Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine
ha.x0r.be
ha.x0r.be
Frankly, I am amazed every day that Ungoogled Chromium, Firefox, & DDG.co are as good as they are. (aka: slightly inferior to Google regarding product polish, but truly "good enough" 98% of the time - without selling my future data down the drain)
(edited: to fix typos)
I really want to switch from Chrome -> Firefox for dev work but my MBP’s battery already lasts nowhere near “10 hours”...
And if you're looking to do dev work, that usually means at minimum an editor, a server, and a browser, which seems like too much to run unplugged.
The resources consumed by any web server I can think of are entirely inconsequential.
Anyway, for now, if you're on macOS, set gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config for a large increase in energy efficiency at the cost of some visual effects.
i usually prefer the desktop version of websites since mobile often times looks more awkward on tablet. but with ff i almost have no choice.
That being said, I use the gentoo chromium package that builds chromium from source and rips the codecs out of the binary chrome release.
Here are some examples I can think of:
- to stream live webcast and prerecorded webcasts through a Continuing Legal Ed provider, using their (proprietary?) web app.
- Vimeo.
- NFL.com but not live streamed any games.
- some of the 2018 Winter Olympics, including live stream.
- videos but no live stream on the Premier League and Bundesliga websites.
- Twitch, both live and recorded
However, I have never tried Netflix or Hulu or any other pay provider.
I'm sure I've watched videos on other sites that I'm not thinking of right now, like BBC, etc.
I have never had any other issues, but I only use Chromium for a few things, like expressly watching videos, and using a few specific websites. Otherwise, I use Firefox and FF Nightly as my main browsers, for almost everything except watching videos and streams and also anything with audio. For all that stuff, I have had nothing but great experiences with Chromium.
> I have never tried Netflix or Hulu or any other pay provider.
... except YouTube Red/subscription and Amazon Prime Video, which are obviously both pay-fors, but I mentioned those in the previous comment so I neglected to include them in the list above.
Both of those have worked perfectly well in Chromium on my Gentoo install.
(Though frankly, if you're using a Mac, Safari should be your browser of choice, if only for privacy reasons.)
At best this is a strong exaggeration, and at worse completely wrong.
What privacy protections does Safari have that Firefox doesn't? (Keeping in mind the vast extension store - I include extensions like NoScript within the umbrella of "Firefox")
Desperately need the scrolling in Firefox to feel like scrolling in the rest of the apps.
And I would very much like easy tab switching by swiping across the title bar thing, and the new tab/new incognito/back button behaviour.
Pls Moz pls
Why didn't they do this straight away? It's extremely bothersome having one app scroll differently to the others
Scrolling is irrelevant for me.
It's as fast as Chrome (if not faster) as it uses the same rendering engine Blink; has all the features you mention; has builtin Ad and privacy controls; is developed by Brendan Eich's company (Mozilla's co-founder); but is fully open source and a fork away, if the company starts pulling odd moves.
Now I can't remember why I went back to Chrome
What an introduction to the repo of that readme.
I wonder, how much it differs from SRWare Iron or Iridium
One common issue is some sites (google’s gallery.io even), only really associate based with the first account logged into chrome, or the OAuth flow breaks.
Now if you log out of google, to set the base login to your work email for example, it logs you out of chrome also, so there goes your password manager/bookmarks/cookies etc.
I’m still figuring the best strategy, currently I just made a second chrome profile to separate but it’s super time consuming/annoying.
I feel like it was a major change without any heads up.
The thought of switching between two windows just to copy a bookmark or a note from another browser add on, seems crazy in 2018. You can’t have tabs from different chrome profiles in one window, which is understandable, but wasn’t really a concern before this change.
For example, I most definitely prefer my bookmarks and browser history to be separate. Let's just say I might blush if the location bar autocompleted some sites from my personal history if I was entering a URL in front of someone at work...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
+ Gmail, Drive, Google Calendar = Chrome
+ Sites I trust = Firefox
+ Sites I do not know or trust = Firefox Private browsing (or Firefox Focus on Android)
This involves cautiously copying links from browser to browser, and if I make a mistake I have a scorched Earth policy of the history and cookies.
The only thing that is consistent is that they all have Pinboard so I can bookmark as I go along.
Over the years this feels more and more like the safest thing to do, to compartmentalise according to trust, and trust Google only with whatever you want tracked.
Wait, what? Do you have a source for this?
- Firefox incognito and Bing for sites I dont trust and/or wanting to watch any videos I want (tv shows, movies, porn, etc). Bing is miles better anyhow for this because of googles DMCA takedowns. Theres no risk of XSS because firefox is sandboxed and I have nothing important there.
- Firefox I occasionally use for devdocs.io and some documentation resources.
- Google for everything else. I have too many plugins though here though.
I am debating on using a 3rd browser bc I do occasionally scrape things and keeping track what I am being tracked on is hard to remember. Id rather not run the risk of getting banned anywhere. At the sametime, getting tracked through cookies is convenient to me so I dont have to relogin etc.
So I also run a scorched earth policy. Possibly using a 4th browser for seperating bank logins, social media etc on a different browser entirely. Granted I 2FA everything
VPN for everything, I turn it off only during gaming. Rather not deal with my ISP and net neutrality implications.
I dont care what google or microsoft knows about me in all honesty. There are so many ways to fingerprint users on the web that its almost impossible not to get tracked, unless you took extraorindary measures against it.
Anything I do on my phone I assume is compromised, managing app permissions is too much work. I dont take photos with potential blackmail material. Same with anything I use chrome with, I use a lot of extensions. They always get compromised.
BUT -- I know a lot of regular (non-technical) users who are terrified of logging into shared/public computers with their Google accounts, because they can't tell the difference between logging in/out of Gmail and logging in/out of Chrome, and they've experienced/heard horror stories of people leaving one logged in when they log out of the other.
I just tried it, and logging out of my Gmail also clearly logs me out of my Chrome (with a big message), which feels like a big win for peace of mind for most users.
So as much as it bothers me as a "power user"... I actually think this is a big improvement in conceptual simplicity for the average user. (And power users can figure out how to use multiple profiles for multiple Google accounts.)
There was a story [1] here just a few days ago where the culprit seemed to be that Chrome Sync had been set up with the daughter's EDU account and it was saving passwords for the parent's banking account, and presumably this will help avoid that kind of mix-up.
I'm terrified of logging into any site on a public computer.
Wait, logging into a Google site on Chrome now logs you into the browser?!!!?!
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/10432883138834513...
https://mobile.twitter.com/x0rz/status/1040537928127135744
Google calls the feature "Identity consistency between browser and cookie jar" and a Chrome representative on the official Google Chrome Help Forum confirmed that this is the intended behavior.
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/08/disable-the-sign-out-link-...
Earlier HN discussion:
So when I need Gmail or Google Maps, I have to open it in a private window. Not very convenient, so I don't use them often.
By the way, if you use Chrome and haven't changed the default search engine from Google, then your browser pings Google every time you open a new tab. You can check it yourself with Developer Tools: a new tab page is loaded from Internet and it sends cookies. It can be fixed by creating and choosing as default a new search engine with Google's URL, but using other name (for example, Gogol instead of Google). Then Chrome will load its start page from disk, not from Internet.
This is what the average user wants. All complex functionality has been put in the background. Cross-platform integration has been perfected.
Give it a year and users around the world will no longer think of Chrome as a browser, but simply as the interface to the (Google-)Web.
With Chrome Google has succesfully defeated Apple, MS and Mozilla.
And Google will continue to do everything to make people stop thinking of Chrome as a browser. They want you to think of it like a window into your online life, a window that is the same no matter where you are or what device you use.
It is a good browser, it may be even the best for some things, but it ain't so good compared to rest I will stop using Firefox, especially on mobile.
The more they push, the less I use their services (openstreet|opentopo, duck).
People make the decision between different ecosystems, and Apple and Google are the biggest. Apple has a tight control over Safari on iOS. Safari has been defeated on Desktop though.
I know, it's behind on some features/standards though.
Safari desktop is quite dead.
Many websites are barely usuable in Chrome but acceptable in Safari.
When we first launched Chrome, Sundar said: “We think of the browser as the window to the web.” A decade later, it’s still the tool people use to access all of the websites and applications that help them do what they want to do. As Chrome heads into the next 10 years, we want to expand that window—so you can see more and do more."
- https://www.blog.google/perspectives/rahul-roy-chowdhury/hap...
Quoting the exact phrase gets you a similar result, though.
And that's a terrible loss for human civilization. They are going to destroy the open, decentralized Web to build a walled garden for Google to cater to some hypothetical "average user". It's truly absurd.
The funny thing is the only country free from that (Google-)Web is China.
I don't find Google to be the best search experience anymore. It gives me too many ads and partnership deals. I use searx.me and it gives me good old fashioned organic web search with results that are just as good.
Plenty of alternatives exist to their other services as well which only get better every year. I'm now convinced Google has a hard fight ahead of them just to keep what they've already got.
I'd say it's what the average user was tricked into. In first years of existence Chrome was smuggled as "additional software offer" along with default browser setting in many software installers - that's how it mainly became popular. The typical computer user wouldn't notice the difference of new web browser presence (tho, the initial panic - "where are my bookmarks/passwords" could and did happen) and thus, as you're saying will accept that Chrome is the Web interface.
> With Chrome Google has succesfully defeated Apple, MS and Mozilla.
I'd say they managed to accomplish what MS couldn't with IE years ago - they had dominant position but not the quality and that's what Google with Chrome has achieved. I'm still "crying" after Opera decision of moving from Presto to Webkit/Blink - without it there's little to no competition at all between two remaining meaningful players. Nowadays it's Firefox with Gecko/Quantum vs Chrome along with all its's copies using Blink; an artificial homogenization of browsers market has happened - stimulated by shady marketing actions (mentioned bundling within installers).
That says something about how out of touch Google is at the moment.
It's sufficiently reliable a behaviour, however, that it's eminently bankable. Most especially in Silicon Valley's surveillance capitalism world.
Data are liability. They're long-term toxic waste. But as with earlier forms of toxic waste, they return profits to those who ignore, conceal, or confuse as to the true deferred costs.
There is something there that makes it comparable to the early nature conservation movements. Fast forward a couple generations and nearly 99% of the population is pretty convinced on climate change and that we've messed up quite severely - but not enough to stop messing up.
As the article says, the web browser is the most obvious component, but it also includes Google Cloud Print [0], Google Talk/Hangouts [1], Google Earth [2], Google Music [3], Gmail Offline [4], etc.
In some sense it's the spiritual successor to Google Desktop [5], which used to fill a similar role.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Print
[1] https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2014/10/notification-re...
[2] visit https://www.google.com/earth/ in a browser other than Chrome
[3] https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/4627259
A browser should just render pages (incl. JavaScript), and save cookies if you need it to. Beyond that, there's nothing else it needs to do. Round about Netscape 4 and IE6, browsers were functionally complete. Since then they've just been gilding the lily and creating an artificial 'features race' between the browser vendors.
Sometimes, simpler IS better.
Still trying to figure out how to control animated gif's in webkit2.
I've been keeping an eye on qutebrowser[1] though which offers either up to date [2]qtwebengine or webkit (qtwebengine is the browser engine of chromium minus all the google services and other garbage).
Because if we never did we'd all be stuck with mozilla 1.
I admire the determination, but why not just use Firefox instead?
1. People may wish to not have activity on multiple services connected or associated. This was certainly true for me when I found that G+ and YouTube accounts, independently created, though sharing a common email address, were conjoined.
2. Google is put in a position of advantage as regards online identity. This persists across several dimensions:
a). Google apps and services share an authenticator with the browser itself. Other parties must implement their own authentication schemes, unless ...
b). Third-party applications utilise the Google Chrome authenticator, in which case
i). Those third parties leak user identity, activity, and all but certainly fraud and abuse detection, including both false negative and false positive determinations, to Google.
ii). Other browser venders, including Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Opea, and others, are rendered as second-class citizens from an authentication standpoint.
iii). Consequences of a loss or freeze of an account now extend to multiple third-party services.
c). Loss or freeze of an account locks people out of their own web browser and all that entails; cookies, bookmarks, history, extensions, configurations, extensions-related data (say; Zotero).
3. The centralisation, stakes, and attractiveness of attacking people's Google identities rises yet higher. Data exfiltration, access to browser and local system state, denial-of-access attacks, and more.
The privacy, anti-trust, security, conflict-of-interest, general risk, and other implications simple boggle the mind. That this was quietly rolled out with no apparent announcement or consideration tremendously reduces my already greatly-diminished trust in Google, its leadership, and its stewardship of critical Web infrastructure and protocols.
Chromium is likewise affected.
What were they thinking?
Were they thinking?
I have been a loyal Chrome user since pretty much launch, because it was the fastest browser and mostly seemed to stay that way over the years. I understand why Google is doing this from a monopolistic “control all the things” perspective, and this will probably increase engagement in the near term, but I think this is a very poor strategic decision given the rising tide of trust issues surrounding Big Tech these days. Privacy is such a hot button issue now. Facebook is rightly getting raked over the coals in front of Congress for its rampant neglect/abuse of privacy issues. Apple is crushing it with its privacy-first positioning and hammering FB and Google publicly on their tracking-based revenue models. I understand that Google can’t change its underlying business model overnight, but why double down on more enforced tracking? It makes them an even bigger target just in time for an oncoming storm.
Time to start shopping for a new browser. Thanks for everything, Chrome.
But I don't think this Chrome release changed anything with regards to that? It's been the case for more than a decade that if you're logged into gmail you're also logged into search, maps, apps, etc. And if you log out of one, you log out of all of them.
Whatever workflow you've been using to keep logged into gmail while avoiding being logged in to the other Google sites would still work exactly the same way. (E.g. I'm always logged into gmail and chrome, but do 99% of my searches and Youtube watching from incognito windows, so they don't get associated with my account).
"Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility." --Robin Morgan
That all these things are good or neutral for Google.
So I use one container for Google properties (gmail, YouTube, etc.), a different one for social networks other than Facebook (Twitter, Reddit, etc.), and a third for shopping (eBay, Amazon, etc.)
You can teach Firefox to always open certain URLs in a particular container so smile.amazon.com brings up the shopping container, twitter.com brings up the social one, and so on.
I've been a little sad about losing some of the old Firefox extensions but Quantum has been great.
As far as I know, Facebook Container is just more comfortable to use.
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/multi-account-co...
That's a bunch of work. The more complicated or fast changing the sites in a container, the more work.
Facebook Container comes with the curation done by its maintainers. This is probably less trouble than it might be because it's not as though developers who use Facebook are unheard of.
After one day I had it up and running.
- Google - Facebook - Work - NSFW - Misc
Opening up every google service in its own google container seems like a recipe to forget once and leave google cookies in your shopping container, for example
Let Chrome scan your computer for malware? I wonder what is the cost for a free malware...
I use an ad blocker to block analytics and advertising beacons.
I want to be signed into gmail and google properties, but not Chrome. I don't want my history to be sync'd to Google's servers for advertising.
Now you can't use Chrome if you want your privacy anymore.
(Edit: remove double negative)
Without competition ultimately the user does not have choice and you get invasive and arbitrary behavior like this, all pushed under the guise of 'helping' some mythical average user and it will keep getting worse.
There are professional security fud mongers always pushing 'no alternative' solutions that somehow always end up benefiting centralized corporate interests. The simple fact is the tech community have lost control of the web, standards, privacy, user interests either by naivete or collusion to adware and spyware companies masquerading as tech companies.
Still mystified why such huge numbers of people - also among the well informed - find it a worthwhile trade handing over the generality of their life to this monolith in return for some perceived marginal gains in speed og useability or whatever.
No, I don't use the search either, and I block their Analytics snooper, whichever guise it appears in (font, tagmanager, gstatic etc. etc.).
It's eminently doable. So call me a luddite.
This way in my regular browsing there's no Facebook or Google cookies reporting on what websites I visit.
It's really easy and doesn't impact at all on workflow, if you want your Gmail you just click the user button, and click Google. You could even set that user's homepage to Gmail.
But if you want to be signed out of fb and goog in your regular browsing, I think it's the way to go
That and I hear Firefox has a Facebook container, which is probably the same approach
If you're logged into Google properties (independent of browser), Google can already track you across most of the internet, via their Ads and Analytics embedded in a rather large percentage of web sites. If you don't want Google to track you on non-Google web sites, then you really need to use separate browser profiles (or separate browsers). Have one profile for Google properties and a separate one for other things.
Ironically, Chrome has really good multi-profile support. It's easy to have different Chrome windows running different profiles, each of which has all its own settings, storage, login state, etc. Give each one a different theme to make it easy to tell which profile you're using.
Firefox has a concept of profiles but AFAICT you can only run one profile at a time. :(
For multiple profiles (for different combinations of browser extensions), I use this:
alias ff='firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote &'You can have one primary firefox instance, and any number of instances that have the "--no-remote" flag set, each running different profiles. Any links you click outside of firefox (e.g. xdg-open) will use the primary firefox.
The 'firefox --no-remote -P' trick has worked for longer than chrome has existed and I've been using it to juggle about 15 profiles since firefox 3, usually having 4 different firefox instances open with 4 different profiles.
The more user-friendly way to do this is with firefox containers though.
Even if I hadn't already had a terrible experience with their login feature, it is a privacy violation. I haven't agreed to have my browser history and other private data uploaded to an advertising company. The argument that most users want this is flawed: many would object to giving Google access to this without permission. Maybe the EU will step in?
After this latest folly from Google, I may replace Chromium with Brave on the desktop too.
(And while you're at it, do the same for Facebook.)
If you don't trust Google, don't use Google services. If you need to sign into different Google accounts, use a different browser.
Apple makes Safari to sell its Macs and iPhones.
Microsoft makes IE/Edge to sell its Windows licenses.
Google makes Chrome to sell its advertising.
- It has amazing features like tab stacking;
- super fast and lightweight;
- also uses the Blink rendering engine;
- is compatible with most of Chrome extensions; AND
- takes privacy seriously.
Give it a try: https://vivaldi.com
Converted a friend too and I am anoying some other people to start using it.
In fact, if you reset your password you lose all your sync data as a result[0].
[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ive-lost-my-firefox-syn...