Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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I liked chrome because it was quick and had useful features. Past tense. C-ya.
Firefox has been as fast as chrome on most websites for some years now. Chrome was quick a decade ago, not anymore...
Man I wish we hadn’t all fallen for the “don’t be evil” motto all those years ago.
This move from Google is utter, utter bullshit.
Well they did remove the don’t be evil motto… guess it didn’t fit their business model
Spoiler: it fits very few company's business models. Some companies can avoid it, if their owners/board want to. But once they take venture capital, or go public, they lose that choice. And that "don't be evil" promise, and most any other, is void.
once they go public, the only goal is MOAR MONEY! reddit will also fall into this trap when/if they go public.
Shareholders can actually sue a business for making ethical decisions that leave money on the table.
Not too long ago I personally discovered their own AI had some interesting insight about this topic... https://sh.itjust.works/post/1176461
We all did. It's very much possible that they really meant it at the time. Most companies start with a lot of idealism. And then they become successful and consequently the target of cronies. They feel like they're entitled to everyone else's earnings and the dark pattern begins.
Is this the part where I act surprised?
I avoided chrome for a long time. Finally I made the switch because FF was getting too slow on old computers back in the day. Lasted for maybe five or six years before I started getting some bad vibes. Why am I letting google run the web browsing software I'm using? This can't/won't be good in the future.
At least five years ago I made the switch back to Firefox, and haven't looked back. I love having adblocking that works (I use a router level ad block and ublock origin just in case to ensure I block almost every ad on the internet lol).
I'm honestly surprised it took people this long to decide to move away from Chrome.
Firefox really became awesome after the quantum update. It really is the best browser to date imo.
Agreed.
My personal browser history:
- IE - came with Windows, before I didn't really know what a browser was; we also had Mozilla, but only my dad used it
- Firefox - as a teenager, I think I started at 1.5 and used until 3.5 or so
- Chrome - it was faster than Firefox, so I used and recommended it to a lot of people; this is also when I started to care about web standards (tried to get IE users to use Chrome)
- Opera - used for a couple years until they announced 15, which was going to be Chrome based
- Firefox - I used Firefox off and on throughout, and remember the switch to rapid releases, and I've used it nearly exclusively (aside from Web Dev testing) since 2013 or so
Once Opera switched to Chrome-based, I started heavily recommending Firefox. So I saw the writing on the wall about 10 years ago, and now I'm stubborn about avoiding Chrome where possible. I hope others choose to switch too.
but this is Google, and they control Chrome, and this probably still won't make people switch to Firefox
Yeah. People just simply will not do things that are in their best interest. This is literally the biggest issue that was had with IE. Inertia.
All of my web interaction at this point happens through my Android phone, Google has me by the balls anyway.
There is Firefox for Android. You're still on Android, but you can have some control left.
Unfortunately Firefox doesn't have a replacement for the "Android System WebView" component, so any app that embeds a browser component (and oh boy is that a lot of them) will still be using Chrome.
There's a relevant ticket here: https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview/issues/167
It should be possible to have a shim that allows Mozilla's "GeckoView" component to implement the API, but - per that ticket, at least - most Android ROMs won't allow alternatives to the Google one.
The Firefox browser is genuinely great, but it's so far from possible to replace Chrome with it everywhere a browser is used.
You can't uninstall Chrome most likely, but maybe your stock/rom will allow you to "disable" it.
Good idea. Let me disable it and see what breaks! ( i have firefox and inbrowser installed on lineageos )
Also Firefox Focus, which forgets your browsing history when you close it or hit the trashcan button.
Google has me by the balls anyway.
GrapheneOS? Are you on a Pixel?
Lineageos+microg is a useable de-googled android. I'm using it now without any google services.
So they're baking user behavior tracking into the browser but calling it "privacy"? What's the difference between this and colors cookie tracking?
They say this is meant to be an eventual replacement for tracking via cookies, but there is literally no way this won't become supplemental to current tracking methods. And I think they know that.
While I don't agree with what Google does, they want to remove third-party cookies entirely next year. So it's indeed a replacement, not supplemental.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page.
The blog post says the ad platform is hitting "general availability" today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users.
This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.
Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an "ad privacy" feature has been rolled out to them and enabled.
That's actually what started this whole process: Apple dealt a giant blow to Google's core revenue stream when it blocked third-party cookies in Safari in 2020.
Google says it will block third-party cookies in the second half of 2024—presumably after it makes sure the "Privacy Sandbox" will allow it to keep its profits up.
The original article contains 588 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Gonna be hilarious when we hear about it lowering productivity at work.
Gonna be hilarious when hackers figure out how to hijack where this reports back to. Particularly since Google recently got rid of most of their senior devs you know, the ones who can actually make secure code.
The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an "alternative" tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can't just not be spied on.
Librewolf!!!!!
Any news on when this hits chromium?
probably already has. They put things into chromium first, then move them to chrome usually.
And then hoodwink people into upgrading with the promise of Material You themes 🙄
I hope Chromium-based Vivaldi is still okay. I'm pretty invested in some of its features (though I have to admit it is getting more bloaty).