When you tell Chrome to wipe private data it spares Google.com and YouTube
theregister.com
theregister.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24817304 (1293 points/2 days ago/483 comments)
On my Android phone, I'll just go ahead and claim I'm not missing anything and it's not even close - Firefox is so much better just for being able to run extensions like uBlock Origin.
But on a workstation (macOS) - I'll keep an open mind.
Try it with a long page, something thousands of lines long. Mobile Chrome on Android chokes badly, stops responding for seconds or minutes, and page search is hideously slow. Firefox handles it fine. It's really obvious on long lists or tables, e.g. this page:
Other than that, I'll admit, a large part of it is familiarity.
Even my most ardent anti-Google coworkers reluctantly switch back to Chrome when it comes time to debug.
chrome also renders UI interactions faster. maybe it's skia vs cairo? e.g. try mouse-dragging the ranging slider and compare the lag between chrome and ff:
https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/demos/zoom-ranger-grips.htm...
Does anyone know a Webkit browser that runs on Win - preferably with some kind of debugger?
Until recently, I had thought that browser compatibility issues were not much of a thing anymore.
It's still not worth running Chrome all the time. I only use it to complete those discrete tasks, then it's back to Firefox.
It's usually down to the remaining 10% to pick up the rest of the pieces.
It's extremely frustrating to hear this attitude as someone who was doing front-end dev in the IE6 era.
That's about the right ratio to expect, since less than 10% of browser sessions appear to be Firefox on average.
The major difference between this era and the IE6 era is that Microsoft wasn't willing to play ball with standards. With few exceptions, Mozilla and Google are implementing to the same standards and specifications; problem is, Chrome's a better implementation, for speed and stability, in the average case and the corner case.
They have both more resources to throw at the problem and more access to data to proactively discover issues.
It is, unfortunately, a situation where the playing field is "fair" (in the sense that there's a uniform standard) and one player is just trouncing the alternative.
Corner case maybe, but average case? No way. This is a historic perspective, maybe, but it's no longer valid in 2020.
Chrome isn't consistently the best of all browsers tested, but it beats FF more often than it doesn't.
This is not the interpretation I make of the current landscape. Google is SETTING standards that directly benefit themselves, just like MS did; Chrome uses it's market share to push in directions that benefit Google before they benefit end users.
1) site owner receives complaint
2) if offered, site owner looks up the user agent
3) site owner finds that the user agent matches one that is sub-10% of their traffic and samples the complaint signal accordingly
High-volume sites don't actually optimize for 100% of potential users (because the marginal value for one more user is low). If it's a low-volume site that happens to attract FF users for some reason, complaining is likelier to succeed.
Usually when I come across a broken website, it has more to do with my ad blocker and privacy extensions than the fact I'm using Firefox.
It recently got better support (as of v80), although it's not (fully) enabled by default.
I'm also on the FF boat, though :-)
Firefox (unless things have changed recently) still has limited addon capability -- no key remapping (or most other stuff) until the current tab has loaded. You also can't do unsigned addons (unless you do dev mode which is a separate install that doesn't update), while Chrome allows them by toggling "dev mode".
But no, I use Google Docs and log in to several bank accounts in FF without issues. I keep the other browsers just for compatibility checks for front-end development.
Just look at, for example, the recent madness with Firefox on Android. They effectively pushed a beta about 6 weeks ago, removed tonnes of features, made many menu items difficult to navigate to, removed compatibility with almost all add-ons, it's slower, it crashes for many constantly, it's just a plain, simple mess.
They had 4.5 stars at one point. They now have 3.9 stars:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...
Do you know how hard you have to work, to drag something down from 4.5, to 3.9, in a month, with almost 4M users?
I honestly don't think they could do worse, if it was intentional sabotage by some hostile insider.
And it's endless garbage like this from Firefox.
What firefox sees:
"OMG! Chrome is gaining ground! Quick, turf everything that is unique on our platform, that is different from Chrome. We must be just like them"
What outsiders see:
"Great, everything I cared about, unique to firefox is now gone. Plus it's slower, buggier, and they keep changing everything around on every single release. Great. Time to move on."
You don't compete with the giant, by being the giant. You etch out a unique market.
Meanwhile, Firefox did the precise opposite, and removed their uniqueness.
They aren't long for this world.
It's mildly annoying to re-learn the UI, but Chrome did the exact same thing to me years back when they, for example, dropped viewing every tab as a separate app in the running apps list. I refused to update for a year after that, very annoying. They all do this, I've resigned to it.
Feel the burn, the passion, the hatred. Join the dark side. Hate. Hate with me. Maybe our collective hate will drive the madness away.
For me personally the biggest current difference remains HDR support, which FF lacks and Safari/Chrome are continuing to grow. FF still has a big ways to go to achieve HDR so I think this one will be around for a while unfortunately. Now of course many are going to think "I don't give a shit about HDR" in which case refer to the first paragraph.
The biggest difference that finally got fixed was for the longest time Chrome had much higher quality pitch correction on sped up content e.g. YouTube 2x. It was noticeably worse at 2x and I couldn't even understand the content at 3x on Firefox but it sounded great in Chrome. This forced a lot of my usage over to Chrome until it was fixed.
On the Chrome side the biggest drawbacks are lack of extensions on mobile and lack of containers. I don't use containers as a privacy tool but more as a multiple profile tool without having to worry about which profile a window was launched in but I don't think that's the main real world use case happening. Lack of extensions on mobile is obvious.
> must perform with >50 tabs open
Testing Firefox now, it has the same behavior as Safari: when I open 16 tabs it starts a horizontal scrolling list. Absolutely unusable. Chrome shrinks every tab down to Favicon size or smaller and shows you 50+ tabs at once.
Chrome got tabs right a decade ago and has yet to mess them up, as they have with most of the rest of the browser. Very hard to switch until they do.
on FF, tabs open next to the current tab, unless you previously opened a tab in this one, then it'll go to the end of the list of tabs you've opened from the current window. but as soon as you switch tabs once, it'll start placing them next to the new tab you're in again. chrome just does something entirely unpredictable, instead of "resetting your spot".
but I've found that most people don't really seem to browse the way I do/don't care about that
Firefox uses the same open source spell checker, Hunspell, that Chrome, LibreOffice, MacOS, and many others use, but for some inexplicable reason have a terrible dictionary. I've ranted on this before [1] so won't do so again here.
I get the impression that the poor handling of multiple profiles is because they expect you to use multi-account containers instead.
Those are fine if you just want, say, to access multiple instances of the same site without using the same cookies for each, or want to make it harder for cross site cookie tracking, but for most of the times where I want to access multiple instances of the same site I also want separate bookmarks and add-ons and history for each instance.
Google has a huge collection of data sources (search query correction, document translation engines, the Books project) to refine a spellchecker against.
The open-source solutions have never had access to that volume of data, to my knowledge.
1. On the list of words Firefox gets wrong that I've reported but haven't yet been fixed, LibreOffice gets them all right.
2. On the list of words that I indirectly reported quite a bit earlier that Firefox now gets right, LibreOffice gets one wrong ("heliocentrism", which Chrome also gets wrong, and MacOS gets right).
3. On the list of words that Firefox gets wrong that I have not yet reported, LibreOffice gets them all right.
I don't call Firefox's terrible spelling inexplicable because Google and Apple and Microsoft do much better. I call it inexplicable because LibreOffice does it much better (about as good as Google and Apple and Microsoft do it).
If anyone can suggest any sort of fix, i'd love to leave the snooping, prying Google browser behind finally.
I call bullshit. Google is an evil company, this is nothing new.
Best context I can give is the actual CL for the fix.
Test clearing all private data -> not all private data cleared.
It /also/ wouldn't surprise me if it's exactly the way you describe.
In either scenario, it's equally bad.
In most fights between adding a user feature and protecting user privacy, if the feature cannot be added otherwise, feature wins. It's only "shady" if you're already assuming the feature vendor is a hostile actor.
The consistent Chrome experience enabled by logging the browser in is hells useful (especially in this era of mobile device + desktop device; no more having to remember if I bookmarked that article on my phone or my desktop or my work PC, etc.).
/Not/ protecting user privacy is always shady, regardless of who the actor is. When done knowingly, it's almost always hostile.
Once we assume that's not the decision that'll be made (because obviously), the question becomes whether the feature can be implemented at all while respecting user privacy.
And if the answer is yes, we can expect it to happen.
I don't subscribe to this school of thought, personally. I suppose that's where our differences lay.
What school of thought do you subscribe to? I had assumed that this
> /Not/ protecting user privacy is always shady
... being an absolutist statement, meant that you were open to the easiest way of protecting user privacy, which is "Don't increase the security surface area at all," i.e. add no new features.
Wouldn't we be able to tell when they push the fix?
On the other hand, a very large majority of the time that a programmer speculates on the internet about something that's obviously true about code I've written or am otherwise privy to, they're wrong
On the other other hand, most vague and fabricated statistics about anecdotal, speculative or subjective topics tend to have very little weight when making a point...
So I don't think the thought that any programmer would know this is a ridiculous edge case is one that holds any real weight here.
I think it's pretty sad that nobody here has linked to it... It's as if the people who care about this stuff aren't the same ones who write and review code for a living...
The likeliest point of introduction is where Google added account login to the browser itself. At that point, either ambiguity of specification or failure to test as though the user thinks Google is a privacy-hostile agency (while using a browser that allows them to login to Google) could have resulted in someone adding a special case to refrain from throwing the credentials away that keep the browser logged in that inadvertantly failed to throw the credentials away that keep a session logged in.
I know it's easy for those people to claim that they didn't know what they were doing or that they were told that it's fine. But maybe slapping a few would cause others to finally fucking think for a moment "do I wanna go to jail over this?". If you're making decisions that affect the privacy of literally millions of people then, well, maybe you need a little accountability.
Here is the fix and the link the cl for the fix with a link to the cl that created the issue as well: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f800edb...
I'll let you judge for yourself, but this is not coming from PR.
It would appear that the root of this error is that Chrome is also an operating system. So in small, focused apps, yes, that's a hard mistake to make. In apps that some people are using as the main shell for their entire laptop, there's a lot of nooks and crannies for complexity to hide.
I’m not saying this remedies this morally or, for most people, practically. But it is a practical solution for you and me and any machines we deploy.
Sure, it sucks that it's Microsoft. But Microsoft is less evil than Google, imo.
I recommend anyone on the fence with Chrome to give it a shot. You won't even realize you left Chrome after about 30 minutes of using it. Even though Brave and Edge are similar, for some reason I was never able to stick with Brave.
It's really hard to give Google the benefit of the doubt at this point.
Here's the fix, the bug is in chromium but only affects chrome because it has some "Hosted Apps" installed out of the box.
In the same way, browser makers should be decoupled from hardware and OS manufacturers, which have a similar monopoly problem.
Google bankrolled both Chrome and Firefox.
KHTML was the basis for the original webkit, and that was built basically for free.
[citation needed], as I switch from playing arcade games in my browser on archive.org to experimenting with a WebXR-driven VR experience.
- Google: obviously
- Microsoft: is a Cloud service provider
- Mozilla: VPN provider, also makes a social VR for headsets and browsers and is a cloud service provider
- Apple: iCloud, App Store, and Apple TV
- Brave: ad network wedded directly to the browser implementation
The law should be crafted in a way that allows for commercial agreements, as long as they are between equal parties, non-exclusive in nature, and time-limited if they involve default options. This way, browser companies will not be directly dependent from any single web or OS company.
Are you sure you're not just trying to rig the race so that only your favorite player can cross the finish line?
I don’t really understand it though, would it hurt Google to just delete data for their own domains? Do they really need it that badly?
Much worse UX if we're talking ChromeOS and it turns out the bug is that the logic that manages cookies and local state overlaps the logic that manages being logged into the browser-as-OS. "Navigate away from Chrome and I'm logged out of my whole computer" is no good.