Chrome 76 Has Given Billions of Google Users an Incentive to Use Firefox Instead | Hacker News Reader

Chrome 76 Has Given Billions of Google Users an Incentive to Use Firefox Instead

forbes.com

34 pointsfeross12 comments

I'm not clicking on that bait. Could someone change the title to something that actually says what it's about?

Original title was: "Chrome 76 Has Given Billions of Google Users an Incentive to Use Firefox Instead"

Thanks. Wanted to say the same. Or please, stop posting Forbes and wsj garbage here in the future. It’s an insult to read. Regardless, ditched back to Firefox more than two years ago.

The whole article is clickbait and low effort journalism. If anything, it actually does a lot more praising Chrome?

Starts up with

> Chrome 76 update which brings plenty of things to like from a security and privacy perspective, and one real stinker as far as usability

Then follows with 3 paragraphs of explaining the upsides. Next, there's a completely unrelated paragraph about the whole ad-blocker extension v3 kerfuffle, which then transitions into a rant about the word "omnibox".

Finally half way through, we get to the crux, which is about the url simplification, which is insane to think that out of all the things people would leave Chrome for, it'd be because removing www. and https://. As if average users care one bit...

Title is inaccurate as proven by the authors opinionated statement in the first paragraph.

> Google has just released the Chrome 76 update which brings plenty of things to like from a security and privacy perspective, and one real stinker as far as usability and the potential for cyber-shenanigans is concerned. Whether it is enough to give many of the billions of mobile users of the Chrome browser (it has been installed five billion times according to Google Play) an incentive to march towards Mozilla Firefox remains to be seen. One thing's for sure, though; it's undoubtedly annoying the heck out of web developers.

The question is if removing 'www' and the protocol are strong enough incentives to take the trouble to manually switch from an integrated (on Android) and bundled (just about everywhere) browser.

On the other hand I suspect that users will get used to not seeing 'www' and the protocol and in no long time, will call browsers not following suit as "having cluttered UI."

Monopolies (even de facto ones) train their target users, and not the other way around. We will get used to yet another small erosion of choice, complexity and the appreciation of diversity that exposure to them brings.

Out of all the things that would make people go from Chrome to Firefox, removing www is literally at the very very bottom of the list for average users... I understand technical people and power users caring and claiming it's not a good idea, but the majority of people won't even notice anything changed.

That's my point. Any single factor by itself seems hardly a reason to switch. Sadly the "whole picture" is not something the vast majority of users are likely to be informed about, so barring severe and protracted regression, I don't see any large-scale switch away from Chrome.

Chrome removed the green padlock as a way to show the its secured by default. Therefore, an error will show when it's not https. Could the author please explain why that is bad?

Bump

I don’t use Chrome on iOS but Safari explicitly shows “Not Secure” for a non-HTTPS site. The secure ones have a padlock. My non-tech friends find this to be very clear; they have learned not to enter information when a website is “Not Secure”.

If this is the direction in which Chrome is heading, the 5-billion or so users will know, without a doubt, whether a site is secure or not. I don’t see a problem with this change, per se. The others, especially targeting ad blockers, seem to be a step in the wrong direction.

How would you know if they removed icon for non-safe sites. You wouldn't as there is no indication of that anywhere (no http string in address, no icon indication).

This brings unnecessary bit of burden to user who would have to pause to make sure site is safe (bank, etc).

That is a bit like trying to strip 'not occupied sign from public toilet stall. Claiming that if its occupied appropriate sign will be displayed.

Say you want to use a stall and you couldn't see a sign if its free or not, that will give u a small pause before you 'try' one.

This is basically just a summary of the most visible changes in Chrome 76. The ones that the author seems to have the most concerns about are the hiding of https and the hiding of what Google calls trivial subdomains like www.

The actual article title is also phrased as a question not as a statement, "Has Chrome 76 Given Billions Of Google Users An Incentive To Use Firefox Instead?"

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