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Comment by ikinsey | Hacker News Reader

Can you provide an example of where this pattern of behavior happened in the past?

Example: In Chrome 69, Google made it so that each time you sign in and use a Google service like Gmail, Maps or YouTube, your Google account will be automatically logged in to the Chrome browser.

There were outrage but Google had provided a flag to turn it off. It was in chrome://flags/#account-consistency.

Edit: Google removed the flag shortly after.

Thanks! I didn't know I could turn that off. I "solved" it by wrapping chrome with my own home grown tooling to maintain multiple parallel profile directories, so I could run "work chrome" and "chrome for gmail" and "chrome for web browsing". Of course, now I use firefox for all 3 so I don't have the problem anymore... :)

The flag is long gone, as Google removed it a few release after. I apologize if I didn't make it clear.

It's a setting now. On each browser profile, go to chrome://settings/syncSetup and turn off "Allow Chrome Sign-in".

Its a paranoid reading of the normal launch process.

Behind the scenes every major change like that is a flag that's deployed first off then slowly flipped to default true as a rollout so that it's as low risk as possible of unintended damage / failure.

This “feature” drove me back to Safari.

This was actually the update and app behaviour that pushed me off of chrome back to firefox. been using firefox for all my browsing needs since. No issues.

I’m confused. I have a normal google account which I sign into chrome with and I have a google apps google account through my university. When I sign into google properties with my university account I remain logged into chrome on my personal account.

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