of their way to download it. I personally don’t use Chrome. But I am assuming your answer is - government should stop people from using their own free will?
For anyone born in the past 12-15 years, their first computing device would almost certainly not be a desktop computer. It would be a mobile device, and Chrome is omnipresent there.
Rather, if the authorities were to do anything, they would regulate to redress the imbalance and give back power to users to control how corporations use their data. There is no voluntary solution as it is, and the state says it exists to protect our rights.
I might even be so bold to say it is necessary because advertising is a mental health problem.
Additionally, the monopoly is enforced because of the manipulative brand recognition. Chrome = Google = The Internet in many people’s heads. It is difficult to break this hold without intervention, but if it could be done that would be great.
If people are using a computer , they are going to Edge and getting on the internet to download Chrome.
It’s a poor excuse that most people think Chrome is the internet. When they are connecting to the internet do you really think they think they are connecting to Google?
> Chrome is not installed on any desktop computer system by default except for ChromeOS that has 3% market share.
Chrome is installed by default on the handheld computer system most people use, with AFAIK over 50% market share. Given that unfortunately more and more people are using handheld computers as their main or even only computing device, this is very relevant.
> Everyone that uses Chrome, went out of their way to download it.
Wasn't one of the drivers for Chrome's popularity that it came bundled with other desktop software people downloaded and installed? These people didn't go out of their way to download and install Chrome, that decision was made for them by someone else.
> government should stop people from using their own free will?
I believe those who want government intervention want it on the browser manufacturer side, not on the user's side.
> Chrome is installed by default on the handheld computer system most people use, with AFAIK over 50% market share
And if that 50% (actually 40% in the US) didn’t have privacy invasive Chrome installed - they would still be running Android which is made by the same company.
A chromium-based browser is installed on every Windows desktop, which gives Google a huge market share under which to effectively and unilaterally dictate web standards
All the annoyed people in this thread, reading this post from their Google Chrome window.
And every time I mention this, I get a ton of excuses, from people that should know better, that they can't leave Google. Boo woo.
There might be exceptions, but to the large majority of other lazy tech users, this is on you. Enshittification doesn't happen in a vacuum. You are passive actors to a shittier web.
I'm annoyed from Firefox because Firefox is currently terrible and not implementing web components and PWAs the right way so they don't become a headless browser for other apps.
you only believe that because it was advertised, by the company who is the number one for advertisement, who would have though?
i workedv with JavaScript performance at a top10 alexa site when that was talked about. chrome and firefox (and ie, heh) were always close. but all the chrome promoters focused on the aspects chrome was better... which changed monthly btw. today chrome string concatenation was fast. tomorrow firefox using string array mergers, etc.
anyway, just created an account to point this wrong assumption out, even if it was posted as a joke. and i did have to solve a challenge (captcha) by the very advertising company we are talking about. sigh.
I have more tabs open on Firefox than chrome and Firefox is faster. Chrome is massively annoying because it unloads the tab all the time. It sucks that I have to use chrome for work.
They were, but in different directions. Poster 1 was sarcastically pointing out an advantage that people claim Chrome has. Poster 2 was pointing out that it isn’t even true.
Yeah, but at least it's not chrome or directly benefits google. If China came out with a web browser, I'd use it. Just to starve American spyware corporations of a tiny bit of data.
Consumer-side activism has never worked. Only through regulatory action will these parasitic advertisers and the harmful industries around it be thwarted.
You made me waste so much time thinking that this well known manifesto was some genius hacker thing but it turned out to be american extremism/terrorism.
I have yet to see an ad this clever! It's 2023 and the ads I'm served are for things I already recently purchased (and don't need to buy again) or similar to something I have recently purchased or a cheap knock-off of something I have recently purchased.
Only tangentially related, but the new hot shit i recently learned about is "conversational commerce", i.e. services that let companies spam their target markets on messengers like whatsapp in situations like the ones you describe, or when a certain product is back in stock etc..
i think it's an absolutely disgusting invasion of supposedly personal communication spaces. My ex "works" (cold messaging people on linkedin) for a startup that does this and i genuinely don't understand how otherwise lovely amazing people can throw their morals under the bus like that and willingly dedicate 40+ hours of their lives week after week to making the world a shittier place.
It isn't wrong. These things COULD be useful - just like a camera in your shower that warns you if you have a problematic-looking mole on your ass could be. We could do amazing things if not for bad actors.
But bad actors are a much harder problem than computer vision or AI or recommendation engines or just about anything else non-adversarial. It's why discovering climate change 50 years ago hasn't led to a solution since. It's why we can't just educate people out of misconceptions, we have to actively fight against people trying to keep them wrong and make them wronger (and it's why institutions have lost so much trust that this becomes possible).
The only defense against this is virtuous people in power, but our system has done an incredible job - somewhat intentionally - of making sure that they aren't. Investors aren't lining up to support someone who'll make 10% less profit to avoid some horrible externality.
This philosophy of thinking every opinion deserves and requires reasoned critique while maintaining decorum is worse than any rude words. The opinion expressed by the author does not deserve more than the two words they were generously afforded.
I don’t see how you can actually read the article with any care and think the author expressed an opinion. They aired a possible counter argument - “ Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well.” In two paragraphs in a much longer piece.
It’s sad that HN has become a place where there is only room for simplistic one sided rants. That actual journalism is met with angry swearing.
Both Chrome and Edge are just hostile towards my browsing experience.
Chrome keeps on rolling out new settings to pilfer my browsing data.
Edge will just kill all of my settings to anything Microsoft wants.
Arc and Firefox are working reliably at the moment but Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime.
> Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime
Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it. I don't know what's going on at Mozilla but they seem to lack any vision, they're just existing as an option without trying to be the best option.
I don't get this Firefox hate. I use Firefox and I'm pretty happy with it and the product's direction. I'm also fine igoring products and features that I'm not interested in.
Just because I'm criticizing something doesn't mean I hate it. I want it to be better, and that's something Firefox needs if it wants to get out of the bottom in terms of usage.
Firefox being at the bottom has nothing to do with what mozilla does. Its because they are going against google that pesters you to download chrome. The network effects of everyone downloading chrome for 15 years. The idea that google is one of the largest companies on earth and mozilla is a rag tag team. Firefox is better. You objectively have a worse experience on chrome or edge or safari. Most users otoh just don’t care about vetting software. They stick to what they know. Go to a library or cafe and be disappointed how many people browse the web with zero ad blocking because they simply don’t know any better.
I think we can recognize at this late date that most 'hate' on the Internet is about a form of fun, one kind of social interaction and self-expression and not about the object of abuse. People express hate about everything under the sun (and on HN).
Most of it is a performative rant, sort of like a stand-up comedy routine. The target is just material for the routine; nobody takes the comedian too seriously. Every HN thread has it.
Firefox is perfectly customizable. You can make the tabs look however you want with a config. Want them out of the way and appear when you mouse over on the left edge? You can have it like that. You also don’t need to use any features you don’t want to use. You can even hide them entirely with a config file.
Earlier today there where an article regarding Microsofts user hostile approach to Edge, and it kinda made me wonder why the reactions towards Chrome seems less extreme. Only reason I can think of it that Chrome is something you inflict upon yourself, and Edge is something Microsoft is attempting to force upon it's users. Still I fail to see that Chrome isn't every bit as awful as Edge.
Sure their sales team is extremely aggressive in corporations and bribe/take out to expensive concerts/sportsball games to sell Power Automate/Office crap.
But from a consumer level, there is almost no reason to use Microsoft services in 2023. Maybe if you are a hardcore gamer and need 60kfpsUltra the day a game is released.
And I was a big fan of Edge when it came out as an alternative to Chrome.
There's always an arc (pun intended) where the product goes the profit-at-all-costs direction and chooses to exploit it's users (looking at Chrome/Edge). I will move away from Arc the moment it chooses to do so without allowing me an alternative way to support them.
You won't regret it and you won't miss anything. Who cares if Chrome is 2% faster on some obscure CSS parsing test? At least you aren't participating in your own psychological manipulation and are resisting WEI.
I would very much miss AppleScript support. It’s the number one reason I (and many users of my tools) don’t touch Firefox. Fortunately, Webkit browsers (Safari, Orion) have got that covered. Unfortunately, Chromium browsers are a more common choice.
Isn't AppleScript effectively dead ? Apple disbanded the Mac Automation team back in 2016 and even fired the product manager AFAIK. At some point in time, it will be removed from the macOS stack and very few people will even notice.
I used to think so too, but I have a ton of experience with AppleScript and its JavaScript counterpart and they’re still solid. JXA’s Objective-C bridge is a convenient way to access macOS APIs in a scripting language.
One might think the introduction of Shortcuts would be the best time to retire AppleScript, yet Apple made it possible to run shortcuts via AppleScript and one of the standard tasks allows you to run AppleScript from within.
Super curious what you're doing with AppleScript + the browser. I definitely prefer Safari over Firefox. Haven't tried Orion yet but I'm super stoked there's another webkit browser.
One example is a script to quickly grab the URL of the current tab and send it to mpv¹ for playing or yt-dlp² for downloading. Or send some JavaScript to that same tab. Or grab the URLs and titles of all tabs in all windows that match a specific domain, close them, and then reopen them together in a brand new window (or save it to clipboard to send someone). Alfred³ has a ton of automations that allow you to do that without having to code it yourself.
Shaving a few microseconds off of internal loading is absolutely meaningless when there are hundreds of milliseconds of third party JavaScript being downloaded, and your browser is actively removong the features that allow you to not do that.
You'd be surprised. I had to chase down a rendering bug that made an infinite scrolling widget unusable on Firefox because it did recursive layout when flexboxes were within a scrollable div. A 2% performance hit can matter in the modern context of hundreds to thousands of layout elements.
That having been said... This is an ecosystem thing and if everybody were to switch to Firefox it would be Chrome that had the weird rendering bugs because people would be testing on Firefox first and wouldn't be using layouts that Firefox didn't handle cleanly.
I don’t know how people find firefox slow. In a straight a to b test maybe, but its never a straight test. Its the test of chrome loading ads or using a crummy ad blocker, vs firefox with ublock origin. The latter will blow the doors off anything on the market.
I am aware. but the browser engine itself is not the issue. The UI is.
I use firefox on my iPad quite a lot and it has the issue of randomly going fully blank when opening a link in a new tab. Or the UI being stuck for a few seconds.
Neither Chrome or Safari ever have these issues for me on iOS.
Same here - quick, much more customizable, with good-quality extensions, great ad-blocking... Haven't looked back in years.
On Android, they also do things right (ok, subjectively) and keep the address/navigation bar on the bottom, so I don't have to stretch to reach the most-commonly used UI elements.
“The intent of the Topics API is to provide callers (including third-party ad-tech or advertising providers on the page that run script) with coarse-grained advertising topics that the page visitor might currently be interested in.”
In other words, google knows so much about the visitor to be screwed by regulation, hence they want to wrap the coarse-grained moat as helpful topics for advertisers. Meanwhile not exactly share that info with anyone to not lose their moat benefit either by removing third-party cookies effectively killing other data harvesters’ moats and become the one true eye of sauron(or politely called as monopoly).
But the topics API is available to anyone to use right? So in a way they're getting rid of their moat because they're closing down a datasource where they are market leading and opening up a new data source where everyone gets access for free.
Just stop being a helpless victim and get rid of this evil corporate spyware and switch to a privacy-respecting browser like Firefox, or even better LibreWolf https://librewolf.net/
It's essential to stay vigilant about online privacy. Consider exploring alternative browsers or privacy settings to protect your digital footprint. Also, check out AC Football Cases
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427227
Top comment on that one was:
Key actionable info: to fix this, go to this URL:
and turn off the toggles on each of the three subpages.Alternatively, go to this URL https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ to fix this permanently.