Hacker News Reader

Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

After that, you can also do what I do to prevent Google from reinstalling Keystone ever again:

  touch ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
  touch /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
  chmod 000 ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
  chmod 000 /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate

View on HN

Honestly, if you're going to go this far, why not switch to Firefox or another Chromium/Blink-based browser, like Brave?

It seems kind of counter productive to kill off the auto update system when you can just as easily switch to a browser that just doesn't do what Keystone does.

Its a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't it? Chrome is a fine browser, botnet "features" aside.

It’s so easy to switch browsers so why even bother trying to fix some big ad company’s browser that is not acting in your interest?

Yes indeed but FF bogs down quicker than Chrome with lots of tabs, so I use both.

More important, I like Google Earth and it tries to install Keystone too.

The next release of FF looks to be a game changer in that regard.

It is much better (using v70 beta 8), but still has areas where performance lags behind Chrome. On a large board in https://miro.com/, for example, Firefox is laggy and jittery, whereas Chrome is buttery smooth.

You can report a performance problem -- I have had good luck with fixes: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...

Unfortunately I think we've heard this so many separate times that it's beginning to be the boy who cried wolf.

I've heard "Firefox is better than it was" only for me to reinstall the latest and find it's still way cludgier than chrome.

Sure. I hear that, but there have been some specific MacOS issues that have lead to it performing worse on MacOS than on other platforms, and they seem to be getting addressed in the Nightly builds.

In general, I've found it to be much better than Chrome, but as always YMMV.

I've had the same feeling many times with both Firefox and Chrome in the past.

I think in the end that's something that you have to test out for yourself periodically, as it seems to be great differences of which is the best performer across OSs and devices. As a rule of thumb I try to do a short evaluation of each of them every ~5 releases.

I stopped using firefox years ago when chrome got good, and was happy. I wasn't happy with chrome recently (especially memory and CPU usage), and tried switching back to firefox shortly after the quantum release. I've been happily using it since, and have found comparable or lower resource usage. It actually does fine for me, even with tons of tabs (or as fine as any web browser does).

We shall see. So far using some "tab discard" plugin is essential to reasonable performance. Somehow having many tabs/windows open slows down firefox a lot, event though they aren't wasting CPU (I have most javascript disabled).

Weird... the tab discard stuff no longer helps with Firefox for me. It seems to handle background tabs on its own.

I usually do chflags schg instead of chmod 000. I know it might seem like overkill, but Google is very sneaky, and I would not put it past Keystone to just change the permissions for itself.

That's very hardcore, but I agree with your logic.

> I would not put it past Keystone to just change the permissions for itself.

From experience, they absolutely do it.

They would call it "repairing permissions". OK, so I didn't break into someone's house, I just "repaired" their door that had locked me out.

> I usually do chflags schg instead of chmod 000.

Thank you. This was the best tip to come out of this whole discussion.

I'll identify every location Google apps write to, and lock them out with this.

Thank you! Because of Keystone, I have decided to treat Google Chrome as malware. I won't install it unless I really have to. One reason is that I have to test websites on Chrome. I can either run it on a virtual machine or disable the updater as you suggest.

I certainly understand the desire to rage kill google software update because they messed up, but people shouldn't actually do this because they'll be vulnerable to all future malware that targets chrome. And this varsectomany bug will never happen again.

This is not rage-killing. I've been doing this for several years because Keystone is a ridiculous resource hog and I fundamentally disagree with the notion that any software should be allowed to run (much less change the configuration of) my machine without my explicit permission. I'm willing to stay on top of the malware situation and update Chrome manually. I wish I didn't have to, but Google leaves me no other option.

Only if you continue using Chrome.

I think the probability of Google freaking out and pushing ads to my system is higher than the probability of me a chrome zero day that I give a shit.

They are both very low, but I’d rather programs not change my stuff against my will, even if they are trying to protect me.

Apple needs to provide the user with the ability to ban software from google and other malign companies.

Problem partly solved.

I would change that to just /Library/Google/ to prevent Google from putting ANYthing outside its .app bundle or the normal user preferences folders.

TIL that Google puts a "brand" code in that folder to identify how you downloaded Chrome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com