Your FYI is also useful for the contrapositive of that feeling, which we often see on HN: "Look how Firefox is leading privacy improvements and how much more privacy forward it is than Chrome".
1. Chrome, as the dominant browser, drives developer behaviour (devs need to change their websites when Chrome breaks compat). Firefox doesn't have this luxury, so some features like this must necessarily be lead by Chrome in the monopolistic browser world we live in.
2. Referers allow websites to individually track users better, which is bad for user privacy if you are concerned about entities such as Facebook, etc. tracking you. However, those entities are Google's competitors; for Google, Chrome does the tracking, so they have no need of the Referer.
Removing it is "good" for user privacy w.r.t. Google's competitors, and simultaneously good for Google (disadvantaging such competitors).
It's a web browser.
I myself religiously use Firefox by default and only use Chrome if I bump into some websites don’t work in Firefox. But my kid’s teachers often send links that my kid needs to use for school work. And a lot of them are educational websites that don’t work in Firefox. I can’t be home all day to provide tech support. So having Firefox as the default browser is simply a no-go. Guess what wins, between Chrome and Firefox?
I read a lot of people saying this, but I use Firefox and I don't run on this issues, except when I land by accident on some weird dark pages (mainly porn pages)
As developer, I develop on Firefox, and sometimes do a quick test on Chromiun/Edge/Chrome to see if something it's break or bugged on Chromiun/Edge/Chrome web engines.
I'm a happy Firefox user too, but I don't want to believe that Firefox is the only browser that cares about user privacy.
I don't either, but I don't believe HN users praising Chrome is going to help with that situation...
I'll happily celebrate Google making a privacy-oriented change that's actually intended and not a bi-product, but this isn't such a case.
And how does Mozilla make money?
Out of Chrome and Firefox, one is one big level of indirection further away from Google's influence than the other.
Mozilla Foundation is purely a donation-fed nonprofit, and most things you associate with "Mozilla" are made by the Mozilla Foundation. In fact, even Firefox itself — the open source project — is made by the Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla Corp is just a company that employs engineers to work on Firefox. (I.e. their job is to be ordinary FOSS contributors to the project.) Those engineers might have a profit motive to do things Mozilla Corp investors/shareholders like, but that's fine, because those engineers mostly aren't part of the Firefox steering committee. The Firefox steering committee (along with all other Mozilla projects) is composed of people who are employed by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation; and/or FOSS people external to Mozilla as a whole.
(ETA: fixed the names. I originally called Mozilla Corp "Firefox Corp" — and it really basically is, as Mozilla Corp doesn't employ people to work on anything other than Firefox. IMHO "Firefox Corp" would be a strictly-better name for it.)
From Wikipedia: "Mozilla [...] is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. [...] The community is supported institutionally by the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation."
There's three entities:
- Mozilla Foundation: accepts donations and spends them on web initiatives, does not spend them on Firefox
- Mozilla Corporation: is owned by Mozilla Foundation, employs Firefox devs, has search deals with Google
- Firefox software: is developed by Mozilla Corporation, is funded by search deals
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...
Many people are a bit shocked to learn Mozilla Foundation does not fund Firefox. Firefox is funded by search deals (mostly by Google); Mozilla spends donations elsewhere.
Source?
In the event that such behavior would occur, it can be detected by sniffing your packets, and people would very soon speak about it.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2021/03/20/stop-usin...
2. https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/6055073241c...
It's accessible even afterwards on chrome://settings/security
However there are many many many sources out there documenting Chrome's comprehensive tracking:
- Google's own ToS is probably too long to read, but it lists ways in which you consent to be tracked by the browser
- Google's proposals to the W3C for adding new ad-tracking tech to web standards go into detail on Chrome's own mechanisms for doing this tracking as a PoC example [0]
- Chrome isn't technically available on iOS; they are forced to use Safari's engine under the hood of iOS Chrome, which restricts in some ways the amount of tracking the browser can do. Despite this, the list of data tracked by iOS Chrome is listed on the AppStore download page and IT IS LONG.
Finally, you mention packet sniffing. In actual fact, direct packet sniffing has been made non-trivial by cert-pinning. This doesn't however prevent checking the frequency and destination of app phone-home requests, and yes, Chrome does it a lot. You can see this yourself if you use common user firewall tools such as LittleSnitch/LuLu/OpenSnitch/etc.
[0] https://github.com/WICG/floc#qualifying-users-for-whom-a-coh...
However the link you provided shows that in "Google Activity Controls" and "Google Ad Settings" the user has the possibility to completely opt-out of this tracking.
If privacy-minded users are fully aware of all of these options, that may be fine for them? (spoiler: I was NOT aware of all!)
There are other options in Chrome's settings that may allow you to further opt out of other types of tracking, if you can discover them.
These settings aren't documented simply or centrally by Google and can change with each release (releases are extremely frequent).
Then there are types of tracking that can't be disabled as Google classifies them as "legitimate interest" or required for certain functions of the browser (one particular example here that comes up often is the collection of wifi ssid data for geo apis).
Anything that's on by default will always be unmanageable even by most technical users. We need a browser that doesn't track by default. Otherwise, you must typically assume you are being tracked (this goes for Firefox as well, though I think we can at least assume less data is tracked in firefox and is slightly easier to opt out)
/s ?
/s ?
Given that Firefox improving privacy generally doesn't draw antitrust scrutiny, where is the problem with that statement?
>The questions from Justice Department investigators have touched on how Chrome policies, including those related to cookies, affect the ad and news industries, four people said.
Investigators are asking whether Google is using Chrome, which has 60% global market share, to reduce competition by preventing rival ad companies from tracking users through cookies while leaving loopholes for it to gather data with cookies, analytics tools and other sources, the sources added.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tech-antitrust-google-exc...
If Google were truly improving privacy, one would expect their changes to decrease their own ability to track users, not just their competitors.
At the time I'm writing this, there are 740 upvotes and 187 comments on this story vs. 12 upvotes and 0 comments for the top submission when Chrome made the same change [1]. Without the FYI, I would have assumed this was Firefox leading the way in privacy because I was simply unaware that Chrome had done it.
(not that firefox doesn't have lots of phone-home behavior you can't turn off like firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com)