Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync | Hacker News Reader

Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

blog.ideasynthesis.com

359 pointsfomojola170 comments

Keep in mind that while everybody here is all outraged about this, nobody else is. Because the experience is so nice.

It's the reason why I can search for "prefecture Melun" on my laptop, then jump in the car, open up maps on my phone, Start typing "1" and watch it suggest "12 rue de Gambas, Melun 77320", which happens to be the address of the Melun prefecture.

That sort of thing happens for me every day, and i think it's kinda cool. Google knows this stuff about my life and will suggest it at useful times. If I open maps on the day I have a flight, ferry, or hotel reservation, it'll just assume I want to navigate there (because it read one of my emails) and suggest it for me.

So yeah, I guess I should be outraged and worry that they'll start targeting me for ads or ratting me out to the NSA or something. But thus far they haven't.

It's just that they can offer all this cool stuff if they connect your devices. And in 2018 that involves using a database. Personally, that does not concern me all that much.

The day is not that far, when you look to buy say car insurance, and you get $XYZ as a quote. Your ur friend gets $ABC where $ABC <<< $XYZ. Why? because the profile that all these corporation built on you seems to suggest you have the character profile of a 19 year old.

Is there a way you could prevent this? Yes, if you care about privacy and not let someone build that database in the first place.

It's not only/always the NSA that we need to worry about.. You can already see this in some sense. A flight ticket could cost more if you look for it using a Mac instead of a PC. The road to creepy data mess is not that far.

> Is there a way you could prevent this?

Yes, regulations on insurance pricing factors and on use of personal data.

True. However, I can easily guard my data than to effect politics and regulations all over the world. Why not both?

Yeah, who needs freedom anyway?

Your solution is worse than the problem.

How is regulation to protect people from being taken advantage of by malicious data-mining practices "worse" than the actual practice of maliciously mining data to rip people off?

Limiting freedom is bad unless you have a very good reason to do so.

Does it make sense to ask "Why is fascism bad?". At a philosophical level it makes sense to ask this, but most of us would agree that freedom is desirable, because it allows people to develop their life project and be happy, while allowing other people to be happy (or at least try to be). Fascism is the totally opposite of freedom, therefore most of agree that fascism is bad.

Is there a good reason to undermine freedom in this case? I don't think so.

Some people may find that giving up their privacy for convenience is worth it, others, like me, would think the opposite, but we individually make the decision to use or not use Google, Facebook, etc. "Being taken advantage" is subjective.

Even if it was generally considered to be "malicious" and "being taken advantage of", you're arbitrarily twisting the rules of the game, to favor one group of people (the "users") and impair others (those that create the service). You may say: Yeah, but those being impaired already have millions of dollars and those being "protected" are good people. So, you decide who is "good people" and whose freedom doesn't matter? Should millionaires have less rights than poor people? Laws should correct for the amount of money/power people have, is that fair? I don't think so.

It is not clear to me that just because a company can gather and use personal data that they should be free to do so. Even if they should be so free, it is not clear to me that they should be free to use any personal data in whatever way they want.

> Limiting freedom is bad unless you have a very good reason to do so.

The argument that they should be free to do so because otherwise we are otherwise limiting freedom is not convicing. Consider, for a moment, whether we have a right to privacy. Restricting person A from violating the rights of person B is generally not considered a limit on the freedom of person A. For instance, we generally do not talk about laws against theft limiting the freedom of a person to take whatever they want. If we do not have a right to privacy, then preserving privacy may still be a "very good reason" to limit such freedom.

> Some people may find that giving up their privacy for convenience is worth it, others, like me, would think the opposite, but we individually make the decision to use or not use Google, Facebook, etc. "Being taken advantage" is subjective.

Most people do not realize they are giving their privacy away or if they do, do not realize the extent of it. Privacy policies are intentionally obfuscated (and these public policies only exist because of regulation). People have expectations of how their data will be handled and PR departments do their best to suggest that their expectations align with reality, but theose expecations are never aligned with reality.

Even if this is how it actually worked, it would only work that way until it no longer works that way. Eventually you may find yourself uninsurable if you refuse to install a tracking device in your vehicle.

I feel like insurance companies are already doing this in a more transparent way:

https://www.joinroot.com/

If you want the lower rate, you let them track you with the app. If you don't, you call up Geico or whatever and let them decide based on your age and zip code.

Chrome Sync has nothing to do with this.

I disagree. I think this is indeed a known exchange of your privacy for value, but when people not using the app also find their life insurance rates going up it'll be a different story.

I also think all of us are terrible at determining the value of our privacy and it's an asset we don't miss until it's gone. It's for that reason that I think the sale of privacy is something we can't leave up to unregulated industry because not all parties have good information on the goods they are exchanging.

You missed the part where the algorithm is written and improperly maintained by underpayed and underqualified developers and routinely spits out wrong answers.

Information about what you're willing to pay isn't sufficient to lead to you paying a higher price, like in your example. There has to be no competition in the given market (probably not the case in your particular example-- car insurance).

This is the exact opposite of what economics would predict. If you have a greater risk than your friend, then you will pay more because your expected risk is higher. In perfect competition, your rate would be equal to your expected return (that is, the premiums would match the expected payout).

So, if an insurer can identify that you have a greater risk than your friend, in perfect competition you would pay a higher rate. No insurer with perfect knowledge of risk would allow you to pay less than that, because they’re expected return would be negative.

I was assuming they were concerned about you being charged more than the cost of providing the insurance. If the supposed dystopia is indeed merely the reality where everyone gets charged the cost of providing the service I have to ask how exactly you think things work right now.

Competition and free market is not always the best solution to all the problems. In this case, what if all insurance companies are allowed to build such profiles? They all rely on that creepy data hoarder that built the shitty profile on you.

In that case the companies will compete to give you competitive yet higher than others quotes to YOU(as they can see).

What competition? Oh, you mean those companies on the second page of the search results?

Lack of ability for companies to advertise to you seems like a distinct concern from that of how much information they have about you, let's take it one at a time!

> Lack of ability for companies to advertise to you seems like a distinct concern

It's not about "lack of ability to advertise", it's about someone being able to heavily manipulate the perceived availability of competition (which is much more important than the real availability of competition). And that someone is the same someone that helps the companies manipulate the price (hint: it's Google).

This is an old as time debate of "Security vs Convenience".

It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https? Same thing with letting Google start to categorize and selling your profile to organizations. It might be nice now, but in 5-10 years what will the landscape look like?

It's ultimately your choice to determine how much of your information you are willing to give up for the sake of convenience but you should think a little more about what the future could look like and start putting in some safeguards to protect yourself in the future.

> It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https?

I think that's a totally different issue and I think it's harmful to this discussion to bring such an issue in.

The case of http vs https is not one of user security vs user convenience; it's user security vs sysadmin convenience.

There's a different tradeoff with giving user's more security which is less convenient for you to maintain, and you typically should do this (this is stuff like https, supporting 2fa, etc).

The better comparison is sharing data with third parties to provide users conveniences. This is a comparison between user's data security and user's convenience. That's the tradeoff being discussed.

Bringing in unrelated things like http vs https will only serve to muddy the waters and damage your point.

Giving up privacy for most people is not a security reduction. Privacy is extremely important, but it is relevant only to a tiny minority of people who care about it or otherwise require it. Most people neither care nor use their rights to privacy, so in practice, losing it, for them, is no real loss. It is an increase in convenience—at no cost. The cost is a societal one, borne only when “no privacy” becomes a widespread default. As it stands, there are other browsers that offer better privacy for those who care about such things.

The NSA revelations shown that governments are doing mass surveillance for real and it is not just a nonsense conspiracy. Right now maybe only ver few might get affected by this. But if in the future the people in power use that information against you or your people you will regret it to exchange your privacy for convenience.

> if in the future the people in power use that information against you or your people you will regret it to exchange your privacy for convenience.

Alternatively if the people not in power have a revolution and murder all of us working in finance... well shucks I guess that could be something I'd regret.

Waving around arbitrary threats doesn't help if the people you're preaching to view them as low likelihood.

Privacy is related to security. The ability for anyone with a little technical knowledge to gain large amounts of data about you is a big security risk for individuals and society.

Every feature you've listed works without forced log-in. Taking away the choice to share everything about one's life with an ad company is what people are angry about.

There is no forced login. You can still use Chrome without logging in to anything. You can also disable Chrome Sync even if Chrome is logged in after logging in to gmail, so “forced” is the wrong term.

You can't use Google Chrome without logging into the browser itself if you use any Google service.

False. Incognito windows. You can also disable the login state sync as many have pointed out.

By disable do you mean use the temporary flag that is already removed in Chrome Canary?

Incognito windows are not a realistic alternative, because that adds more limitations.

From what I've read, the main objection to this isn't the linking of the accounts for people who want it, it's that there's no way to opt out for people who want to use Google services on the web but don't want to log into the browser itself at all. I don't think there's any reason that they couldn't make it so that logging into Chrome automatically logs you into your Google account on the web as well without doing the reverse as well. To me, this feels like an even worse version of the "opt-in by default" issue; to opt out, you also have to opt out of logging into any Google accounts at all while in Chrome, which is a huge ask even for privacy-minded people who don't want to log into the browser itself.

> or ratting me out to the NSA or something. But thus far they haven't.

I think in a post-Snowden world that is a pretty bold assumption.

You get that cool stuff because you are signed into your Google Account on your laptop and on your phone. The controversy is over the new behavior of being signed into your Chrome browser by default. Do you really want by default to have your browsing history sent to Google?

The thing is that you opted into the services you gave examples of, you aren't opting into the Chrome sign-in, it's forced upon you.

No one had a problem with Facebook collecting tons of meta data, until one day, it mattered. One more link in the chain that ties users down, everyone is complacent while slowly becoming a product.

Well, kinda. Now the choice is made at what browser you use.

How long before Google forces you to have a Google Account to even search? I think we all know it's probably going that direction eventually.

I think that's backwards. Google without Search has very little to most of the Internet, and Google knows it. Search is the basis of Google's Ad money, and they won't do anything to restrict that.

Other search engines are good enough to work if a user's unhappy, and Google hopes that users never have a reason to notice that.

If Google can do what Amazon is doing with product searches in a "one click" purchase model the trade will pay off in forcing people to sign in. A huge huge portion of Google income is from direct purchases, which is why Amazon is arguably its biggest competitor, not Bing. At the very least searches are much less relevant if you aren't signed in, and that gap is only going to continue to grow imo.

Also, even those of us who care about privacy are not all outraged about this. I have been using Chrome Sync (with a clientside encryption passphrase) for years. It always surprised me that there were separate login states for gmail and the browser. This change saves me a step, and reduces user confusion too.

Users who already sign into Chrome are not affected by this issue. But for people who do not already sign in, we have now been force-logged in without consent. That is the problem everyone is outraged about.

But that logged in to Chrome does nothing unless you additionally consent to Sync, so why do you care?

Exactly. This just streamlines the login process and cuts the number of times users enter their password in half.

I use and appreciate those conveniences too, without having ever signed in to Chrome or using Chrome Sync.

Many privacy-conscious people make all the same tradeoffs that everyone else does; like you, they've decided that what they're giving up is worth what they're getting in return. The problem with this change is that for many people there is no benefit and they were not asked, so they feel they are having something forcefully taken away from them without getting anything in return.

"Because the experience is so nice."

If the experience is "so nice" why are so many people outraged? The data suggests this is a terrible experience to look up and suddenly see you've been auto-logged into a browser without your consent. Terrible UX.

> why are so many people outraged?

Whenever you think that many people are outraged and someone else claims that it's not the case, the logical conclusion is that you or both of you are in bubbles.

Is it possible that you, a hacker news poster, are in a bubble whereby you've heard the opinion of tech-savy people, but not the opinion of the average mom who doesn't even realize the auto-login is the reason her android phone is now suggesting browser history from her desktop?

I agree it's worth acknowledging that it is the tech crowd that is concerned, and that's exactly what we should expect. This was a stealth-release feature that doesn't really explain itself and has no clear way to disable. It seems completely reasonable that it is tech experts who are the ones to first notice this problem, and rightly criticize it.

I agree that it is worth acknowledging that it the tech crowd as well.

But then, who should you be listening to about whether to vaccinate your kid? Jenny McCarthy on social media or a bunch of people who each had to spend several years of effort to be called a doctor? Obviously, go with the better user experience.

I think this is my favorite quote for discussions that start out like yours:

“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. – Edward Snowden”

Maybe I'm foolish, but I have this hope that a shift from the "make money off of mining your data" business model to something else, perhaps like crypto/tokens enable, might just enable the convenience you speak of, without forcing me to sell my information because everyone else didn't care to value their data.

The point is that it is forced and you have to opt out, rather than opt in.

100% agree with you. This is one of the main reasons why I switched to Chrome. I can understand that some people value their privacy, but for those cases why don't just use a browser like Firefox.

I'm pretty sure most people switched to Chrome because it was a better browser, not because they wanted Google to have more information about their browsing habits. Note that all the examples you're agreeing with are about logged-in experiences with Google products and have nothing to do with being signed in to Chrome.

Can you give one example of a convenience you got from being signed in to the Chrome browser? All of your examples would work without that.

Having the same settings/history/bookmarks/extensions shared between my main laptop, my cheapo 10" notebook I use when in on the beach or in a plane etc ..., and my phone.

Being able, in three clicks, to re-open on my computer a tab I closed on my phone a couple hours ago.

For me that's it.

That doesn't benefit from the Google account synergy like the other examples. You get that if you log in to Firefox.

Uhhh, yeah, but the question wasn't "what is something Chrome offers you that you can't replace", it's "what do you get by getting logged in that you enjoy". I'm sure competitors offer the same sort of thing.

All of that works without forced log-in.

forced log-in is not the question/scenario I was answering to, parent asked "a convenience you got from being signed in to the Chrome browser".

So I'm not sure why you answer that to my message.

Thanks, but no thanks. Ditch Chrome and don’t worry about ugly hacks to remember or bookmark or ask about in the future when they no longer work.

Life is too short to put up with such nonsense. There are better alternatives [1] available.

P.S.: When you uninstall Chrome on certain platforms, it’ll open your default browser and direct you to a feedback page. Be honest and tell them why, and that you wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

[1]: https://www.firefox.com

I'll add one more to your side note.

Please tell your particularly non technical friends and relatives to avoid Google like plague if they care about privacy. Show them how - give a link to Firefox, Privacy badger.

A relative of mine who paid $7/month for a VPN service because he cared about his privacy from ISP, but was using Google Chrome and Gmail for sensitive personal Email. Fewer people from the non-engineering world know/understand what we assume is common sense. When you get a chance please don't hesitate to tell people of better choices.

>Please tell your particularly non technical friends and relatives to avoid Google like plague

For anyone that has never had a conversation like this, you really have to be careful with this and pick your battles wisely. Some people are so non-technical, that they will not understand what you are explaining to them, or why you are even bothering them. You will be perceived as a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. Some people will understand what you are explaining and might even understand your stance, but ultimately will still continue in their ways because it's so much easier and convenient.

What ever you do, don't be judgemental about their decision. You will only make them less interested. Start slowly. It can be overwhelming how fubar'd the web experience has become.

I find it really easy to pitch privacy in a "do you really want your medical insurer to know that you're googling weight loss or pregnancy stuff?", "do you really want your future employers to know what kind of dank memes you looked at?", "when you're booking a hotel the price will go up because they'll know you've looked at it before and want to fake a sense of urgency so you buy" sort of way. Providing concrete examples of how a lack of privacy can cost money seems to be useful.

> Some people are so non-technical, that they will not understand what you are explaining to them, or why you are even bothering them. You will be perceived as a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. Some people will understand what you are explaining and might even understand your stance, but ultimately will still continue in their ways because it's so much easier and convenient.

This is a very common reaction I've seen. People don't care as much about privacy as one would assume they might when given some information about it. It's like a case of extreme apathy triggered and nurtured by ignorance. Add to this the convenience factor of Gmail or similar platforms, it's a big task.

But I have seen that there are at least a few people who, over time, get the heeby-jeebies about privacy intrusions. That's a good result compared to not telling them about this over and over for a long time.

Exactly. I regularly argue about this with my colleagues who are all mostly trained statisticians with some programming experience. Generally, what happens is that people are in awe of the "innovation" coming from Google and my protests are generally laughed off.

There are things that can be explained but can be understood only by direct experience. This is one of them. They'll eventually get burned by their faith in Google and suddenly they'll understand.

Latching on to GP's context, statistically speaking, most people don't see these issues themselves. So they don't care if one in a million or even one in a hundred might get affected. As long as they (or their close ones) haven't experienced it, it doesn't exist and doesn't matter. It's exhausting to deal with such people, and most of the general public are this way.

Do you have any recommendations for a good alternative to Gmail? I've already made the switch away from Chrome, but for some reason my mind blanks on email -- I can only think of Yahoo or Hotmail

My alternative is not free :-( I use FastMail and pay for mine and my wife's accounts. It may not be for everybody, but it is one choice, and I'm a happy customer.

It is by far a "No bullshit" email service. They do one thing, and very well. It's simple, fast and reliable.

I'll give them a look, thanks! It may not be free but it is cheaper than I expected. Looks nice.

Here's a 15 hour old HN thread asking this exact question and getting over 500 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054574

Protonmail.

Ditching Chrome is not an option for the security conscious; there is no other browser that has the security resources dedicated to it that Chrome has. It’s not even close.

>there is no other browser that has the security resources dedicated to it that Chrome has.

I disagree. Firefox uses the exact same URL filtering system [0] used by Chrome to block access to potentially harmful malware-ridden sites. Add some solid extensions like uBlock/uMatrix and Privacy Badger to that, you get a browser that's as secure, if not more, than Google's bloated browser.

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing

Do these security changes get rolled into Chromium?

I've got Firefox in my Pocket, and it is just as bad as Chrome. I try to watch videos, but hardware acceleration has too high of an ohm. My CEO donated to Prop 8 and thinks JavaScript is great. I think I will just go paste about Firefox being the best, when really I am just a Mozilla fanboy that pretends to know better than the rest.

There's a great way to disable this and many other user-hostile features by going to https://www.mozilla.org/ and downloading Firefox. Suddenly, you are no longer fighting your browser.

While you're completely on the mark with this, I noticed that Google pulls the new Microsoft now that it has almost a quasi monopoly on the desktop: Most of the new, complex UIs by Google services (read: GCP Cloud Console, all of Google Marketing Platform) are slowing my Firefox to a grinding halt, often times even crashing the tab.

No problems in Chrome whatsoever. It's the only thing I'm using Chrome for these days and I can't help shake the same ugly feeling than when I was forced using Internet Explorer for government websites purely because of their ActiveX plugins back in the days.

I've ran into various comments around the internet/reddit that Google sites like Youtube are slower on Firefox, and that changing the user agent to Chrome fixes it.

No problems here: Waterfox plus usual privacy oriented addons then Hooktube replacing Youtube. Might seem excessive but works like charm.

https://www.waterfoxproject.org/en-US/

https://hooktube.com/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hooktube-redi...

Just a heads up—HookTube's homepage (at least for the moment?) is very NSFW.

Warning: Hooktube link is NSFW. 'Sensual massage' thumbnail on the frontpage...

Just checked, you're absolutely right! I always use the redirector addon rather than going to their homepage though and it has been SFW so far.

To all, I can't edit anymore my post to delete it, so just forget about the hooktube address; as others reported it's definitely NSFW while the redirector Firefox addon is safe. I apologize for not checking it before.

That seems hard to believe as it would imply that they have code specifically to cripple the Firefox experience. It's probably at worst that they intentionally don't optimize their sites for Firefox and not actively making it worse.

> That seems hard to believe as it would imply that they have code specifically to cripple the Firefox experience.

I think it's more the case of enhancing the Chrome experience and not doing anything to deliberately impact firefox.

That is the same as what I suggested. Which would mean that simply changing a user-agent can't make anything run better on firefox.

Google does a lot of UA sniffing, and serves different sites to different browsers.

The sites served to non-Chrome receive less QA resources, as far as I can tell, and are often buggy in various ways. Simply spoofing the Chrome UA in Firefox on Android can often get you a site that works better (in Firefox) than the one served to Firefox by default.

Sometimes this happens on the desktop as well, they optimize for the latest Chrome and the "latest" Firefox ESR - so here we are, Chrome is the reincarnation of IE6'6'6 the definition of evil in the software world.

I've noticed this also. Gmail or anything by Google within Firefox is painful. Very very painful.

Just a heads up, but we are actively working on improving the situation here, and should have releases coming out that steadily and progressively improves the experience on this front. It is an area of major focus after the initial Quantum Flow effort, and we have technical fixes in many places in the pipeline to address this.

(I work on the Javascript engine in Firefox, and improving our story here is one of my personal top priorities, as well as an organizational priority).

Are you saying that performance issues on Google properties are a bug in Firefox? The other posters were implying the issue was Google doing things to intentionally slow down performance in Firefox.

I'm not about to speak to the intent of programmers I haven't interacted with heavily. In these sorts of charged conversations there is often an impulse to make issues about "this" or "that" exclusively. I find it useful to avoid that impulse entirely and instead focus on what I can do to make things better.

Well then let me restate my question. Are there regressions in Firefox that hinder performance on Google properties?

Not stating Google is intentionally slowing down things - but I've noticed that Google products and only Google products are slow to render, slow to click into the search field of Google Maps, and when I press 'compose' within Gmail on a macbook pro 2017 I can wait easilly 10 seconds before the email bit pops up. Within Chrome however, quick and slick.

Google has a history of disabling or degrading features (image search, maps, youtube) in browsers that aren't Chrome under the "we haven't fully tested them" excuse. In almost all cases changing your user agent to Chrome would result in a perfectly functional site. Perhaps there is 1 feature that didn't work but it was usually obscure and it feels like Google was just throwing the baby out with the bathwater to spite anyone not using Chrome. Up until recently it felt like Google made a Chrome version of their product and a lowest common denominator version and anyone that isn't using Chrome got the later. Now it seems like they let some browsers use the Chrome version but there are unusual performance regressions compared to Chrome. It's very reminiscent of the first browser wars where sites were IE or Netscape only.

The whole point of standards push over the years was so that developers could just code to the standard and the browsers would either catch up or suffer the consequences. It seems like these days Google is dipping into Microsoft's old playbook for every trick it can find to get people to switch to Chrome.

If you want a site the is just horrible in Firefox Mobile, try: http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/meteye/ This is a Australian Government site, so there is no Google shenanigans going on here.

You are meant to zoom in on a locality on the interactive map, and then pan around by dragging. Panning works fine in Chrome. The panning is so slow in Firefox Mobile it's unusable . (It's fine on Firefox desktop, but I'm guessing the shear horsepower available on a desktop CPU hides the problem).

It's a bit sad, because it's a page I use a lot. Whatever it is, it effects a lot of similar pages.

Can you provide a few links to bugs for this?

I'd love to know the technical reasons behind that.

Read in another HN comment just the other day that the slowness was because they used some obsolete only-in-chrome shadow DOM API which "polyfilled" on all other browser, which if true sounds exactly like pulling a Microsoft.

I haven't verified it myself and I couldn't find a reference with a quick search, so while it sounds plausible, it would be great to havd a credible source to refer to.

This is not necessarily malicious though.

Probably some in-house framework they use that happens to use this old browser API. And they haven't gotten around to fixing it.

Of course it's also reasonable that nobody is pushing a fix up because it works fine on Chrome and that's what Google wants us to use.

Some kind of reference https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053935

I have a Gmail account since it was invite only and I believe also there wasn't any web interface yet so I always used it through a mail client such as Sylpheed, now Claws Mail (https://www.claws-mail.org/). The very few times i had to use the web interface (always Firefox or derivatives) it worked without hitches on FF too, but a few months ago I was doing some maintenance to a customer PC (Debian+Firefox just like all my machines) and noticed how slow the Gmail web interface had become. Switching to the "old" mode helped somewhat to restore some speed, but being used to snappy dedicated mail client it still was truly slow to operate. Unfortunately today every non tech savy user thinks the browser is the internet to the point some don't even know what the word browser mean, which makes even more difficult to convince them to try anything else. Where a browser struggles with two pages of mails, I can keep available my entire archive since about 2001 on the Claws Mail client, that's over 50K mails in a dozen accounts, and query them to find whatever I need.

I had compatibility issues when I tried to use TensorBoard the other day. It doesn't even seem like they were trying for compatibility in that case.

>Suddenly, you are no longer fighting your browser.

I mean, if you're okay with Pocket showing you ads in your home page, your browsing data being sent to Cliqz, addons that publicise the "Mr Robot" TV show being installed without your consent, Mozilla pages that use Google Analytics scripts that cannot be blocked, then Firefox is a solid choice.

None of that happens in the current Firefox releases.

That's a lie. You are still shown Pocket ads and AMO still uses Google Analytics which cannot be blocked (extensions cannot run on addons.mozilla.org).

About the rest: true, it's in the recent past, but Mozilla love to shoot themselves in the foot, so they will keep doing that kind of stuff.

I don't see any Pocket ads.

As for analytics, they need to use something. And disallowing extensions to run on addons.mozilla.org is a solid technical decision.

> but Mozilla love to shoot themselves in the foot

As opposed to some other influential tech company which always does the right thing?

An addon that is not enabled by default, doesn't reference what it's supposed to be "advertising", and will only do anything once going to a specific page after it's already been enabled doesn't seem like a very good advertisement.

Except they wiped clear their extension "store" semi-recently and there are still things I need which do not exist. Every time there's a flareup of "Chrome is evil" I take a look, and then close Firefox with "still not for me".

While it's interesting to see ways to inhibit Chrome's new behaviour, getting into a privacy fight with your browser supplier seems to be a losing strategy...

Yes, it's only a matter of time until Chrome removes this flag, just like they removed developer support for disabling the autofill in web forms.

Oh wow, so that is why I had so many problems recently with using forms that supplied some kind of autofill themselves.

I wondered why that problem didn't happen with FF (which I switched to).

I was surprised and angered by the sudden appearance of this automatic sign-in and sync. Between the time that it was activated silently and when I disabled it, I have a nagging suspicion that Google hoovered up my browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, etc. in the guise of "sync". While I couldn't find any evidence, whatever little trust I had left in Chrome is now gone.

> I have a nagging suspicion that Google hoovered up my browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, etc. in the guise of "sync".

It does save some state even when you erase all your history. You can log into GMail, then go to your history and click to erase all history, after which the history settings page will scroll down (to hide the fact you're still logged into this sync thing?), and then when you go to GMail you're logged in again, effectively making Google bypass you clearing your cookies.

This automatic link does not automatically enable Chrome Sync[1]. You can see and delete Chrome Sync data here: https://myaccount.google.com/dashboard

[1]https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1044110733108101120

Google should be very careful with these aggressive tactics. They are quickly losing many users. There are other options available nowadays, including browser like Brave. I personally have switched back to Firefox. I still like Google but they are falling into the same old trap of not listening to their users. The moment they let that escalated and there are other viable options then the game is over.

> They are quickly losing many users.

While I'd also like to think this, the reality is that any number of users they've lost would be negligible at best.

For now yes, but the tech world has showed us similar lessons before. I bet Blackberry and Nokia executives said the same thing when Apple introduced the first iPhone. MySpace was very confident when they deemed Facebook number of users was negligible as well. Unfortunately privacy issues are only getting bigger in the future. That's why I said Google should be very careful not to tread down the same path. Only those who learned lessons from the past will survive. I love Google so I hope they won't get too comfortable with data mining activities and lose track of keeping their users who are the real data sources.

Linux users.

Put:

  {
  "SyncDisabled": true,
  "RestrictSigninToPattern": ".*@example.com"
  }

in a file called disable_sync.json (for example)

and place in the following location:

Chrome: /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/disable_sync.json

Chromium: /etc/chromium-browser/policies/managed/disable_sync.json

It worked on Chrome Version 69.0.3497.100 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Ubuntu 16.04 but it didn't work with Chromium Version 69.0.3497.81 (Official Build)

Chromium kept signing me into my Google account.

You'll need to close down and restart Chromium after each change I think for these. Some policies don't require restarts.

If I go to https://groups.google.com using my Android phone and Chrome 69 and press the sign out link, it won't sign me out. Next time I go to groups.google.com, I'm still logged in. What is the point showing the sign out link if it doesn't do anything? Thanks Google.

Firefox on Android properly signs me out.

One more reason why I don't use Android as my primary phone. I just don't trust Google.

I heard Firefox OS is awesome.

I don’t understand why people are complaining about this. If you’re concerned about privacy then why would you even use a Google product in the first place? There are other options.

Because my employer forces me to use G Suite and some of the features of that (Meet) don't work well (or at all) in non-Chrome browsers.

I use Meet exclusively from Firefox, and it works just as well as in Chrome.

Note that Hangouts does not work in Firefox. However, it works in Safari.

> Hangouts does not work in Firefox. However, it works in Safari.

...barely. If you pop-out a window, it disconnects and closes the window after a minute or two of inactivity if the window is not active. This makes it totally unusable to me.

This started on October 30 2016. I submitted a series of bug reports to Apple, but they were all ignored and/or closed for inactivity. In case you care enough to submit your own bug report, please reference Apple bug 44725612, 29018740 and 28263663.

I'm pretty sure that Google could implement a fix/workaround, but good luck with that.

This drives me nuts. I have to keep a Chrome open just to use Hangouts.

Meet does not work as well in Firefox. If I use my BT headset I have to go into settings and switch back and forth between mics and outputs to get it to work. The connection fails more frequently than Chrome too.

Wouldn’t you just use your work account for this then and keep it separate from your personal digital footprint? I would, or I’d change jobs.

Chrome has become the de facto standard browser. I regularly run into websites that don't work (or don't work well) in Firefox.

Do yourself and the community a favor and when you see a website that doesn't work well make the Firefox Team aware of it[1]. They have a dedicated Team to check those issues.

1- https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility#Contact_Us

Thanks for the tip!

I use Firefox in excess of 10 hours every day and don’t have any problems so I find this statement very surprising. I’m not sure about Chrome being the de facto standard either and even if it is, it doesn’t mean you have to follow it.

Such as?

Notion (can't scroll down with the keyboard, only the mouse) or Intercom (customer's replies are not displayed until you reload).

To disable this feature (at least for chrome 69, not sure if it will change), go to account-consistency: chrome://flags/#account-consistency and select disable.

This no longer works in Chrome Canary (71).

EDIT: to be clear you can configure the setting, but it's not respected anymore.

Former Chrome engineer confirming my report here: https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1043861647247515649.

This is deeply troubling.

What's the point of inconveniencing yourself in all these ways when there are fifty other ways people can track all your browsing activity anyway? It just doesn't seem worth the trouble.

I think the biggest point here is one of respect to the customer. The fact that I lost all of my settings when I simply logged out my persona is clearly disrespectful of the customer. With so many good options, why use Google?

> As much as I might like Chrome (and Google)

Why would you? Brokering data in a borderline illegal or immoral way is their business model.

Further convinced to go back to FF, darn it after an update and a reboot one hour ago, ctrl+space no longer works with chrome(which worked in the last few years) but it works the same way with anything else, yesterday it's that youtube brought my PC to grinding halt when it's used with crhome(firefox works fine), what's going on Google???

I found that the easiest way to do it on Mac is to download the Chrome Enterprise bundle, edit the .plist and convert it to a profile with McxToProfile, to get something like this:

https://twitter.com/gepeto42/status/1043587638568079360

The easiest way is to switch to another browser.

Oh wow, so if you just log in into a Google Account it automatically activates Google Sync without any prompts and starts uploading browser history data and other no-Google properties related browser data? That's pretty nasty. I can understand that for most people this feature is very useful and it's fine to have it, just not fine to enable it by default without even a prompt or something asking users if they want to enable it (say the first time it detects a login to a Google property). Especially with all the governmental focus on Google right now I'm surprised this would get rolled out worldwide.

I never noticed it but it seems it's not being used when using incognito mode (I only browse in private mode, either Chrome or Firefox) so I wasn't aware such a thing is happening in the normal browser mode...

> if you just log in into a Google Account it automatically activates Google Sync without any prompts and starts uploading browser history data and other no-Google properties related browser data?

No, it does not.

https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1044110733108101120

Great, another creepy thing in Chrome we have to disable. Like Google Software Update wasn't already annoying enough.

If I wasn't a web developer, and needed to use Chrome for testing, I'd have uninstalled that creepy quasi-spyware long ago.

Why is Chrome "needed"? I would imagine merely having a standards-compliant browser is the only thing you need?

In which case, why not Firefox?

In practice it’s not unusual for behavior to differ between chrome and Firefox.

Especially when google has been known to program their sites in a way that favors their browser..

Sounds like a good way of saying that one or both browsers is/are not following standards

Chrome isn't identical. For example, we found SVG images don't render properly in Chrome but do in Firefox.

As creepy as the Mozilla Maintenance Service.

For Windows and Mac Chromium builds without Google Sync I recommend: https://chromium.woolyss.com/ From the site: "Welcome on this auto-updated website to easily download latest stable version or good build of Chromium web browser. All is free and open-source."

Don't download the default installer. Instead scroll to the build that says "No Sync".

Chromium of course is the Google sponsored open source project that Chrome is based on. It has the dev tools of Chrome which I prefer to those of Firefox.

Once again another reminder that the need for open source alternatives with minimal to no logging is shown to be a greater necessity in an age where these companies know us better than the government. We can continue to pretend these companies are non-partisan and won't use the data collected for political influence, everyone here is obviously impervious to such influences, but the bigger concern is its influence on public perception.

I think people would rather trade their security for convenience, which in the first place is why Chrome is so popular, with its inbuilt tie-in to Google services. Sure, you could provide an open-source browser that's security focused, but what makes it compelling to the end-user to switch away from Chrome? I don't think many laymen particularly care about this situation.

So long and thanks for all the fish google

If you are on linux please see: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/ChromeWalkingAw...

If they remove the flag, can you disable the service by black-holing an IP, URL, or DNS entry?

I would also like to know if there is some kind of network blocking that could be employed. But likely everything goes through google.com ...

Then, they will run the service behind a crucial Google address / web page. Then what?

I tried to install Chromium but don't know how to install my extensions. So the this seems like the best solution for now although I am working to rehabilitate Firefox.

Thank you for doing this.

You install extensions the same way with Chromium. I don't understand how this could be hard to figure out.

It can be more difficult than you might think.

About a year ago I installed the chromium package provided by Debian and went to install my favorite set of extensions and kept getting a weird error about not being allowed to install them. Turns out that the Debian package maintainer had decided to build Chromium with a patch that disabled installing extensions unless you pass in a flag on the command line to chromium to re-enable the feature. I found this out not because it was properly documented but instead from a bug report on the Debian bug tracker.

Of course, FireFox on Debian hasn't been similarly modified to disallow installing extensions from AMO.

Sounds like poor packaging from Debian. I haven't had any issues on Arch with the following package:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-bin/

You can set a strong sync password in Chrome. Of course, your Google search history etc is still available to other apps.

I don't think it's coincidental that this controversy arose at the same time Google is pushing their new "Signals" product in Google Analytics, which leverages customer sign-in data?

(Just noticed this today.)

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7532985?hl=en&ut...

Is this true for chromium also?

Yes.

Best way of disabling Google Chrome sign in and sync: Uninstall Chrome.

NSLs are a bitch.

Disable the most useful features in chrome. No thanks.

Well, Google is being Google once again.

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