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Comment by pleasecalllater | Hacker News Reader

Google is an advertisement publishing company. All the things they do, they do to earn money, not to give people anything. When Chrome first appeared, I was wondering about the extremely huge cost of building the browser and how Google wants to earn from that. Then it started to be obvious: it's all to spy on people. Not from the beginning, but slowly... the google account integration... the forced logging into the account... adding custom adblock (which doesn't block most of the ads)... and now this: disabling adblockers.

I'm glad that I stopped using it.

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I once read that Chrome was created by former Firefox developers. Google is infamous for its code reuse.

Many web commentators continually sound the alarm on Google's increasing leverage and control over a variety of "components" or "intrastructure" essential to the www.

But controlling the browser is, I think, the ultimate control over the web as users know it. Browsers seem to fall outside the purview of www standards. Are there RFCs that tell people what browsers must or should do? More likely, there are standards that focus on servers and seek to accomodate whatever browsers are doing at the time.

The browser can override anything. It can easily modify user intent in subtle, "hidden" ways. It can rewrite "default behaviour" overnight.

To give an example, users probably think little of something like the feature known as "Omnibox", if they even know what that is, but this sort of browser "feature" is of enormous value to a company trying to gather information on what users are looking for.

Imagine the number of DNS queries this bypasses, redirecting what is typed by the user to a default search engine, conveniently preset to point to a Google server.

Recall that Chrome was made when IE still had a dominant marketshare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

IE was stagnating, slow, and extremely vulnerable to malicious behaviors. The net result was that the web became a very hostile place, while Microsoft was pitching various "post web" strategies like WPF. Google had been a big financial supporter of Firefox but not to a degree where they could direct the project or push their own agenda. At the time many viewed Firefox as slow and bloated.

So Google made their own thing, and it worked admirably and we might be in a very different world if they didn't. They dramatically improved the state of the art for JavaScript, added intrinsic hostile activity and site blocking, started dramatically accelerating the adoption of technology improvements (by implementing very early proposals, often to much consternation), etc.

The web was less dangerous. Google's cash cow was protected because there was less of a draw to go to alternative platforms.

That, I think, was their primary intention and it was aligned interests with users. Everyone is happy with the web.

And honestly I do think this ad blocking thing is a bit of "fake news" (e.g. it is being grossly misreported). Google is proposing a solution that offers more privacy from the extension, and it seems very similar to what Safari has done (and which is very widely viewed as a great design).

"Google is proposing a solution that offers more privacy from the extension, and it seems very similar to what Safari has done (and which is very widely viewed as a great design)."

It would only provide more privacy if ad block extensions go solely with static lists of uris. If they want to retain features like right-click block, or allowing users to customize the list, static blocks don't work.

These changes do nothing to inhibit the ability to log/store/etc requests anywhere you want as an extension author. They are only removing the ability to cancel in flight requests.

What's your source that the Safari ad blocking approach is viewed as a great design? Everything I look at shows it was a regression in effectiveness. Certainly the various adblock authors weren't thrilled. How well, for example, does it work with YouTube ads?

IMNSHO, Google's obsession is artificial intelligence. They have build a search engine to prove they were better at understandanding content of web pages. To improve their AI, they need to spy on every aspects of our life. They spy on all our web activity, on our phone contacts, on our mails, on our documents and on our deplacements (waze). The fact that this search engine has generated so much money was an accident. Now, Google fights are: political lobbying to avoid being destroyed for monopolistic behaviour, protect and increase their spying means, improving their AI.

> I was wondering about the extremely huge cost of building the browser

Chrome was originally based on WebKit and many other open source libraries, and some parts still are. The only major initial investment was V8.

>https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/11/apple-google-near...

And that was 6 years ago.

Chrome doesn't log you in automatically, it just shows your Google account in Chrome if you've already logged in to your account. There's no sync happening.

When a company tells me where it's going by increasingly "encouraging" certain behaviours as their product matures I take them at their word.

Profiles went from optional, to on-by-default but could be disabled via chrome://flags, to on-by-default but could be disabled via command line arg, to cannot be disabled, to logged in by default but not syncing. Where this progression is going and what it's trying to promote is not rocket science.

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