Google asks websites to kindly not break its shiny new targeted-advertising API
theregister.com
theregister.com
Google is clearly trying to shape the internet for themselves and that is way too much power. (Not that the other companies don't sometimes have ulterior motives, but the impact of those motives just happen to align with my privacy preferences)
I would like to counter that and say that diversity is better for the ecosystem than any gain you might find in using Chrome. Use Brave, Firefox… any other of the new browsers… anything really that brings more choice and less power to Google. It’s about balance.
Nobody wants to go back to IE6 - part 2.
Indeed. The IE dominance and then stagnation set back web development for half a decade at least.
That's a good thing. People figured out how to do more with less, and make it compatible cross-browser too.
I use Chrome because it's fast and it gets out of my way. Firefox on the other hand is slower (not slow, but slower than Chrome) and shows ads every now and then. Other browsers are Blink-based so they are as fast as Chrome but there are concerns about ads too (think Brave, Opera, etc).
So maybe Firefox should get their act together? Why are you blaming users? Is it our fault that things are this way? We do what we can with the tools we have.
And some "farther from the tree" variants like Vivaldi are not as shady as, say, Opera.
I agree with the parent comment's observation that it's no good blaming users; other browsers need to make a compelling case. There's a saying in YC lore that a new app has to be an order of magnitude better for people to switch, but I think other browsers are approximately as good as chrome (but not 10x better).
The greatest concern for me is privacy; I presume the org who makes the browser sees a list of every action I do on the internet, so I have to be able to 1. know who they are and 2. trust them (or, distrust them less than I do Google).
There's probably also some 'safety in numbers' heuristic to browser choice too.
Vivaldi is awful. They rewrote the UI in javascript and it's slow and buggy.
At least on my computers I don't see any performance difference between Firefox and Chrome, at work I have to use both, and right now I have 3 Chrome windows and 2 Firefox ones open, all of them with multiple (like dozens) of tabs, no noticeable difference.
Last month, for example:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-stops...
I'm not defending the ads in Firefox, it's just that when it comes to advertising we're really in a place of choosing the lesser of evils.
You have to go into about:config and set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false to disable them. No way to turn them off for regular users.
Where? I don't see ads absolutely anywhere.
>they can hamstring ad blockers with things like Manifest V3
I've been hearing about this for years and it still hasn't happened. When the change occurs, if I begin seeing ads, I will abandon Chrome. But until then I will keep using it.
A small thing that annoys me: ctrl/cmd + click on bookmark doesn't behave like the same click on a web page (opening in the background). There are changes that can be made to about:config, but it's a mess, behaviour is different between a bookmark and bookmark folders, sometimes it switches you to the new tab, etc.
I've also noticed that JS performance isn't as good on some sites. For example, the hash step on VirusTotal takes way longer for larger files on Firefox than it does on Chrome.
The messy profile switch is also annoying, especially when they've supported the feature for years. And no, containers are not a replacement for profiles.
So I agree that Firefox needs to improve. The average user won't use it just because it supports the "open web"... do they even know what that means?
I don't use it as my primary browser and it I use it at an absolute minimum, but more and more I see popups of being unsupported in Firefox or needing a critical plugin for a workflow at work.
I do worry that we are seeing a repeat of that situation, a bit different but the same idea. A browser having too much control and shaping things their way.
The obvious suggestion here is to use a Chromium-based browser that is not Google Chrome. Like Brave.
* Afaik they aren't really staffed up to maintain a fork so much as tweak settings and repackage
Not incredibly relevant, I suggested to use a different browser. If you don't like my suggestion, input your own valid replacement to Google's Chrome. Talk about being a contrarian.
You also seem to mistakenly believe that Brave is a child of Google Chrome. Brave is a child to Chromium, and Google Chrome is a child to Chromium. This article states that the Topics API is being added to Google Chrome. I made my suggestion on the assumption that they would have said that Google added the Topics API to Chromium if they added it to Chromium. If the article worded this poorly and they actually meant to say that Google has sunk this in to upstream Chromium, then I cheekily alter my suggestion to W3m or Lynx.
Suggesting Lynx as an alternative clarifies that your remarks are unserious, or you are out of touch with reality --- charitably I will assume the former.
I, for one, like Google moves and like Chrome. I think that web will be better with a single engine. Safari is alternative and I hate it because it always breaks complex layouts and requires additional work.
Linux is a single server OS and it's good.
IE was bad because Microsoft is bad.
For me making sites that work on other engines is the job!
I'm gonna use Chrome fork or previous version. Chromium is open source
Chrome was targeted at developers from the outset. The comic explains "why Chrome" in a way that makes very little sense to a lay person but shows why Chrome is far better than what developers were developing against up until that point. Google sold Chrome on its technical merits, and technical people could easily sell it to friends and family because everyone already used Google and liked it. They had a compelling story for what was wrong with existing browsers and they had strong name recognition.
I think the problem with efforts to compete with Chrome so far is that they miss both these things. I'm a privacy fan myself, but it's pretty clear that privacy alone isn't enough of a selling point the way "a browser that works like an operating system" was. There has to be something else to set the browser apart. And then once you have that distinguishing feature to appeal to the technical crowd, you need some way to make it easy to recommend the friends and family. That's especially difficult in today's browser environment.
1. malevolent advertiser creates an ad campaign for cat-food but targeted at people who are interested in bondage.
2. user who is into bondage and owns a cat sees the ad, clicks on it, orders the cat food, types their home address and personal info. Note: user is unaware of the bondage link.
3. malevolent advertiser now has another datapoint containing the bondage connection with personal info.
In reality, the topics come from a predefined taxonomy[0] that certainly won't include topics like "bondage", nor (by policy) other kinds of sensitive PII. Additionally the system inserts noise into the system (5% of the time the topic will be a random choice rather than one of your actual inferred topics of interest), so that you can't actually infer the user's real interests from a single ad click like that.
[0] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/topics/ove...
And we all know that policies, like end user agreements, never change. They are especially never changed unilaterally by commercial entities for which the change could be beneficial to their business plans (directly, or by virtual of a lobbying party negotiating an exchange of conveniences).
Also, there's a lot you can do with innocent looking data, simply through correlations. Just like people like to generalize from skin color (I mean, what is more innocent than skin color?) I'm pretty sure that you can even infer skin color from things like "likes R&B music" and a few similar datapoints. Of course, you don't get exact information but statistics can be enough to hurt someone. That's also why your noise argument doesn't make much sense.
Nice v1 at the end. We can assume that this list is final and will not be changed?
> nor (by policy) other kinds of sensitive PII.
Yeah, it just exposes interest in family planing, loans, ..., which we do know have absolutely no potential for abuse.
Or given the attempts to outlaw drag there is probably no potential way to use interest in Nail Care or Makeup in a negative fashion, right?
> Yes, if you assume the people who designed this API were idiots
I assume they are getting paid well to play the role.
Pointing to some stuff and saying "this API that's made to target users allows user targeting" isn't bringing anything new, really.
> And to help prevent those privacy problems, the ad giant is asking advertisers to promise they won't abuse this ad targeting mechanism.
Ah, what a relief. Asking gently this to advertisers with the Do-Not-Track HTTP header has worked well, after all!
https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/issues/74#...
No thank you.
I mean yeah probably. You know what else does that? Removing 3rd party cookies and not adding an advertisement API to replace it. Literally effortless.
I believe chrome had been a good product but at this point it is clear the policy makers are no longer people who care about it as a browser (some may argue that was always the case) and are now just execs from the adsense branch.
The option to block all 3d party cookies certainly exists (though by default only affects incognito mode).
US: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333848/google-antitrust... (States) https://www.engadget.com/google-antitrust-doj-cookies-privac... (DoJ)
EU (EC): https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/eu-antitrust-reg...
Ok, technically only the UK explicitly forbid it. But having something be pre-emptively investigated for antitrust issues by both the US and EU even before launch is functionally the same thing.
https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
Much of the media reporting got this wrong when Google made this change in 2018.
They never promised to "do no evil", and that's become increasingly evident over time.
Disclosure: I have worked for Google in the past, most recently more than 8 years ago now, but I have never been in any way part of Google's policymaking leadership ranks and am certainly not speaking for them here.
Adtech company's browser
the adtech reskin
the browser company almost wholly funded by the adtech company
OR Vendor and device restricted browser that won't work if you, say, wish to use Windows or Linux (incl android).
So tell me again why I would ever use a browser that lacks functional vertical tabs? Yes, some chrome-based browsers have vertical tabs (brave, others?), but no browser can compare to the functionality of Firefox with Sidebery. Too bad Mozilla doesn't care about Firefox enough to bake it in and trying to turn off the damn horizontal tabs is such a convoluted process.
I'll also note that Safari's implementation of vertical tabs is hilariously bad.
And to those of you who still use horizontal tabs - if you keep more than a handful of tabs open at once, you need to graduate to the clearly superior UX of vertical tabs.
That’s not a hard tradeoff.
Using the internet in any modern capacity can basically be summed up with this phrase. Unless you're running a PinePhone with a browser you compiled yourself, you're throwing stones from a glass house.
Let's find out.
We must cut this Gordian knot while still can. Some combination of public funding for browser development, and making web domain names (a public good) contingent on website content following web standards, that will slowly get made simpler [1]. Perhaps the corporate browsers should be forced to display a scary red warning for incompatible websites, even if the browser is able to render them (like Google does if it whimsically decides a website is phishing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36470078).
Just like we forbid radio jamming, polluting the web should be restricted, if we want to maintain some semblance of usability.
As for the API itself.. it is interesting how ads based on website content aren't even considered. If something as blunt and expensive as a poster next to a highway is viable, why do we let Google lie to us that only surveillance-based advertising can fund the web?
[1] Old content gets to follow the standards of when it was published.
I honestly can't think of a bigger waste of public money. It will cost billions and billions, we will get nothing useful, and then it will be abandoned.
> making web domain names (a public good) contingent on website content following web standards
I don't know what this means. Are you suggesting that I shouldn't be allowed to register a website name unless the content is in strict compliance with someone's web standard? What happens if it's not? Do they take the domain away from me? Does the government take it?
Well there was the War on Drugs. But yeah I don't want a browser that was made by my government. What could possibly go wrong?
Say that again when the address bar says "brought to you by Pepsi™", and every website you visit is sent to the manufacturer - like LG TVs sent filenames found on USBs back to LG.
> It will cost billions and billions
Mozilla spends $400+ million per year, and they've been at it for more than a decade. It already costs billions.
> we will get nothing useful
Even if the funding goes to Mozilla? Are Google's dollars magical?
> Are you suggesting that I shouldn't be allowed to register a website name unless the content is in strict compliance with someone's web standard?
I'm suggesting you keep the domain, but it doesn't resolve until the content is standard-compliant. Or, alternately, for-profit corporate and publicly-funded browsers are obligated to display a scary warning.
> Do they take the domain away from me? Does the government take it?
What do you find so hard to understand? Do you think the domain namespace shouldn't be managed like a public good?
You're big on cynical criticism of my suggestions, but are my predictions wrong? How do you think the growing cost to develop a browser will be funded, if not by selling out? What do you think will happen? What has been happening so far?
> funded
The two are not the same. Regardless, you could still use any browser you wish.
Which government, though? Open source projects know no borders, they can get funding from any and every government they want.
Honestly kind of sad. The whole Google mystique is about not pretending this sort of nonsense will work.
So we’re moving from fingerprinting to fingerprinting plus more data.