Why I’m done with Chrome
blog.cryptographyengineering.com
blog.cryptographyengineering.com
Adsense was the first breach in trust for me, when they banned my account for no reason and ruined any chance of every monetizing my content...since they are basically a monopoly in that area. Getting off their blacklist, is literally impossible.
Then came Chrome and Android, which grew to collect so much information on people that it was genuinely baffling.
Then my agency work and work with previous Google employees telling me about Google sales tactics to SMBs in Adwords. Intentionally not focusing on ROI because they knew the companies had such high burn out rates. They would, and continue, to milk them for whatever they are worth. They know the company is statistically going to go out of business in a year, so just take them for whatever they are worth! Luckily agencies act as a middle man, if not for that, the abuse would be so much more widespread. But if you deal directly with Google ad sales (and this is something I never knew existed tbh) they will intentionally screw you if you are under a certain spend.
Now they have growing and creeping monopolies in advertising, and their only real competitors are Amazon and Facebook... which to me are both on or near the level of sleaze that Google has crept to.
Now things are accelerating, with Chrome's increasing intrusion, Android's increasing intrusion, deals with Chinese governments to stifle freedom of expression and speech. Google AMP being a closed system that's only goal is to push Google into controlling more of the web.
Add to that, let me preface that I am not a Trump voter and never will be and probably lean more towards the politics of Google leadership, but the video that leaked out (it sucks it leaked to nutty Brietbart and not a real new organization, maybe it would have been taken a lot more seriously) of the Google town hall also baffled me. I think Facebook might even take their moral obligation of objectivity more seriously than Google...and that's a serious problem. Algorithms can determine electoral outcomes, and Google is one of the top tech lobbyists in Washington. Doesn't that bother anyone?
This is no longer a company I can advocate anyone using. Unfortunately because of their monopoly status in advertising I have to deal with them.
Here's hoping that Trump in his second term hits the digital monopolies with the anti-trust legislation they have been flaunting for the last 10 years.
Just because they are somewhat closer to me socially doesn't mean I want to sell out my freedoms to them.
One only has to look at what the Murdoch paper monopolies did to any politician who dared stand against him: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/cancer-eating-the-he...
He could solve that problem by simply ceasing to say and do dumb things. I'm not convinced the media is out to get him, he just shoots himself in the foot about 20 times / day. I wish the news were focused more on policy than politics (though not sure that would help him), but people like drama and news orgs like money.
as much as I dislike trump, i do think some of the negative media coverage of him is over the top, and does its part in destroying credibility of real issues. my own gut would be on those '20 times/day' things, probably 5-10 of them are overblown or taken out of context (the 'fist bump' on 9/11 was overblown, imo, when you look at the complete footage and context).
agreed, but it becomes a bit of "boy who cried wolf!" If everything is 'over the top' and 'worst ever', etc, then nothing is.
there's legitimately enough to be covering about policy and real political issues at stake - the 'fist bump' coverage and 'outrage' from anyone was worse than trivial - it gives cover and legitimacy to the folks who are on the fence about 'fake news' charges.
But should we just allow the normalization of such behavior? I don't think so; I think we should continue to call him out on it.
>there's legitimately enough to be covering about policy and real political issues at stake - the 'fist bump' coverage and 'outrage' from anyone was worse than trivial - it gives cover and legitimacy to the folks who are on the fence about 'fake news' charges.
Agreed.
what behaviour?
let opinion journalism call him out for stuff that is opinionably bad. let fact-based news call him out on 'real' stuff. again, i go to the fist-bump thing (but the 'koi fish food' thing last year fits too) - there's no need for that to be covered by the same folks and with the same level of coverage as state of the union speeches or cabinet appointments.
The rich will not save us from themselves. But they will put a nice rainbow flag up with the wages they stole from us.
I really really wish Microsoft or someone outside of the duopoly, were more powerful in the mobile and search space so people had a choice. I do have an Android phone, but only because Apple is so locked down that I essentially have to use their services, and I don't use Google services outside of their store...but I know just by having an Android phone Google is tracking me.
As for advertisers, I know for a fact that some SMBs/agencies don't serve on Bing, not because the traffic isn't there...but because it's hard to manage so many bids and pacing in so many different platforms. Google makes it so simple, even if the ROI is slightly lower by not using Bing, etc. It's maddening, it is certainly a very monopolistic company.
they did finally start to take ownership of experience with the surface stuff, and I'm tempted to move back to that world in 2019 with a surface book of some stripe.
Nadella won't because of MS hate.
Lots of naive developers are drunk on the false open source android story and won't apps for their OS - e.g. snapchat founder refused to build an app for WP. And kept sending take down notices for community built clients. This is why MS keeps pursing web apps and "universal apps."
Ms spent at billions in payment (bribes) to developers to build WP apps, yet.
Microsoft of today would never have created Windows. They have tried and failed multiple times to turn Windows into a store only OS.
Their OS was unjailbreakable far more so than IOS. WP's inability to share apps is the major reason why WP failed in my own country. Even till today, people still beam android / windows apps.
Windows 10 auto updates is another clue that MS is clueless about data costs. I'll bet, more people left Windows for autoupdating than for being insecure.
PERSONALLY... I think MS could mount another shot at the phone market - but they'd have to be serious, commit long term, and be willing to lose out $ for a while to gain marketshare.
I don't recall them spending billions on getting WP apps built. If anything, the anecdotes I heard were mixed - both cheap funding of lots of stupid one-off apps to try to inflate numbers, but cheaping out on funding for established apps with existing users/communities. In neither case did I ever read about billions being spent in those pursuits.
Again, I think there's probably one more chance MS has to make a run for this - new leadership since the ballmer days, commitment to manage their own hardware, and a public commitment to long-term investment in that ecosystem... - lots of folks are waking up to the privacy issues in mobile - apple has a story, google doesn't have a terribly good one. Lots of smaller/secondtier players in ios world are fed up with 30% fees. MS could address privacy and fee issues, and attract/keep new market. But... we don't want another 'playsforsure/zune' situation. :/
I don't think privacy is a mass market appeal. Here's an experiment you could do. Stop a few random persons on the road or on the train and ask their opinion about equivax, Cambridge Analytica, and Chrome's recent privacy violations and I'm sure you'll get blank stares on 90 out of 100 people.
As for developer fees - the jumping CEO reduced the app registration fee. No one noticed. He gave the OS for free - OEMs didn't bite.
Nadella recently reduced the their store fee from 30% to 15%. And you didn't know about it.
I feel that focusing completely on consumers would get MS 95% of the push it needs. The wishes of external parties is what gave us the DRM, Youtube's content ID and much more - all anti-consumer.
Developers complained about losing revenue to piracy - voila. Microsoft built WP so that it was impossible to get apps outside the store.
Apple has "arguably" been about consumers and we can see where that led them. IMO, fuck everyone else, design consumer friendly stuff. At least that's how Google search, android, and gmail began.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/campaigns/micr...
But repeat the same experiment asking them about Facebook listening to their conversations (whether true or not, it's now believed) and about adverts tracking them around the web and those same people will start complaining vociferously and tell you how creepy it is.
Innovators' curse maybe? They were pioneers in voice assistant, smart phone and tablets. Alas!
MS has begun to coast with AR - hololens, no new version in a while. Apple is well positioned to take the lead here.
As for IOT, I feel the current MS won't win. Windows 10's constant need to phone number will wear battery down and consume previous bandwidth.
Which is well-earned, they saved it for decades. What fueled their growth before, now is working against them.
> Lots of naive developers are drunk on the false open source android story
If you think leopard can change its spots, it's you who is naive. The arrogance with handling Windows 10 should tell you, that they didn't change; they will abuse their position when they think you have no other option. The "naive developers" as you call them know that and will not do anything to put Microsoft into that position.
> Ms spent at billions in payment (bribes) to developers to build WP apps, yet.
Yes, they did. They thought that their existing partners will help them. Fortunately, they were wrong.
> They have tried and failed multiple times to turn Windows into a store only OS.
Yes, developers giving Microsoft more power over themselves. What could possibly go wrong... It's a good thing they failed.
OS Store is not the thing that keeps Windows used.
> Their OS was unjailbreakable far more so than IOS.
That's another "feature" nobody asked for.
> Windows 10 auto updates is another clue that MS is clueless about data costs. I'll bet, more people left Windows for autoupdating than for being insecure.
That's just a symptom of hubris, mentioned above.
I recall Ms was banned from building their own hardware. Just like how Car companies are banned from retailing their own cars in the US.
I want to touch on this because in my experience this is less true than it seems on the surface.
The contacts app and calendar app support carddav/caldav respectively- photos use the standard camera interface (mpd?) the things that suck are that you need to use Xcode to develop for it, and you need iTunes to put music on the default music player app (however using plex w/ sync has been my cross platform solution for a while- and honestly I don’t know many people who aren’t using Spotify)
Am I missing something?
On the one hand I understand the complaints about Apple's "walled garden," but I've pretty effortlessly connected to both Google Calendar and Exchange services. (And I don't use Apple's own Calendar app anyway, although I configure the calendars through the iOS system preferences so they integrate with all the Apple stuff relatively gracefully.) I do file syncing with Dropbox, which integrates with Apple's Files app pretty nicely as of iOS 11. I keep passwords in 1Password, which always integrated fairly well with iOS and does even better as of iOS 12. I get a lot of ebooks in DRM-free ePub format from various vendors and can just open them directly in iBooks. (I suppose using iTunes is still a problem, although iTunes Match and, now, Apple Music actually made syncing pretty painless for me. After the initial pain of moving from iTunes Match, which worked great, to Apple Music, which did...not...work great for its first year. But I digress.)
More apropos to the linked post, I trust Apple with my data rather more than most companies I deal with. They not only don't treat it as a profit center, they seem to prefer to minimize the amount of personally-identifiable and unencrypted information they deal with. I do still use some Google services, but I prefer to use Apple's equivalents when possible -- and I've been using Safari instead of Chrome for years. A lot of people think I'm nuts for that, but occasionally I feel a bit vindicated...
For years I've used an Android phone with no Google account attached - I simply skipped the OOB assistant and then created an account pointing on my company's Exchange, where all my mail/calendaring/contacts were. For maps, I used Sygic, which you can purchase outside Play Store.
Yes, I did lose Google Play, Youtube, Hangouts, but exactly that was the intent - not using Google services. Today, it would be even easier, with the existence F-Droid providing third-party apps.
Had to uninstall DNS66 and F-Droid because of it.
I'm fairly annoyed on Android that I can't uninstall some stock Google apps.
Within a few months of Gmail going public it changed from gmail.com to gmail.google.com or google.com/gmail or some such thing, and I knew instantly they had bamboozled everyone.
That was years ago, the rest has been the expected trend.
The domain gmail.com became unavailable in Germany due to trademark disputes [...]
To think we were so naïve.
I ran such an agency. As someone who is proficient in PPC, the AdSense sales team was inexcusably poor at their jobs. They'd offer to setup campaigns for free with thousands of barely relevant keywords and would push upping the budget past what was reasonable.
Their tactics were so bad for my clients that I stopped accepting their "free" help and did the campaigns in house. I hate to think how many agencies simply went along with their advice to the detriment of their clients.
Worse is when you get billed for clicks for inactive campaigns, even ones that were never enabled.
[1] https://firebase.google.com/support/guides/disable-analytics
I care about that information and I’m glad they removed your apps, maybe now you’ll start taking privacy more seriously.
I think the point is that you should be aware of it. It is your application after all. Yes, what Google does is weird, but the app developer needs to be more careful in general what 3rd party code they load.
On the other hand, I understand you. Probably you do your due diligence when you load some random dependency but you (like everyone else) used to expect better from Google. Not anymore I guess.
Im just curious
I've noticed the straight search results making a marked decline in quality over the past few months. If one of the keywords within your search is anything remotely profitable, it will drown out all other terms. Then the search results ended after ~4 pages.
Definitely changed from the Google I "grew up on."
(And, as much as Matt Cutts might deny it, it seems inconceivable that Google do not use revenue generated by advertising as a search signal...)
This is my biggest gripe with Google's search engine. It used to be that you could specify exactly what you want to get and it would find it for you. Now it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, so it refuses to show me things I know exist and that every other search engine will find with very simple, straight-forward search terms.
That could have a very simple explanation: There is no Wikipedia page for "Gun Rights". There is however a Wikipedia page for "Right to Keep and Bear Arms" which is exactly what appears in the Wikipedia box on the right or as the first Wikipedia article when you search for "right to bear arms", "right to guns" and "arms rights".
The philosophical question is if a search engine return what people want or should return return what is most biased for truth and informative.
The bot uses data, sure, but like the humans it also--
* Chooses what data it uses based on... * The rules that make up its processing which in turn are... * Influenced by the peculiarities of its creator(s).
Those last two can't be emphasized enough. A subject matter expert, for example, will choose data differently from a layman, who will choose data differently from someone completely ignorant on the subject. Someone driven to keep certain data suppressed will choose data differently from someone driven to research the matter, who in turn will choose data differently than someone wholly disinterested in the topic. Unless a person builds a bot with a 'willingness' to question both its data and its own programming (and perhaps even its creator) to present the best linkage the web has to offer, all bots will be mere dummy proxies of the creator programming it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_rights is a valid link, and seems like the obvious wikipedia page to deem relevant for that phrase. And Bing gets it right.
I have no reason to think it's some dark conspiracy, but it's certainly a pretty silly failure of their vaunted algorithms. Are there a lot of searches for common phrases where a Wikipedia page exists and Google returns a different Wikipedia page as the top item?
It's a bit like searching for "USA" and getting a result for "Canada"; just because the canonical wikipedia URL is "United_states" doesn't mean that a page about a different country is more relevant. :)
Put a finger on the scales, show us how it’s done.
Modeling this behavior, without tilting the scales completely is perhaps impossible.
I’m interested in seeing how such code could work, while scaling and not creating artifacts. I can’t think of anyway for such code to be deployed without breaking search and letting attackers gain even more
I totally agree, it could be as simple as the algorithm finding more usages of 'gun' and 'rights' on the Gun Control page than on the Right to Bear Arms page and basing its decision solely off that. However it could be as complex as skewed data in a deep learning model that takes in every users search term and subsequent selected result. No one really knows exactly how its decided except Google's own engineers.
The fact that most other, very similar search terms provide the expected results suggests to me that it is not an intentional misdirection, otherwise the other search terms about guns would also show the Gun Control page.
This is coming right up when you look for "gun rights" on DuckDuckGo.
I don't see the issue.
It is known that Google employees have the capability to skew search results politically, just not whether they do it in specific circumstances (of course it would be robustly denied)
https://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUKKCN1M1041
(For those that say “good” remember that tomorrow this could be used against you. I am certain it was used against Bernie for example)
That would be important if it were true. Can you back it up?
Same thing with Youtube, the algorithms seem to optimize for the lowest common denominator and all the interesting niche stuff is lost in thr noise.
Some of the solution is to do a better job of actively searching for good content instead of waiting for the algorithms to recommend it. But that itself has gotten harder too. Finding good content curators is hard.
It's bizarre to see "video you watched 4 times 5 years ago" on your homepage. Every day.
Google has been doubling down on this direction progressively--their justification being that people game the long tail by producing a lot of low quality, highly niched content.
There may be no real solution to this within the context of Google's PageRank-inspired algorithm and this may be an opportunity for disruption.
EDIT: To clarify, why is that list so bad?
Google seems to like to include results appropriate for common phrases if you include only part of the phrases. My guess is that the "american" in "american inventors" brings in results for "african american inventors" too.
Judging by the text in the box, Google appears to be using a snapshot possibly around June 2018[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_rights&action...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_control&oldid...
Even then, one could imagine that the Google could somehow detect that it is not a particularly informative page, and pick the most likely disambiguation link out of it. Logically speaking, that would be first link in the list. But before the page was changed to be a pure redirect, it had the following blurb at the very beginning:
The term "'''Gun rights'''" may refer to:
* The legal concept of the [[right to keep and bear arms]]
* [[Gun control]], the set of laws or policies that regulate the
manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use
of firearms by civilians.
...
FWIW, I don't think this is the case of deliberate changing of search results. But I suspect that their algorithm is inadvertently picking up bias from somewhere else, and applying it here.
I've always been curious of locked topics to see some type of analytics breakdown. The most hotly edited items are generally the things I'd most like to see surfaced.
When asked "gun rights", google added the link to the only section of the article discussing gun violence. They obviously manipulate their search results pushing political BS :-(
The entire results were full of the other phrase and not the one I searched for.
I kinda hate AI.
(Because it's dumb. Do what I told you, not what you think I want)
As in, if some full blown NRA guy searched gun rights, what would he get?
Info cards are not influenced by your account's history as far as I know. They are purely programmed by a combination of bots and hand tweaked responses. The hand tweaked responses come from a combination of user complaints/requests and internal pushes by engineers.
槍枝管制 "gun rights"的圖片搜尋結果 槍支管制是指任何對定義、限制或限制擁有，生產或改裝，進口，運輸，銷售和／或使用槍械的法律，政策，實踐或提案。 槍支管制的法律和政策在世界各地有很大的差異。有些國家，如英國和中華民國，擁有非常嚴格的槍支限制政策，而其他國家，如美國，有相對溫和的限制。槍支管制的支持者普遍認為，普遍民眾擁有槍支會導致危險性。 維基百科
/
Gun control Search results for "gun rights" Gun control refers to any law, policy, practice or proposal that defines, restricts or limits the possession, production or modification, import, transportation, sale and/or use of firearms. The laws and policies governing gun control vary widely around the world. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom and the Republic of China, have very strict gun restrictions, while others, such as the United States, have relatively modest restrictions. Proponents of gun control generally believe that the widespread possession of guns can be dangerous. Wikipedia
In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters
I don’t believe the founders have had personality transplant, so why has google become evil?
Once it reaches that point, every business optimization is in detriment of either the final user or society, quite often both.
This need to have 7-13% yearly returns force companies to grind their employees and customers.
I like capitalism, but I can easily see capitalism doing evil things to create short term profit.
Here's an article from June 2004:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/gmail_spook_heaven/
The privacy implications were widely discussed when Gmail launched, but then the media interest just faded out because people were apparently OK with it and Google promised to "do no evil". So here we are, 14 years later.
That right there is the issue. “Real” news organizations share ideological views and their choice of what to investigate is a result of that ideology. When a newsroom cheers or is despondent over an election result, it’s unrealistic to expect them to provide hard-hitting coverage that potentially undercuts their own biases.
The coverage of Russian “collusion” is a great example. Hillary Clinton’s people met with the ambassador of China as well as Russian officials during the campaign. But there was not even cursory coverage in mainstream media outlets or any investigation into Hillary’s campaign while similar alleged actions by members of the Trump campaign have led to a years long special prosecutor. I am not going to relitigate the collision case here, but alleged Trump collusion or alleged Clinton collusion would both be considered crimes, that Clinton didn’t win is immaterial since the crimes being alleged are collusion before the election. However, there hasn’t even been any cursory investigative reporting of the actions of the Clinton campaign despite secretly meeting with both Chinese and Russian officials. Just those meetings alone would be grounds for concern, but media outlets, in their disdain for Trump, ignored a potentially identical crime committed by Clinton’s campaign, not because it wasn’t newsworthy, but because it didn’t fit the ideological ambitions of many major “reputable” news outlets. I am not claiming Clinton did or didn’t collide; only that there was enough evidence to inspire at least some investigative reporting by the media — but the problem is that such reporting would weaken the “case” against Trump in terms of public opinion.
Keith Ellison a congressman with multiple, credible sexual assault accusations against him gets a pass in the media despite him running for Attorney General of Minnesota and he’s the deputy Chairman of the DNC. Yet, the media goes after the Kavanaugh story despite a far weaker accusation than the police-record supported claims against Ellison. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative. Again, I am not litigating the Kavanaugh case here, only pointing out that the media has a propensity to cover news with an intensity to suits an obvious agenda as opposed to covering news impartially.
With the Google politics situation, why would the “reputable” media care when it’s a sentiment they already share.
I was a contract journalist for Reuters from 1996-2002 and, in my opinion, journalism has declined prodigiously since then. It has become a click-bait driven industry that preys on tribalism and emotion. My first real exposure to the 24 hour news cycle was during Desert Storm and I remember the coverage of CNN was not only reputable, but explemplary. The NY Times was an extraordinary paper along with the Seattle PI, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe And Miami Herald. My old hometown paper where I interned before going to Reuters was also great — attacking left and right with equal aplomb, passion and fairness. But something happened along the way. We could blame Trump as is the fashion, but Trump was a product of this, not the cause. There have always been fringe media outlets like Breitbart, however they really didn’t have much of an audience because the majority of people of all political stripes had a reasonable trust in the major media outlets. The issue of media bias isn’t even one of specific stories and how they are written, but something far most sinister — the quiet influence of the assignment editor who decides what stories are even worth considering. The NY Times for example, well written, generally solid stories however, the real bias comes from what they choose not to cover. The Trump stories are certainly worth ink, but so are the stories about Clinton Foundation irregularities, quid pro quo arrangements with foreign governments, the Moroccan phosphate deals, Russian Uranium and campaign money laundering to the time of $84 million.
In full disclosure, I didn’t vote for Trump, didn’t support him at all, but I am a libertarian-leaning conservative frustrated that ridiculousness like modern Breitbart even needs to exists. (I say “modern” Breitbart because under Andrew Breitbart, it was actually a pretty decent new source, albeit from a right perspective — it was the conservative answer to the Huffington Post, though now, it’s pretty close to Infowars territory.
I apologize for the rant, but I agree, it’s a shame that fringe media has done more investigating into google than the “reputable” media.
It's not just the news media. The justice department seems to be ignoring it too.
How do you know that? Has this happened?
I'd love to see specific sources that back up your claims about Hillary Clinton's 'secret meetings'.
And, on a more general note, I'm pretty astounded that you spend so much time railing against the bias of what we are obviously meant to infer is the left wing media without even acknowledging the existence the right wing media machine. And no, it isn't Brietbart and only Brietbart.
>Keith Ellison a congressman with multiple, credible sexual assault accusations against him gets a pass in the media despite
a) There are definitely some inconsistencies in the stories about what he did/did not, and after reading through a few articles on the subject, it doesn't exactly seem like there's very much concrete evidence at all. AND EVEN THEN, the allegations are not as far as I can in any way sexual assault allegations. And furthermore, I found a litany of sites discussing the situation on both side of the traditional spectrum.
?!?!?! It's funny to see how different viewpoints can be. The CNN coverage of Iraq 1 (and 2) is often given as a textbook example of how pro-military propaganda can be achieved thanks to "embedding": News networks need images, the easiest way to get the most striking images is to be embedded within military units, the military are more than happy to comply, as long as they keep editorial control of what is published: win-win for both, but a definite loss for impartiality
They learnt the lessons of the Falklands, where the BBC was happily informing the Argentinians that e.g. they were setting their bomb fuses wrong...
Which video?
Typical Breitbart trying to create much ado about nothing, I've had similar "town hall" discussions in the UK since Brexit - "what does this mean for our employees? etc"
[0]: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...
EDIT: As it turns out, sources for this are pretty easy to come across online: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-travelban/google-s...
To me, that is not "subverting democracy." It is, however, taking an active political stance.
If the primary source of information is manipulated in the name of political activism, how can they become well-informed?
Sadly I must qualify this by saying I don't believe the general public in the West are well-informed, but that doesn't mean that ideal should be given up entirely.
> show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies
From you:
> fundamentally predicated on a well-informed electorate
Describe how anything in the parent statement fails to contribute to, or detracts from, a well-informed electorate. Both examples are involvement in the functioning of a democracy, not detracting from it.
Nor is any private party obligated to provide "equal coverage". That the level of "informed" goes up, but does not encapsulate information -you- think should be included, does not negate this.
The WSJ is unabashedly an outlet for conservative and GOP talking points. That is clear on its opinion page, and I know that somehow people trust its news pages, but the same editors control the rest of the publication, as does the owner of the WSJ and Fox News, Rupert Murdoch. I wouldn't trust their summary of something relating to a conservative talking point.
"Their staff have openly called to subvert democracy,"
The key here being "openly" and a specific call to "subvert democracy". None of this happened, and your source does not back up this claim in any way. These are apparently in internal only threads, and they were merely talking about tweaking search results.
Internal, private emails threads are objectively not "openly calling" for something and merely "tweaking search results" is not "subverting democracy" in any sane world.
You are spreading misinformation at best.
Any more details on this?
Lack of reporting from others is no reason to believe Breitbart was first to know, e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/jacknicas/status/1040014678263386...
> Doesn't that bother anyone?
I think it actually helps insulate Google from closer scrutiny of its monopoly position and deplorable business model. Why would any self-respecting country suffer an all-powerful ad-financed private Alphabet Agency? Because they think Evil is "on our side".
Same thing happened to me shortly after Adsense started up. They banned my account when I was 17/18 for clicking on my own ads, which I'd never done because I knew you'd get banned for it. I'm now 32, so in two years my Adsense account will have been banned for literally half my life.
And because everyone's on the latest version, it's harder for individuals to downgrade or stay on old versions for longer without getting obsoleted.
It's actually closing the web. The excuse for aggressive upgrades & auto-updates are mainly for security purposes, with the side benefit of reducing the work of web developers. But on the flip side, it's actually huge centralization move.
Firefox it is, and they have done a great job with the new version.
After this incident, I switched to FF Quantum permanently. It has come a long way and honestly I feel more at home in FF after a day than I did in Chrome after everything they've tacked on the browser.
Having read these threads, and personally knowing people in the Chrome team that read these threads, I am almost certain that Google will backtrack this. I know more than a dozen developers that switched from Chrome to FF Quantum this week.
(I'm on Yosemite.)
Google Sheets and Google Docs have been horrible on anything than Chrome for a while as well, and I guess they have no incentive to make that situation change. Firefox is dealing with it better than before I think, but I won’t hold my breath for parity to ever come.
If your cpu does not have a webm decoder in hardware, it has to decode them in software which is inefficient.
P.S. macOS 10.13.6.
Go to chrome://flags, search for "UI Layout for the browser's top chrome" and pick "Normal". Restart and enjoy the old design.
Running my mouse down the list in about:config feels like I'm drunk.
This is on a brand new maxed out i7 MacBook Pro.
Now if I could just get it to be reasonable about search engines...
It's pretty bad. Firefox cuts my battery life in half doing nothing.
It can be mitigated by setting
gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque = true
EDIT: It seems AdBlock Plus has now come out with a new plugin that conforms to Apple's new API.
I believe all of the people who report this, but it's not something I experience. Here's my usage pattern:
- 50+ hours in a browser each week
- Regular use of both FF and Chrome with very occasional use of Safari (I'm a developer of web apps)
- FF has been my primary browser for 15 years or so
- Used on a variety of Macs (2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, and 2015 MBPs with 8-16GB RAM)
- Running uBlock Origin in all browsers FWIW
...so, anecdotal, but pretty extensive.
I never had major problems with FF in the pre-Quantum days. Chrome always felt snappier than FF, and Safari felt snappier than both, but the differences were not huge and FF was "fine." And now since Quantum, FF is on par with Chrome for me in general.
The one time FF feels like a pig for me is on Google-owned web apps like Gmail.
For many years, Gmail and Gsuite apps were lightning fast on FF. But in the last few years it has gotten slower and slower on everything but Chrome. Hmmm, wonder why.
- uses 100% CPU even when idle
- frame rate drops to 2-3 per second for 5-10 seconds when switching tabs
- causes other programs to not work properly because it is using too much CPU
I have tried uninstalling the browser and re-installing OS X but it didn't solve those issues. I read somewhere it is a bug that pops up when you have display resolution scaling on and I think it applies to me because I have two 4k monitors set at 2x scaling.
uses 100% CPU even when idle
Anecdotally, I've never seen this, even when I had 1 external 4K and 1 external 2K connected. The whole OS was kind of sluggish at that point, but that was definitely asking a lot out of a puny integrated 3-year old laptop GPU so eh.
Just did a quick informal test with my current setup:
- MacOS High Sierra.
- 2015" MBP with no discrete GPU.
- Single 4K external monitor, 3008x1692 scaled resolution.
- uBlock is off.
With only a single blank tab open FF uses 0% CPU as expected. I opened three tabs: Facebook, Espn.com, and MSNBC.com. There was a brief flurry of CPU activity as the sites loaded, and FF's processes are now idling comfortably at 0-1%.
I repeated the process with Chrome and results were similar. One difference is that Chrome spawns 10x as many processes, but they seem to consume less memory each.
In both FF and Chrome, there's a palpable (500 or 750ms?) delay when switching tabs. In my experience a lot of Mac apps behave that way at scaled 4K resolutions.
I repeated this informal test in Safari and it "feels faster"; less CPU spike on initial site load and switching browser tabs feels close to instant.
I don't know if Google has gone too far with the A/B split testing and are picking winners solely on a most ad revenue metric or if they abandoned UX testing altogether. I suppose it could be a bit of both. May be their decision making AI is secretly optimizing Google in a destructive direction.. who knows.
Makes me wonder if companies aren't just slowing down their competitors..
Also the parent comment is about Google Voice, which is not a browser and therefore is not constrained by Apple's restrictions on 3rd-party browser engines.
All this unfixed for years now.
I'm trying to switch to Firefox but it certainly doesn't feel as snappy as Chrome when doing dev work. I do like some of the tools though. Still undecided.
I've never been a huge extension user (ad blockers and some development tools), so moving to Safari was easy. The big thing I missed was favicons, and those have been in the technology preview for awhile now.
I may explore FF for development, but I'm not sure there is a need since I've already relegated Chrome to a specific task.
I have noticed a few quirks in Safari that I have to work around. Like not rendering things exactly the same way as chrome/firefox. Bit of a pain, but there is never anything that's really "broken".
I'm puzzled as to why people seem to dismiss the "built-in" browser. It's the fastest, smoothest, best integrated, and least power-hungry browser on the platform. I regularly use all three major browsers (for testing, I write web applications) and I consistently switch back to Safari for all my non-special browsing.
I keep switching away from it due to lack of favicons and lack of extensions. I don't personally mind paying for a dev license to release an extension, but it definitely takes a toll on the extensions that get released.
Safari has a new extensions model and will be deprecating the legacy one in a year. Hence the push to migrate to newer extensions.
I made an extremely simple extension using the new model around 2months - before I try migrating an older "actually useful" extension. But theres just no way its possible to migrate.
Apple doesn't care about browser extensions now, it seems they want everyone to move to the new model, so they can collect revenue on sales on ad blockers.
:(
The web is terrible without a serious adblocker and the available alternatives (paid or not) are unable to take away the same amount of junk. People will simply start using another browser.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...
More specifically, if you can inject scripts I don’t see why you couldn’t call window.close()
This is a tradeoff Apple made valuing privacy and performance over user freedom. The new content blocking API is safer and faster.
To use Safari, you pretty much need to decide that performance / battery life are more important than anything else which only describes my needs when I need to milk my battery when it hits 10% with no electric outlet in sight.
This is how to enable it: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-enable-safari-favicons-on-mac-...
I do use Chrome during development though.
Safari lets you peek at the previous page, and makes it very obvious that you are about to go back, without any performance hit.
It also comes with reading mode, which chrome doesn't. Even with an ad blocker, many pages are still layed out in ways that can only be summed up as reader hostile.
So for reading and moving between pages, I feel like it beats both ffx and chrome. So I disagree with your "more important than anything else" part, but agree that performance and battery is among its top features, and if you don't care for that, safari does become a hard choice.
But it needs more than that when my battery already lasts 6+ hours under heavy use and my laptop is plugged in almost all day anyways.
Perhaps you can see how a reading mode that we already had extensions for in other browsers and sexier prev/next gestures damn it with weak praise.
As I said, it provides the best performance, experience and battery life.
We have no particular stance against it, though I agree with the other poster that WebGL is more the future.
edit: reading all the comments in this thread, geez, I finally feel like I'm not a stupid user. :) The issues are real!
"Faster tab switching in the majority of cases for our macOS users"
"Improved the reactivity of Firefox on macOS"
Example: https://i.imgur.com/ZfHnNmX.png
I've been seeing people repeat that for the past 5 years. It turns out to be false though.
It's actually a selling point for me, I just can't stomach all the material design craps that Chrome forces on me where a page lost like 70% of usable space to useless whitespace.
At least for me, on Linux, it’s always been opt-in, and plenty of the versions of Firefox packaged by distro maintainers get rid of it all together.
I for one am glad that it exists, I love Pocket, the only annoyance I have is that the Firefox integration is not as complete as the Chrome add-on, probably because Firefox users keep bitching and moaning about it.
It's great that you like Pocket. I think it's a bit rude to act like it's unreasonable to have qualms about how it was added (certainly pre-Mozilla owning them) or to be confused about it's inclusion while things like RSS reading/folders, (a not-uncommon browser feature) are removed.
This entire conversation wouldn't need to happen. There wouldn't be unhappy users. There wouldn't be "another side" calling criticism "bitching". They'd get active, enthusiastic user feedback, etc, etc.
Whenever suggestions pop up for migrating from freaking Chrome, which if we are honest is the new IExplorer 6, to Firefox, somebody has to mention freaking Pocket. And it's tiresome and I don't think it is legitimate.
The presence of Pocket's integration in Firefox can't possibly be the reason for why somebody doesn't want to migrate from Chrome.
This describes their approach to basically every new thing they come up with, and as a long time exclusive Firefox user it's the one thing I really don't like about it. I find it to be a great daily-driver browser but every now and then they'll try to cram some new garbage down your throat.
At least they don't surreptitiously start siphoning your data with without asking first, though.
Edit: As for the screenshot thing being poor, I agree that labeling the upload button 'Save' was quite a faux pas but at least the icons are pretty clear. The 'download' icon is the same as the download manager icon, and the upwards arrow pointing to a cloud is a reasonable representation of 'upload'. I might even use this thing someday.
Exist a way to make it work? (ie: Maker a goblal zoom and a per-domain/page)
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/chrome-and-fi...
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1362065#c57
Unfortunately, while Firefox has made significant leaps the last couple of years, it's still not a viable alternative to Safari for me. It doesn't feel particularly native (neither the "chrome" nor form controls etc.), and the UX is still clunky compared to native Mac-first apps.
One particular way in which Safari absolutely beats Firefox is the address bar. Most of the autocompletions that Safari provide are exactly what I want. As an example, if I type "mapq" into Safari, it suggests mapquest.com (a site I've never visited before, so this is not based on anything from my history). For Firefox, it suggests a Googles search for "mapquest", which is just stupid. Aside from suggesting web sites, Safari is superb at showing good results (Wikipedia is often a top hit), and it is awesome at providing autocompletions from my bookmarks and history.
Firefox also seems a bit lost when it comes to innovating, and keeps coming up with weak concepts that don't get any tractions; Personas comes to mind. Container tabs are a similarly interesting idea with a weird implementation that requires you to micromanage your tabs, which I certainly don't want to, and provides a "techie" solution to something that should just be invisible and default (i.e. all web sites should be "contained").
All websites contained would be an interesting default. With ways to “re-open current tab in container [X]” and “merge current tab with container [Y],” it would involve less micromanaging. That’s still not invisible, the container process and UX warrants plenty of thought.
The other is what could be described as "focus" or "modality". A lot of people use windows as a poor man's workspace. For example, if I'm researching where to travel, I'll have a window open with tons of tabs — Google Flights, Kayak, Tripadvisor, Booking.com, all jammed into one "workspace". If I'm comparison shopping for one specific thing, there'd be Amazon, Jet, Etsy, eBay, etc. This is how people tend to work: Windows separate modes, tabs separate units of focus within that mode. And yet there's no browser that supports such a way of working. We have to accept that people now "live" within the Internet, and need to support different modes. Rather than think of the browser as a shell, why not think of the browser as a world in which you can open up different types of interacting with that world? For example, a Google Doc tab is not something that works very well as a tab. It's a document, representing its own modality. Slack is an app, also its own modality. A "workspace" is something else again. And so on. These are all "applications" in a classical sense, yet work within the context of a user.
I'm not suggesting a ChromeOS, just that what we think of as "the web" could be rethought in terms of different variations — ways to work — with the same thing.
Also, in terms of privacy, why are we still using cookies? Why are we "logging in" and "logging out" of web sites and having password managers that automatically fill out form fields? Why can't the web site negotiate its session with the browser ("I want an identity for gmail.com, please give me one"), which can already know who I am?
You might want to take a look at the Firefox Multi-Account Containers Add-on, it lets you set domains to always open in a given container, which cuts down on the micromanagement a lot once you get it "trained". [edit: This is not well-advertised, it's accessed through the context menu (right-click) on a page when you have it open in that container]
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
> i.e. all web sites should be "contained"
It's possible to enable this for most intents and purposes with "1st party isolation", which came from the Tor browser. Some info here:
It's still too difficult and cumbersome to use. I might want to have one tab with gmail signed in but another to make anonymous searches on Google, both are on google domains so i have to manually fiddle with the containers again. Then you click a link in an email or search result and you don't really know if this tab should be in the mail-container, in the default container or in the domain-matched container.
It's a tough problem, and I agree the grandma test is a good standard, sometimes it can't be easily done.
Firefox, on the other hand, only shows you searches. It might offer "Isaac Newton" as a search suggestion, but that just triggers a search. It has no knowledge of other sources of information (beyond bookmarks and history).
For me, I find them very useful. It's convenient, for example, to be able to have two side-by-side Gmail tabs open. e.g. one for work email, and one for personal email.
But I do see your point that they shouldn't be necessary.
Works for me when I flip it on https://i.stack.imgur.com/0ZfvX.png . I keep it off because I don't like having my every keystroke in the address bar sent to Google.
Firefox only does search suggestions. In other words, anything you select from the suggestions just go to search results. Safari does that, too, but it also provides actual results. Very often the top hit is the right thing.
I feel like Firefox is back in the same boat it was in the 90s, but this time fighting Google Chrome instead of IE. But it's a bit different since you have to explicitly download Chrome. It's a bit different since you see an ad to download it right when you hit Google.
Maybe one day, mozilla. Maybe one day.
whenever a page loads all the elements move around for a second or two before they settle in their right place. that would crack me up if I had to put up with that all day
Recent attempts I've been making to help teach web developers about the dangers of referers, before they add more tracking pixels or leak reset password links get deleted by Mozilla technical writers because
" We don't think it's appropriate to have a red warning banner at the tops of the pages. That kind of design element is one we try to avoid on MDN unless it's highlighting the very first thing you need to know about the item, which we don't think it is in this case, although we do appreciate that it is important."
Great idea, let's leave the wet floor warning as a note at the end of the corridor.
See here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/im...
I certainly trust the MDN team to understand how to arrange their content to match their audience.
I also believe web developers should be more informed about the privacy & security issues of their work. The content you tried to add was verbose without any technical detail or links, and the MDN revision history isn't a great space for content discussion.
Have you tried filing a content bug? It's much easier to converse on bugzilla than thru edit battles.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/form.doc?bug_file_loc=https%3A/...
Firefox is a truly great browser, they really made amazing improvements on all fronts in the last years. And I say this as someone who never used Firefox as their daily driver until half a year ago or so.
Chrome initially was faster than Firefox because it lacked features. This is a common pattern if you've been in this business long enough. Firefox itself was originally the fast-but-cut-down version of Mozilla. Like Firefox, Chrome quickly gained features and bloat and became just as slow as Firefox and everything before it.
>So many sites don't work correctly in Firefox
I've not experienced that.
Microsoft didn't get knocked off their perch. They won the antitrust fight. Do you remember microsoft being broken apart? I don't.
And they aren't a much better company today. They are arguably an even bigger privacy threat since they are leveraging their ubiquitous OS to gather data and to sell ads.
> Google's turn to fall is rapidly approaching.
Microsoft never fell. They are ahead of google in the race to be the next trillion dollar company. I wouldn't hold my breath thinking that google is going to fall. Especially if you think microsoft "fell".
Google's incredible monopoly in search looks like a large target.
I'm not sure why you remember MS the way you do. There was a much much larger barrier for consumers to move to a different OS. If you owned a PC you pretty much had to run Windows. And MS made it extremely difficult to use a non-IE browser in the OS.
That doesn't mean I think they're innocent in all things but I don't see how their search market share is a monopoly target.
As an analogy, during my childhood days when photocopiers came out in India they were mostly Xerox machines. So Xerox became a verb and has stayed a verb to this day. So much so that you will find "Xerox shops"[1] in all Indian cities and people won't understand what a photocopier shop is :-)
That didn't work for Microsoft back then either
I mean, at the tail end of that period even South Park was lampooning the reliability of Windows. A lot of Google’s products work very well and dependably (well, provided they don’t murder the product), which maybe isolates them from that synergistic hate.
People hated Microsoft. Remember blue screens of death? Clippy? Developing for IE?
I even know a local Swedish podcaster that actively say DuckDuckGo instead of Google when relating to search. I completely understand this because I totally agree with the concept that Google has become politicized like a lot of companies unfortunately have become.
I disagree. Have you ever tried to deal with them? I've never experienced a company so hostile towards a customer. They are as money hungry as they were a decade ago, if not more.
We have a number of profiles on our shared family PC and people expect logging into chrome or gmail will also log into the other.
For me it's the price of entry for using the google ecosystem. I was already using gmail/gdocs/chrome sync daily, so it just makes life easier.
If I really need privacy I go to incognito or another browser.
However, this isn't for me (I used to be annoyed enough by my Android phone wanting to sync everything to Google's servers, and switched to an iPhone as a result), and what I hate is that Google never notified users of the change - I probably would have taken a long while to notice this if I hadn't heard about it on HN.
Slowing things down... Logging in and out today is negligible in times of time spent. I’m not sure what other factors can come into play here for you in terms of a slow-down.
Having different OS users for different users seems to be a straightforward thing to do.
The rant, which I agree, is against the trend. Google Chrome recent versions contain poor quality changes which seem to be incorporated only because they support Google end goals.
Most of the times people tolerate bad things if they get good quality products. I support Google Chrome data collection because I get the best browser. If I get bad UX changes (WWW removal), behavior change without UX information (this case) then my patience for the bad things quickly disappears.
For Windows 10 is also going this path. The trend for Windows 10 is bad quality and also dislike the privacy options so I'm moving to Ubuntu.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=882902...
Whoever was in charge of the updates to the URL bar seems to be lacking something. But at least the URL doesn't show "https://" anymore, I guess?
The broader public either doesn't understand this well or the companies take these decisions to cause fatigue and resignation among the public. The end result is that effectively nobody will care about these unless people who care (like the ones here, as one among many groups on the web) take some time to dissuade others from using these applications/platforms (be it Chrome or WhatsApp or Facebook or anything else).
An ungoogled Chromium is not the solution for this because maintaining a fork that stays true to other advancements takes a lot of effort and time, and in this case cannot be relied on either (unless, as someone pointed on another post here about ungoogled Chromium, you take the trouble of building it yourself every time spending hours).
For now, evangelize Mozilla Firefox and push anyone you know who uses Chrome to move out. Even if Google makes changes to this tracking feature because of backlash, it will only be a temporary holdout.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/what-facebook-and-what...
I'm not sure where to go from here because it seems pointless to even use Chromium if I can't remove Google from it and still be able to login to Gmail.
I like gmail web mail a lot, and don't have any desire to switch. It seems absurd that my web browser would be incompatible with that.
I obviously get the idea of privacy. But using gmail somewhat contradicts it.
What you DIDN'T sign up for is Chrome, which can see every site you have every visited, sending all of that info to Google as well to perhaps start targetting some different ads at you. I'm sure that would work well if one of your housemates had visited a dodgy site, which then picks up some suspect ads when you are doing online shopping with your girlfriend.
Well, I've sort of just accepted that Google has all of my personal data at this point. I trust them with data that I want to explicitly give up for the sake of convenience. Anything I type into Gmail I can accept as becoming essentially public record.
However, that doesn't extend to passively collected browsing data. It creeps the shit out of me that my private browsing history could be associated to my real life identity and other PII by someone at Google.
I'm thinking about doing that.
The single reason I started with GMail was because at the time, it had the best spam filter in the industry.
But that was years ago. Has everyone else caught up? Is there another option with equally good spam filtering?
IMO, options like ProtonMail are much better. A service that isn't free but doesn't exploit users in order to make $$ ought to be a better option.
Otherwise I've had pretty good luck.
Edit: actually, there should be more browsers that I don't know about because I haven't really looked around anymore since choosing Firefox a decade ago. Is anything as well-supported (in terms of proper rendering and security, as well as being FOSS / privacy-conscious) that I should look at other than ungoogled chromium?
As for Firefox including Pocket, they own Pocket for starters, and it's less annoying than Edge or Chrome pushing their analytics filled services. There's a lot less cruft on Firefox than in other browsers. If I really wanted I could use one of the GNU forks of Firefox, though I'm not sure how much more privacy conscious they may be aside from a bunch of brand rework.
And I also got burned by the very badly managed WebExtensions thing. I can totally see where GP is coming from.
Two things to note from that thread:
From what I've read, Mozilla had some agreement with Google to keep all the data from their tracking stuff silo'ed so it wasn't aggregated with other data and wasn't used for anything besides showing back to Mozilla people.
and
They're now (and have been for more than a year) respecting DNT, removing the GA code so that you don't make any requests to google if you have that enabled.
This is ungoogled chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
* You can uncheck Firefox's "Play DRM-controlled content" option (which will delete the DRM blob from disk). https://support.mozilla.org/kb/enable-drm
* Or you can install one of Mozilla's "EME-free" builds of Firefox. The only difference between regular and "EME-free" builds is the default value of the "Play DRM-controlled content" option.
I'm posting this comment on Brave, having switched over last week for most of my personal browsing. Generally like it a lot; there are a couple warts (it won't open S3 URLs from the AWS web interface, for example), but it does most of what I need in a browser.
As a replacement for Chrome on your PC, Brave takes the second approach, and performs the evaluation locally (pulling down a fresh list every so often for up-to-date comparisons). You'll have to check with Vivaldi on which approach they take.
Brave has all of the phone-home-to-Google logic removed. If you ever spot anything at all that gives you concern, do feel free to let us know.
Sampson (Brave Developer Relations)
After having just posted here, it was...disconcerting. I'd like to give you guys the benefit of the doubt, but you may want to check a fresh update & relaunch from 0.23 to 0.24. I doubt I could reproduce (I've already clicked past it, and it was only on the first re-launch), but for a moment I was pretty confused about what browser was open (in fact, the only reason I'm certain it's Brave is because I just double-checked my Chrome and it's still on 0.68). Brave 0.24, V8 6.9.427.23, rev f657f15, macOS x64 (10.11.6 El Capitan), OS Release 15.6.0, Brave Sync v1.4.2, libchromiumcontent 69.0.3497.100.
Are you referring to the chromium space options, or the browser market as a whole? I’ve never left Firefox and still find it to be a pleasant browser, one with which I’ve never felt really left out barring a few annoying bugs from time to time that are typically short lived.
Firefox container tabs are game changing.
(Before I get you-can-do-this-and-that replies, I know Profile Manager exists, and that's an ugly hack: macOS users should not need to run multiple copies of the same app bundle.)
The big thing that's different with container tabs is that after you set it up (which is done little by little as you decide to open something in a specific tab and then mark it to always open there), it's not something you actively manage, it passively does what you want. That's why it's so different.
Having every site be it's own container (which is also a mode Firefox supports, to my knowledge) would be slightly more passive, but also likely cause problems with some sites that use multiple domains, so I think container tabs is a good compromise (for now) that allows good compartmentalization while also allowing escape hatches for sires that require it.
Based on what? What did you try to do and couldn't? Or is your complaint - like the rest of your comment says - that you weren't immediately familiar with the UI, you didn't bother learning, and then decided it was the browser's fault?
How long did it take originally for you to learn the Chrome tools and how long have you given Firefox?
It's a pretty widely held thing that FF's dev tools don't feel as smooth or well thought out as Chrome's, which is frustrating because FF (really, FireBug, unless you count the weird IE stuff) pretty much _made_ the concept of browser tools great.
I'd love to use FF again too, but for me the blocker is the UI and battery drain. 's why I just use Safari.
I agree, but how is this relevant to my comment? I didn't say the GP did anything wrong - I asked them what they did. Not nearly the same thing.
> It's a pretty widely held thing that FF's dev tools don't feel as smooth or well thought out as Chrome's
There are a large number of groups with widely held beliefs where said beliefs don't stand up to scrutiny. "It doesn't feel like Chrome" is not a belief that doubles as valid criticism because it's not actionable. Its sole purpose is to complain about things while making sure nobody can ever act on them because it's so vague.
> for me the blocker is the UI and battery drain
While "the UI" fits in to the category above, battery drain is an actual, specific, measurable and actionable complaint. So please, more of the latter, less of the former.
These are not things that Firefox just does differently, they're features that Firefox just doesn't have.
Firefox's dev tools aren't bad in and of themselves. The UX is fine, and getting better. I don't know if other people have opinions about memory tools or profiling -- I don't all that much.
I guess Firefox's dev tools look prettier, and they do have some features that Chrome doesn't. But Firefox features tend to trend more towards, "here's a cool thing like the ability to debug shaders". Chrome's trend more towards, "here's a useful thing like the ability to debug Javascript."
If you ultimately do want to keep using chrome for the dev tools, you can switch your primary browser to ff and use Chromium (without signing in at all) just for that purpose. There's no reason you have to use your primary browser for your web development work.
It is true the Firefox's dev tools are a lot better now than they used to be - I use them regularly when I test sites cross browser. But they lack critical features like source editing and stack rewinding, and the tiny visual/layout improvements they've made are not enough to get over that. In Chromium, if I pause a script, I can edit a line code earlier in the function, resume, and Chromium will rewind the stack to that point and replay it forward with my changes.
It is insanely useful, hands down the single tool that I use most often. Stuff like that blows Firefox's dev tools out of the water, because it turns out that I debug Javascript more often than I debug Grid layouts.
A while back I looked into whether or not anyone at Mozilla was working on something comparable, and there was somebody. But then everything went silent and I don't know the status anymore. I've been wondering for multiple years now why this kind of stuff isn't higher priority than new Grid tools or color selectors or whatever.
Firefox's dev tools are way behind Chrome's in basic functionality, even if the user experience is otherwise excellent. You can't even set breakpoints on DOM elements. I would disagree with anyone who claims that they're even remotely comparable tools at this point.
Sorry. I call BS.
The YouTube Classic extension will speed things up: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class...
Google is actively involved in the standardization process, and moved Youtube over to a new API too prematurely (v0 of a spec). Now that v1 has been standardized, they're updating to that instead.
These are opposite problems. Microsoft got complacent whereas Google moved too fast.
Also Chrome is actively removing the web standards that didn't end up being adopted broadly: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/bli...
So YouTube will end up just as slow in other browsers unless they upgrade to a newer polymer that uses the broadly implemented standards.
These are new standards, and there were a number of breaking changes from the v0 specs to v1. It's a lot of code to update, but we're working super hard to get all of Google onto v1.
Shame about all the conspiracy theories regarding this topic. It seemed likely enough to boil down to a logical explanation.
They didn't grok my privacy issue. Maybe they were deliberately misunderstanding me. Doesn't matter either way. Now I use Firefox.
Turned out, there was a 2 year old open bug on the missing feature, in which Google UX engineers repeatedly argued allowing the save location to be changed was counter to the desired user experience.
I switched to Firefox the next day and haven't touched Chrome since.
There are a lot of different bug reports out there asking for a flag, and apparently the Chrome team added one, then disabled it a few patches latter.
I forget what I was doing at the time (downloading PDFs for a uni course?). But it was a pain in the ass, of dubious utility anyway, and the cavalier UX attitude of "father knows best" left a really bad taste.
I could imagine a high-flying company having entitled employees, I just don't see the qualitative difference between this or that company. Please enlighten me if I'm missing the point.
And lest I sound arrogant myself: I once worked in Pharma and made my peace with the price vs R&D logic.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/12/non-profits-...
Centrist average Joes usually don't care about such things, and right wingers applaud them to help the police and such.
As for libertarians they are against them when it's by the government, but fine with them when a private company (even one the size of a small nation) does it as part of a "voluntary" employment contract.
Corporations of all stripes tend towards authoritarianism though, in my view. It is a natural structure when you have agents using someone else's capital.
Us complaining to google about poor treatment is like sheep complaining to shepherds or vegetables complaining to the farmer about poor treatment. Nobody would care. But if the shepherd or farmer's customers complained, they would listen very closely because it affects their bottom line.
Especially now that google has a monopoly position on search and online videos, they have even less reason to care about what the products ( you and me ) say.
The thing is, as a developer without having access to user research, all I know is what I want, and as a developer I assume I'm atypical. Whether it corresponds to what anyone else wants is questionable.
The opposite of this is people who assume that whatever they personally want is Obviously the Right Thing For All Users. You will find that attitude everywhere on the Internet. And that has its own flaws.
[0] https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1043505744144826369?s=21
I imagine they don’t care one way or the other.
Edit: To clarify, I care about whether Google knows where I've been online. That's why I don't use Chrome. I just don't think most people care.
Now that Google knows, who else can find out? Someone Google trusts? Someone that pays Google enough money?
Lets sell your browsing data to whoever wants to buy it. What kind of risks would that create for you and your family?
Every single person I've explained how much data Google et al's regularly collect has cared a lot. My mother's first comment after hearing what Android and Chrome collect was, "Why aren't the in jail?"
Unfortunately, most of these people continue to use Google's services because they often don't have a choice or are not aware of alternatives. Please, actually talk to people outside your bubble and get their actual opinion (which might require educating them about the specifics of what the tech is doing).
If he came across this, I expect that he would definitely notice that something seemed unusual. Once it became clear what was happening, I expect he would switch away from Chrome.
After a bit of back and forth, I asked for a screenshot. They sent me a photo of the screen and it became apparent that they were clicking on this new avatar embedded in the browser chrome rather than the gmail app avatar below it.
But if these things are unrelated, I guess we'll just have to chalk that up to Google's famously shitty product management and design skills.
You could always be logged in and not sync. You just had previously chosen to be logged in and synced.
By disabling syncing, you turned off a feature that you previously had to have opted in to.
> This will sign you out of your Google accounts.
And sure enough, it signs you out of gmail and the browser. So it's sign in to the browser, or no gmail for you.
I remember because it bothered me to have to wipe my passwords from some random pc I was using just because I wanted my bookmarks.
I know what I saw. I was logged in, then I wasn't after I turned off Sync. They may not be related technically, but in the UI they are part and parcel.
Thanks for correcting me!
The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does. There appears to be absolutely no benefit in turning this on.
Over the last year or so, it feels more and more like Google, as a company, is getting desperate. Like it feels the external tide of popular opinion turning against it. But rather than mend its ways, a decision has been made somewhere to slurp up as much information as possible as quickly and quietly as possible, before it all comes tumbling down around it.
I wonder if GDPR was the turning point. Even my boss, who on a computer literacy scale of Linda Lovelace to Ada Lovelace ranks near the bottom of the scale, asked me to explain GDPR to her.
This ultimately affects Google's future growth and it's why you'll see Google do more such "desperate" moves like trying to become a military contractor, building its own iPhone-like phones, tracking users more aggressively, and I imagine android users will soon see os-wide ads, too.
Except they won't be OS-wide, they'll be Play Services wide and mandatory if you're an vendor including Play Services.
If you don't want Google's ads, you can go do your own thing on AOSP like Amazon and other largely-flopped attempts.
I think the change happened shortly after Ruth Porat was brought on and the Alphabet reorganization was announced (Larry Page wanted to retire without having that be the headline). There was clearly a change in mandate to start monetizing more aggressively and you started seeing the ad load increase across all their properties. That all happened during a lull in Google's stock price. It started trending upwards after Porat signaled to investors that all the money pits would be cut back.
It's not hard to imagine that this could be their reasoning around the change in the future.
Yes it does, it solves the exact problem described right in the article. Before this change, there would be a seperate log-in process for Chrome versus every other google service (which normally all share your current login status). Now, your login status is shared between every google service including Chrome, as a layperson would expect. Previously people who wanted to be logged into Chrome AND other google services would have to complete the login process twice which could be confusing for novice users.
I also just tried signing in to chrome (69.0.3497.100), and it tried to sync immediately again, so I'm not sure where the "sync is optional" idea comes from?
Sorry, not much of a Chrome user here. Why would I want to “sign in” to a web browser? I’ve been browsing the web successfully for decades without doing so. I don’t sign in to my text editor either.
Chrome is not a Google service. It is a web browser. It should act like one.
If they looked at a slightly risque URL on their phone, would the average user expect Chrome on their laptop to autocomplete that URL?
His response ("syncing is expected") is completely on-point when talking about the PoLS. I disagree, obviously, and think syncing is scary voodoo magic. I don't see how you can say "users are unsophisticated and don't understand the difference between web sites and web browsers" and also say "users are sophisticated and expected config syncing".
Unfortunately, to get any further we have to test users.
So in theory your data should remain local
That doesn't sound very reassuring to me. Especially long term.
tbf, this is followed by
> This is my paraphrase
(Side note sort of related from another related article - apparently you can opt-out of the unified login, but the flag that lets you opt-out is broken as of chrome canary 71)
-- Upton Sinclair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair)
Performance results always seem to be subjective, but in my opinion Quantum made FF an absolute beast, even when running the usual lot of security add-ons like NoScript, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, etc.
However, Firefox Containers I would argue is the number one feature from a usability standpoint. Being able to wall off cookies/supercookies, trackers, and work with multiple identities simultaneously in tabs (especially when using Google services) changes the entire relationship one has with the browser account, website accounts, bookmarks, and productivity.
Containers is one of many Firefox test pilot projects that are really thoughtful (FF Send is another). Pair that with great cross-device compatibility, Firefox Focus for mobile and the general granularity of about:config and you have yourself a browser you can both trust and call your own.
It also doesn't hurt that Mozilla isn't evil; all things considered.
Notably though, Focus is on track to move away from it's Chromium roots:
"The switch from Chrome WebView to Gecko doesn’t seem to be performance related. Instead, the reason has to do with the core goal of FireFox Focus in the first place: privacy. Mozilla has found a reason to believe that the Chrome WebView engine can leak someone’s data. So in the spirit of maintaining data privacy, the team behind Firefox Focus has decided to switch to the Gecko engine." [0,1]
[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/firefox-focus-switching-chrom...
[1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/wiki/Release...
Because I haven't noticed any difference between Chrome and FF extensions now.
Until then use browsers like Firefox or Safari where the incentive to be creepy is far smaller.
Which as we know from things like Facebook, that limit will never be reached. These things are far too opaque for the general public to understand or care about. Even we software engineers barely understand the scope of what Google is capable of. It's going to take a principled stance from within the industry to push back against the encroachment of these corporations on personal privacy.
Or perhaps your preference is a minority opinion, and most people will trade privacy for convenience even when fully informed and aware of Google's behavior
That's kind of my whole point. Regular people don't really understand the implications of what's possible with all this data even when you tell them exactly what's happening, and so they gladly give it up in the name of convenience. They don't realize it has value, and is dangerous in the hands of bad actors when aggregated in large amounts. It's going to take people on the inside growing a spine and standing up for the rights of all users over advancing the monopoly on private data for whatever web based surveillance apparatus they're currently being paid to work on.
the argument of consistency between logged-in account and browser account makes total sense from a UX point of view. Even for power users it's sometimes confusing why you have to log in twice.
And yes, of course if you're not logged in this chrome then this problem doesn't apply but most people are actually logged in and the article just skims over that.
* Where were all these cryptography engineering folk when Google decided that it didn't have to ask any permissions to install autoupdates to Chrome?
* Subsequently, instructions were published on how to disable the autoupdate — published by Google itself, mind you — yet somehow after some time has passed, the same versions of Chrome that were supposed to have stopped looking for updates were somehow able to magically automatically update themselves in the end after a number of releases anyways — so much for the browser being secure against remote execution attacks by a powerful-enough party!
BTW, if you think Brave is any better, they refused to disable the autoupdate. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/1877 TBH, between the lines, I got the impression that it's part of the business plan, where an outdated browser is basically worthless to them as an investment anyways, so, spending any engineering resources on such causes is fundamentally not worth it. Who cares about the good-will of the user if there are so few alternatives anyways?! So, I basically stopped using Brave at that point, as I didn't feel like being the product.
Mozilla may have gone away with asking for your permission to download and install the update as well, but at least there's still a clear setting in the interface which lets you be the boss, and, compared to the quirks that Brave may offer, at least once configured, you do know they won't go behind your back to do the dirty work anyways.
Edit: Some are saying this doesn't work on Chrome 69. :(
So I'm wondering: Is enough code open sourced to make it possible for an organization such as Apache, GNU, or whatever, to create a sanitized fork of each new version of Chrome? This would be a version of Chrome with no privileged party other than its user. Every other party would be limited to the same set of features (cookies, local storage, etc.) that apply to all 2nd parties.
As for a fully open-source version: here's a fairly recent summary (2017) of what's in Chrome and not in Chromium (the open-sourced subset):
https://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what%E2%80%99s-the-differen...
There are other omissions that could get in the way of general usability; chromium also omits some proprietary licensed codecs, including the mp3 support.
However, Google synch support, etc, is left in -- and if you desire to keep that out, maintaining the patch set that does it without cooperation from upstream could be a hassle. Whenever they refactor of update the integration between synch and the rest of the browser, you need to make corresponding changes in the patch set that cuts all that out -- and at a fairly rapid pace, too, lest you find yourself unable to ship an urgent security update.
So, it's doable -- but at a price in usability, and doing it right requires some kind of continual effort. Which is what Brave is, in effect, trying to arrange with their payments-based funding scheme. And even a very capable person trying to do the project solo, on a volunteer basis, would be putting themselves at risk of burnout.
While Brendan has built some interesting and useful things including Javascript, he is apparently poisonous enough to cause three of Mozilla's board members to resign, including a founding executive of Yahoo, the former CEO of AVG, and the former CEO of Mozilla Corp (from 2008 to 2010).
His wiki page is a good reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
The other toxic drama was about a 1000$ political donation. Very sad to see an unpopular view used to paint someone as a monster. If democratic political views are enough to kill someones career, it is more a sign of the toxicity of today's social media and activism than a character judgment.
> Does one really want to associate themselves with Brendan Eich though?
No, not really. Not a good political idea to align yourself with the black sheep. With all the tars and feathers he just looks weird.
Though it also works in his favor: Brave is popular amongst the alt-right and technical-minded early adopters. They see it more as character assassination and SJW corporate culture taking desperate vengeance for Trump's win.
Brave is fantastic on android though.
It was ten years ago. When people fussed about it it was six years old.
How many years back do political actions count as relevant?
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-under-fire-inside-the-9-da...
Unfortunatly that requires a large sacrifice: no Turing complete languages.
That ship sailed long ago for browsers -- if you care about auditability, you can't trust the web.
Yes: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine
> Qt WebEngine uses code from the Chromium project. However, it is not containing all of Chrome/Chromium: Binary files are stripped out. Auxiliary services that talk to Google platforms are stripped out. The codebase is modularized to allow use of system libraries like OpenSSL. We do update to the latest Chromium version in use before a Qt release.
Here's a browser: https://www.qutebrowser.org/ I haven't tried it yet.
[edit]
oh, it's already in the apt repos on debian testing :)
I would say that when you're looking for escape hatches, you know the defaults don't match your personal preferences. I understand why some people don't like combined login. However, I personally prefer it, and I guess that the decision to add it was made on the basis of believing that most people would feel like I do, or at worst feel neutral.
But youtube is so damn entrenched nowadays...
Granted, Mozilla's had their own issues and some apps / sites may have become as dependent on Chrome as sites were on IE way back when. But given Google's flexing their control muscles over the last few years, a clean break is probably the better long term solution.
1 - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
Then I have the exact same problem when support dies in the coming months though.
> or the unbranded builds [1]
Interesting, so does this mean that if I want stable builds, I'd have to manually update to the exact unbranded counterpart of that stable version?
> I'm curious what your concerns are with the unlisted extensions option from Mozilla?
I guess because I really don't see what business they have forcing me to upload my extensions to their servers? Same reason why people don't like uploading Chrome stuff to Google servers?
~~~~~~~~~~~
Edit:
I'm trying out the unbranded builds and running into a problem when I try to use my existing profile: disabling signature checking doesn't work. However, it works on a fresh profile. Not sure what the problem is...
user_pref("extensions.databaseSchema", 27);
user_pref("extensions.e10s.rollout.policy", "50allmpc");
Edit:
For anyone else trying to auto-obtain the latest stable Firefox nightly, here's a hacky command (change for your OS as needed):
curl -s "https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing" | sed -n "0,/Windows 64-bit Installer/{s/.*href=\"\\(https:[^\"]*\\.zip\\)\">Windows 64-bit Installer<.*/\\1/p}"It's a temporary hack, but you might also want to look at temporarily loading extensions with about:debugging, this works even in official release.
Good news! Even Firefox ESR 60 always you to disable the mandatory signature checks by setting the "xpinstall.signatures.required" pref = false. The Mozilla add-on wiki was a little unclear, so I just manually verified that the "xpinstall.signatures.required" pref works correctly in Firefox ESR 60. :)
> Yes, I want Firefox stable. I don't want to run a buggy browser.
? Is the developer edition running the same code as stable?
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/04/simplifying-firefox-releas... (edit for better link)
If A is signed in to Chrome, and the user then signs into gmail as B, sign A out of Chrome, perhaps with a notification telling them what to do.
All the Linux vendors, all the distributed social media (PeerTube, mastodon, hubzilla), all the private search engines like duckduckgo, all the open source hardware like Purism...
Imagine them doing an EU and pooling all their resources to produce a coherent yet distributed, open and free ecosystem with a browser by Firefox, search by DDG, OS by Linux, phone by Purism, etc...
They could cross-support each other's efforts, promote eacother etc.
I'd live there instead of Google/Microsoft/Facebook world.
Not sure what the road to that world looks like, but we definitely need a contender because all of the major tech companies have become disturbingly anti-consumer.
Purism raised something like 2.5 and are using it to develop their first phone, and it seems to be going great, on track for April release.
Ubuntu etc are making money and doing good work.
While that's great, I think you're right. That for example, GNOME releases don't have nearly as much goodies as say Mac OS, because they're working with drastically less money and employees.
Take Firefox OS or Ubuntu touch. The amount of money being pumped into iOS and Android must be absolutely incredible. How do these open source vendors compete with the billions of platform investment from these giants?
They just end up with an interior product, so they end up with no market share.
Some bright lights are Ubuntu and duckduckgo, they're profitable and have their niches.
I think I'm suggesting they band together because that can only increase adoption amongst them all - if for example Firefox had duckduckgo as default, and Linux had Firefox as default, that would help those services quite a bit.
I guess though, that if Firefox is targeting mass adoption, they'll have more luck with Google as default. Which is sad.
What happened to “do no evil”?
I got rid of chrome when I noticed it hoggged my memory and CPU, and decided to try Firefox. Firefox is much more processor friendly for me at least.
The love of money is the root of all evil.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. (1 Tim 6:10 ESV)
:)
It was considered "stupid" so they dropped it:
https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/13/4326424/eric-schmidt-once...
I thought that even if "evil" can't be well-defined, its general meaning probably encouraged a culture that tried to focus on ethics. When your leader says that trying not to be evil is "stupid", it has a different effect on the culture.
Don't be evil is in the last line of Google's Code of Conduct.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
Silly: Thinking that Google wants to go do evil, but needs to drop a value statement first (to do otherwise, goes against the Code of Evildoers)
Try to find a snapshot of the code that does not include it (I can only find snapshots with it, so that won't suffice as proof).
About Eric Schmidt (who I won't defend) the full quote and context ("a casual jokey interview"):
> "The idea was that we don't quite know what evil is, but if we have a rule that says don't be evil, then employees can say, I think that's evil," Schmidt said. "Now, when I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there's no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something." In the end, though, he believes it has worked, by giving employees a way to point out things they find unethical.
Subtle but it is there: The former CEO does not think that doing no evil is stupid, he thinks using a rule like that, without properly defining evil was stupid. Then he changed his mind.
Compare with the JSLint license that states: "the Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." You can find that rule stupid and vague, while acting like Mother Theresa.
> "As Google (and some others) interpret it, this additional requirement constitutes a vague use restriction and thus makes the license non-free. Chris [DiBona] explained that if I were to remove that line from the license and 'return to a proper open source license that we support,' then jsmin-php could stay on Google Code.
As a user this is greatly worrying to me. I want my browser to not do anything like this without my explicit consent -- especially since I knowingly avoided doing it... I moved out as much of my digital identity from the Google Cloud as I could. I obviously can't escape needing to use YouTube, but everything can't be perfect.
I gotta be honest, I have some worries regarding Firefox, too. Too often they have pulled shady things and got into bad with terrible people. (the unwanted advertising stuff being auto-downloaded for Mr. Robot, the "fake news detector" thing, etc. etc.)
I find it extremely important to have good, independent open source alternatives to commercial web browsers and each step like this is a step towards one interest trying to take over the core of our internet experience. Pretty scary.
That said I have started migrating from the ecosystem. I’m using safari for the web. Duck duck go for search, and Apple for maps. So far results are a mixed bag but I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I’m hoping to get completely off of google in the next 3-6 months as long as viable alternatives that respect privacy exist.
I almost missed a mandatory form that finally resolved by calling the number on the contact page. This is the sort of thing that used to be the other way around...
Edge is not a bad browser at all, however if you are signed in Windows it will do same shit - sync everything automatically so I would avoid using it if you care about privacy.
Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth
downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs
Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively,
this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen
to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome
somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people
eavesdropped on. In official statements, Google shrugged off
the practice with what amounts to “we can do that”.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-ch...
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409
including Google's perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9735795
I've removed all sorts of dumb stuff slowing down the build that was included by accident or unnecessarily on my project at work. Never attribute to malice ...
Yea, "whoops we accidentally downloaded a surveillance device on your system!"... If that sort of negligence can happen, what else is the browser currently doing, or capable of doing in the future, "accidentally"?
"Chromium does download hotword-x86-64.nexe on startup, but it has been carefully designed as an opt-in feature"
There's a large market opportunity right now for voice controlled systems. Controlling those systems with your voice means they have to be able to listen to you. Full stop.
While I think it's going to take a long time before we truly understand the repercussions of those systems (and I want to be clear, I say that not as an omen of fear and doom, but as a literal statement: We don't understand exactly what level of monitoring we're ok with or is appropriate as a society) I think complaining that google is acting in a solely nefarious way by attempting to incorporate voice control into the browser is disingenuous.
Windows (the literal glass ones) also allow people to see into your home. They let any random stranger on the street walk right up and view the things you own, as well as yourself and your family. But by far and large we've decided we like windows enough that the privacy loss is worth it.
This principle is heuristical and as such can result in down-side when one doesn't actually resolve the uncertainty within the heuristic (read: guess) with detailed evidence.
The obvious downside here is that you can accumulate a bunch of risks which each independently satisfy the heuristic, and so don't seem like risks, but in aggregate can result in a swing towards the opposite of what it says.
Meaning, yeah, sure, stupid thing added to the codebase. But with the accumulation of all the poor decisions Google has made surrounding privacy, is Google really that fucking idiotic, or, what?
It's like saying Occam's Razor always gives you the right analysis of how things are. No, it only gives you the best guess given that you've taken everything possible into account. But here it's worse, because it's not taking into account all of the other times Google has infringed a common-sense understanding of privacy.
Whether or not it's more likely that Google is intentionally crossing this line, rather than it's just merely possible that they're intentionally doing it, depends on other information. In this case because it's unlikely that Google is really that's stupid, because they're good engineers with strong QC practices, so it's more like that there is some kind of intention involved. Not to be "evil" but to deliberately do things that deny the social value of avoiding surveillance.
Current Firefox version: 63.0b8 OS: mac OS High Sierra (10.13.6 17G65)
People like me use Firefox for their paying job daily and somehow we still don’t find it beneath ourselves to file bugs.
"I've never seen this happen before and I've been in some pretty insane buildings"
I've never seen anything like it happen on any other website either, but yet here I am. The failure is so stark that I would have no idea where to begin debugging, and would likely need guidance from someone with more knowledge of the system so I wouldn't waste days of my time. I've reported the issue in the past and gotten nowhere so here I am trying in a different avenue.
You act as if days of your time are somehow worth more than days of some browser engineer’s time. The company I works for makes a decently popular and extremely browser-intensive web application and even we at least do some minimal investigation when we want, say, a Chrome bug to get fixed. If opening dev tools caused Firefox to crash for me you can bet I’d at least try to come up with a minimal STR.
I’m sorry to inform you that you are not that special and that your entitlement is not flattering.
This seems more like, I'm being told the thing I'm worried about isn't happening, but I don't believe it.
Which is fine, but not sure what's changed with what's being done, rather than a change making clearer what's possible (when signed into google, chrome has your google cookie).
> For example, if I have my browser logged out, then I log in and turn on “sync”, does all my past (logged-out) data get pushed to Google? What happens if I’m forced to be logged in, and then subsequently turn on “sync”? Nobody can quite tell me if the data uploaded in these conditions is the same. These differences could really matter.
Again, how is that possibility any different than before this change?
It seems this is mostly a well intentioned (for a subset of chrome users) but poorly thought out UI change (giant blue button).
TBF even firefox is not excellent in this regard(based on the article), but it is much better.
[1]:https://palant.de/2018/03/13/can-chrome-sync-or-firefox-sync... and associate chrome bug : https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=820976
Either way, Chrome exists to give Google's web services an advantage, that's the only reason. I wrote about that seven years ago: https://adblockplus.org/blog/google-chrome-and-pre-installed...
This[1] seems to imply otherwise.
[1]:https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139#passphrase
I think that Google Chrome was always about ads. The browser has an auto-completion algorithm that sends users to Google Search to click on well-disguised ads on the way to their destinations rather than sending users directly to URLs.
(Until recently, Firefox would send people directly to URLs instead of search. You have to enable the two separate boxes in Firefox to make that work now -- ctrl-l for URLs and ctrl-k for search.)
Chrome has a few serious dark patterns if you look closely. Also watch out for Google's current attempts to get rid of URLs, because it's probably motivated by getting people to become more dependent on search to click on ads (as well as hiding from people that they are visiting AMP "caches" instead of people's real (HTML) websites).
And with this new change, presumably in your daily profile, your browser remains signed out also.
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.
That said, you could also just switch to Firefox or Brave.
(Copy pastaing myself. With an addendum: I don't know if this will actually result in less of your private data compromised, but it seems plausible)
It might have been the fact that they were tabs in the same window, and it made it harder for me to control/organise/understand what was in what container.
Especially when opening new tabs.
I can't remember the details but I remember finding it fiddly. Maybe I'll give it another go.
What is this "DJB’s custom search engine" ? I fail to find it with both DuckDuckGo or google..
I'd use the F- out of that.
Nothing in it has been an improvement.
An option to opt out might be good but most people are helped not hindered by this.
And I'm done.
I really don't like the whole Apple experience for many reasons, and not for lack of trying. The Apple IOS system just doesn't do it for me and the whole walled garden approach just isn't my thing. Having said that, I am fed up with Google waging this relentless war on their own users, and I'm done with them. I am ordering the new iPhone Xs Max, and given that I am just as tired with the impossibility of dealing with disabling all the crapware in Windows 10, and the very ominous messages from MS that "windows is a service" (no it isn't, you greedy fuckers, it is an OS) am eyeing up the options replacing my surface pro (new model) with a mac.
Again, I am no fan of the Apple experience, but they appear to be a lot more committed to privacy and security. Google, you used to be awesome. Not anymore though, so bye.
There was previously a link to an opt-out switch that set a cookie to disable account chooser, but Google have now removed that. They don't like to give people choice, not even advanced users.
Account chooser basically re-invents the concept of signing out. Google keeps your name and email displayed on the page after sign out. It takes multiple annoying clicks to "remove account" from the account chooser.
Their suggestion to use private browsing mode to sign in, is not always convenient. Often you just want to sign out properly with one click, as per the way the rest of the world does it, and have no record of your credentials lurking around. Google says no to that, and forces their account chooser on everyone for their own agenda, and nothing to do with user preference.
Sometimes I think the law should step in, as it does with privacy. "Sign out" should mean exactly that, nothing less.
I know it’s been clear for a long while, but I’m just really realizing that an Ad company completely manages this new type of “OS”. By only this test alone, Microsoft would be a much more trusting/reliable company, since their core business model wasn’t in Ads, not so much when considering other test points.
I honestly don’t think the Linux approach is going to work either, since design/ux is so important in the browser, and those are fundamentally ignored more than not in that ecosystem. (To make a point, I love Linux).
I personally would pay for a browser, at least a premium version, as long as a free version with the basics was avail.
I’ve never had to think about any of these things before the last major Chrome update, it’s kind of scary.
Meanwhile, AT&T showed up first with their gigabit fiber offering, and I signed up for it. Google still hasn’t come through despite earlier promises, and I’m increasingly glad they haven’t. I’m not suggesting that AT&T is perfect. They’ve had some significant shortcomings in the privacy area themselves. I’m simply saying that I no longer view Google in the simplistic terms I once did. They are a complicated organization with seemingly conflicting priorities.
For the same reason, I’ve also switched away from using their 8.8.8.8 DNS. My wife is on Duck Duck Go, but I haven’t been able to make that leap myself (yet).
Software is made up of code, it's bits of information; in its simplest forms, code can be like math formulae; an elegant algorithm or architecture is more like something you know than something you have. Many algorithms are in the public domain but the majority of the world's most important code is not in the public domain.
Unfortunately the law doesn't regard computer code as knowledge, it regards it as an asset that can be protected as private property - That's why today we have insane monopolies that are seemingly impossible to take down. The world's most important code should be in the public domain and belong to anyone who cares to learn it.
That said, I appreciate the discussion with even my "non-tech" type friends who are starting to understand the cost of 'free' stuff. That folks are learning I find refreshing, it makes the opportunity for products that explicitly protect privacy or disavow surveillance-as-a-service type businesses that much more competitive.
> If you’re in basic browsing mode, your data is still stored locally. The problem is that you no longer get to decide which mode you’re in.
But yes you do! Don't use gmail and you will remain in basic mode.
I get the author's point, but he seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. If you're using gmail, Google already owns a very very significant part of your personal data, enough that you should be worried about it. If you don't trust Google to treat your cookies and other web-data with proper controls, then you shouldn't trust Google to manage your email either.
So from a principled perspective, yeah it's a step backwards for sure. But from a practical perspective, it isn't nearly as substantial.
I for one did find this new misfeature useful -- because Chrome signin and sync are buggy as hell. I get logged out all the time for no apparent reason. Loading gmail (usually without a new signin) re-signs me into Chrome now.
I am not going to switch browsers based on this slide in user privacy from Google. They already suck wrt user privacy and this isn't that significant for me (as a gmail user). Chrome is still much better than FF for me. And come on, FF has had its own privacy flubs as well. didn't they force pocket on everyone? If you switch browsers everytime one of the vendors makes a misstep, there are going to be no more browsers to choose from, save elinks.
Still, here's hoping someone writes an extension or figures out how to block sign-in at a network level.
I use the different identities extensively (work gmail, personal gmail, and other identities) and the quick switcher in the top right is for me the biggest reason why I've been unable to move to Firefox. (FF containers are not the answer, I know that much. I think FF identities are but they lack easy switching.)
Unsettling.
-Google tried to block Ad Nauseam(its debatable effectiveness and value is a different matter - the fact alone was what irked me).
-Firefox is being slowly, bit-by-bit re-written in Rust. What kind of Rustacean I would be not to use the product that's been the raison d'être of this language?
Anyway, this may also directing us towards a viable alternative: A new, independent and cross-platform repackaging of WebKit2 / WebCore.
On a practical level, it's been quite some time since Safari isn't cross-platform anymore. Also, it's fixed to a specific version of the operating system, which also applies to the open source Webkit release. I'd love to see an implementation with less external dependencies.
This started to occur recently, combining with the fact that each chrome tab needs about 120MB memory along, yes it is about time to be back to firefox
OK, things change and we're kind of stuck going along for the sake of security updates, but going near-unusable at an important moment without obvious warning is a problem. (I'm looking at Firefox and Brave now too.)
> (However, and this is important: Google developers claim this will not actually start synchronizing your data to Google — yet. See further below.)
Did not like how Google forces your google account to be active at all times, and the new UI of Chrome is a regressive step in terms of design.
Firefox just grinds to a halt for me on my Mac.
I only use chrome on the very rare occasions I still need to do a little front end work.
Doesn't this change in behavior make things far less confusing for non-technical users?
FireFox: Here, create cookie containers so nobody knows it's you!
Hopefully with a(nother) big fat fine...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1124108
This is a core thing for the system, and it contributes heavily to Firefox not feeling native.
I can't find anything on this, does anyone have more info?
Why not just use a different modern browser instead, I don't get it.
Also just in case you you've checked other blockchain-like projects, are they legit?
oh wait... fsf.org
/etc/chromium-browser/policies/managed/test_policy.json {
"DownloadDirectory": "/tmp",
"DefaultNotificationsSetting": 2,
"DefaultGeolocationSetting": 2,
"AutoplayAllowed": false,
"SigninAllowed": false,
"RestrictSigninToPattern": "^$",
"SyncDisabled": true,
"CloudPrintProxyEnabled": false,
"CloudPrintSubmitEnabled": false,
"SpellCheckServiceEnabled": false,
"TranslateEnabled": false,
"SearchSuggestEnabled": false,
"NetworkPredictionOptions": 2,
"BrowserNetworkTimeQueriesEnabled": false,
"MetricsReportingEnabled": false,
"SafeBrowsingEnabled": false,
"SafeBrowsingExtendedReportingOptInAllowed": false,
"DefaultBrowserSettingEnabled": false,
"SavingBrowserHistoryDisabled": true,
"DefaultSearchProviderEnabled": true,
"DefaultSearchProviderName": "DuckDuckGo",
"DefaultSearchProviderSearchURL": "https://duckduckgo.com/?q={searchTerms}&kp=-1&kd=1&kl=uk-en",
"DefaultSearchProviderIconURL": "https://duckduckgo.com/favicon.ico",
"URLBlacklist": ["facebook.com", "https://www.facebook.com"],
"CookiesAllowedForUrls": ["[*.]whatever.com", "[*.]whatevercdn.com", "[*.]whatever.io"],
"CookiesBlockedForUrls": [
"[*.]doubleclick.net",
"[*.]wideopenpets.com"
],
"BackgroundModeEnabled": false,
"WPADQuickCheckEnabled": false,
"VideoCaptureAllowed": false,
"AudioCaptureAllowed": false,
"EnableMediaRouter": false,
"NativeMessagingUserLevelHosts": false,
"DefaultWebBluetoothGuardSetting": 2,
"ExtensionInstallForcelist": ["geddoclleiomckbhadiaipdggiiccfje;https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx","cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm;https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx","kljjfejkagofbgklifblndjelgabcmig;https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx"]
}P.S: I do understand your concern. But I see that increasingly google is building for its billions outside of EU/US where people share devices and look at security in a totally different way.
I suspect anyone who disagrees is taking a provincial, American view on the subject, and is being triggered by the phrase "gun control".
How open-minded of you.
There is no better way to partake in a discussion in good faith then to use the old: If you disagree with me [insert negative suggestion here].
1) Inform the user and help the user quickly find facts, narratives, and meaningful content related to the search phrase? 2) Sell things? 3) Promote modes of political control by narrowing the scope of acceptable thought and connection between search phrase and content?
We all hope for #1. We all accept #2. But I think that most of us, at least until recently, had thought that #3 wasn't happening to any significant degree.
I agree that results like this one are befuddling - a search for "Politically controversial and anti-state concept <foo>" brings as the first result, "Related but saccharine pro-state concept <bar>" when both foo and bar appear in approximately equal stature in the domain in question.
Yeah, I think that's odd. And I don't see a way to easily explain it in the context of numbers 1 and 2 above.
So I think you're right to be skeptical here. On the other hand, after a scan of each, I see two plausible reasons that the "Gun control" article might be elevated.
One, it's somewhat longer, with more references and cross-links (it even has a "See also" link to the "Gun rights" article).
Two, superficially, the "Gun control" article is a bit more internationally focused. The title of the "Gun rights" article is straight out of the U.S. Constitution. The appearance doesn't really hold up under scrutiny -- they both spend similar shares of their content on U.S. stuff -- but it might make a small difference.
Regardless of the reason, it's definitely good to pay attention to this sort of thing.
1. It's subjective if the results are wrong. _You_ know what you are looking for, Google however has to guess. And it's algorithms aren't perfect at figuring out _your_ intent - even though they may do a fine job for the average person. Right now, for me, the top result is from a Reddit thread about this very query. The rest are things like "black and white couple" and "couple with white background". These aren't what you expect, but, it makes sense why they are being returned.
2. Your test does nothing to establish intent. A pretty reasonable explanation for the search results is just that that is what the algorithm does.
3. I'm sure someone can come up with some theory about how tweaking the results of this very specific search is a nefarious plot to promote interracial relationships - but it requires some pretty tortured logic to conclude that such a plan would, even if true, be even remotely effective at accomplishing it's goal. That's basically the Hallmark of a conspiracy theory.
Are you implying that there are Google employees manually tinkering with the result of millions of search terms for the purposes of influencing the American population? And nobody at Google has leaked it? That’s hilarious.
And how is that influence campaign going to work on a practical level? Are you assuming people are so dumb as to change their opinion on core political matters because their racially charged search term didn’t acid wash the internet of its diversity??
For me or anyone to believe this, is a huge ask.
Any attempt to algorithmically shape perspectives is crude with today’s state of the art.
How precisely would such an algorithm work, while not creating obvious artifacts and errors throughout the search results for all people using the service.
And how would it work for people only in the us and not elsewhere?
Agreed.
> Any attempt to algorithmically shape perspectives is crude with today’s state of the art.
I suspect that the truth of this statement is very difficult to ascertain at the moment. Reasonable people might dispute both which technologies represent the "state of the art" and also which outcomes represent successfully shaped perspectives.
Although I don't have the data to back up this assertion (and again, I'm not sure such data is cognizable in the current environment), I think that for some reasonable definitions of the above that indeed perspectives can successfully be algorithmically shaped today, though as I said above, I think that this "white couple" nonsense is not a meaningful example.
> How precisely would such an algorithm work, while not creating obvious artifacts and errors throughout the search results for all people using the service.
Again, it may not be clear to anyone, including the authors, precisely how such an algorithm works. That's why A/B (and other) testing is needed.
And I think people in this thread are saying that indeed obvious artifacts are starting to creep up (although again I think that the "white couple" thing is a total misfire and not at all an example - the "gun rights" thing appears to my eyes to be much closer).
> And how would it work for people only in the us and not elsewhere?
Isn't this already at a point of triviality? Doesn't Google already do this all the time? I mean, if you travel outside North America, indeed the Google experience is palpably different from the one in the US.
In the top two rows (ie, 8 images), three are from a reddit post about this very controversy.
The remaining five are images of couples. Of these, three are what look to my eyes to be white couples. One is an image of an ethnically Indian couple in an article about not being able to adopt a white child. The other is a photo of two dudes doing a hand symbol together with a caption "black and white couple gesturing with hands."
All of these images seem very relevant to the phrase "white couple."
So, actually, this is a case where Google Image Search gives back perfectly appropriate results, at least for me as of today.
Interpreting Google's ranking algorithm as a conspiracy to infrinage on gun rights is unsubstantiated by fact.
Spoken like an American.
You do know the rest of the world is doing just fine without your absurd gun "rights". I much prefer my "right" to live in a city where guns are exceptionally difficult to procure. That right keeps me much safer than your gun rights—and that's an indisputable fact, not an opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms
Why wouldn't that get autofilled on the front page of the search results instead?
Please explain how Google implements its agenda into the search results people see before mocking other people's statements.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/1...
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512
Also note that the top "organic" result on Google's search for "Gun Rights" is just a tag page from NPR. There is no way that's a relevant result. So even if it's not on purpose, it's a very poor result...and given it stands out more so than other keyword searches it seems a bit odd.
Edit: down voted for citing study from the National Academy of Sciences, bubbles certainly are thick.
• "Google has an agenda. They don't hire lobbyists on K street to fight for more neutral search results."
• In this case, "the fact that 'gun' appears in the title of one and not the other is impacting the matching and also the Gun Control page is much longer so it probably seems like a higher quality page versus the other one"
You’re being silly.
Such a result would definitely be odd framing, though. Especially if it was the main infobox and not, say, the seventh result.
For instance, I could see a "soft authoritarian" regime subtly justifying its censorship regime by preferentially surfacing content that makes censorship seem more justified. One way to do that is to encourage the idea that "limits are common" and discourage the idea that "free speech is a natural right," which you can do by changing the search ranking to surface an article like you described.
This is simply not true to the many people out there that believe in natural rights.
(Meanwhile, I live in a society with absolutely no gun rights, and I'm extremely glad that I do. I much prefer my "right" to live in a city where guns are difficult an expensive for criminals to procure. It keeps me and my family much safer than your gun rights. And that's not an opinion, it's a proven indisputable fact.)
Then you flagrantly broke the HN guidelines here and vandalized the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18062563. If you do this again we will ban you as well.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054615 and marked it off-topic.
It says “Download Chrome, or open in Safari”, and even though there’s a switch which says “Always ask which browser to use”, unchecking it (it’s checked by default, of course) only gets rid of this popup for a few days, then they show it again!
The Julius Malema of tech. "We are not calling for the syncing of user data to our servers. At least not yet".
"Looks/looking good to me"
> While the story behind the coinage of LGTM remains murky at best, the earliest known use and explanation of the acronym can be traced to a feature summary of Google Mondrian, a peer-review software application for programmers, posted by Niall Kennedy[3] on November 30th, 2006.
With Quantum's Servo, I'm going to give FF another bite at the proverbial apple.
The first argument: He likes to give consent. He fails to mention why he feels the need to consent to signing in, but the second argument implies it, making this just a prelude to that argument. This need seems irrational as there is no difference in the browsing experience between being signed in (and unsynced) vs being not signed in. The only difference is a minor UX change: you can now accidentally sync (which is his second, and most significant, argument).
His second argument, making it dangerously easy to sync, is actually a good thing for the average user. It is also not that simple to do by accident if you have a separate password set-up for syncing. I think it is safe to say on the whole that people who never sync will still not sync.
His third argument can be written off as paranoia: "For all we know, the new approach has privacy implications even if sync is off. ". Sure, maybe by simply being signed in you are being data-mined in secret, but if you trust Google that little why are you using their services? And what would be preventing them from mining you while not signed in?
Lastly, I think the author is slightly conflating "sync" with "data mining"? For all we know synced data is end-to-end encrypted and Google can't even read your bookmarks? The terms of service "signed-in mode" just states that data gets saved to the cloud, not that Google uses it?