Comment by technobabbler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by technobabbler | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The thing about Chrome is that it's a known evil. Google monitors me and sells me ads. OK, not exactly benevolent, but I can live with it. I'd prefer they just charge me $100/yr or whatever instead of ads, but at the end of the day it's a tradeoff I can accept.

The thing about Firefox is that it's an UNKNOWN evil. Mozilla always feel like it's on the cusp of bankruptcy and constantly searching for new dark patterns to sneak in. When Wikipedia needs money they beg for it, but don't purposely sabotage the user experience to get funding.

Mozilla does that with every new release. I always feel like they've added some shady new malware/adware with every new patch, and then use some stupid UI tweak to try to hide it. It's only a matter of time before they sneak Norton in there. I trust the Firefox team even less than Facebook at this point. Firefox just isn't trustworthy, whereas Chrome is a known compromise.

> I trust the Firefox team even less than Facebook at this point.

You trust the goons working for Facebook less than the goons working for Facebook? /s

It hit me really hard when during the whole FLoC controversy Mozilla published its own collaboration with Facebook on the future of browser based user tracking. No amount of technological hand waving could have fixed that first gigantic WTF and a description filled with privacy budgets, trusted third party servers, etc. didn't even have a snowballs chance in hell.

You confused the business model. Google doesn’t sell YOU ads.

You provide valuable behavioural data to Google, which uses it to create very targeted demographics which are used for targeted advertising and analytics that are sold to advertisers.

Seen in this way, it’s quite darker than that, in my opinion.

Sorry, meant to say "show me ads". But yes, it's still an acceptable tradeoff to me.

I mean, our own government harvests even more data and does jack shit with it. At least Google provides a world-class office suite.

Was forced to used the Microsoft stack at a new job and it made me miss the Google ecosystem so much.

At the end of the day privacy isn't that valuable to people. Nobody cared about it in the 90s when the internet was developing, it was barely a blip in the 2000s, and somehow it exploded in the 2010s but plenty of people still use Facebook and TikTok and such. So?

Usability > privacy for most people, a lesson Firefox refuses to acknowledge, I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com