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Comment by px43 | Hacker News Reader

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> A simple example would be just rejecting ad-blocking extensions from their Chrome store. They've never done anything close to that (including all the manifest v3 hullabaloo where they explicitly worked with ad-blocking teams to help them migrate) so who in their right mind would think that they would try to sneak it in via some fancy new web standard that wouldn't even be able to effectively block ad-blocking if it wanted to.

Like, perhaps like if they didn't allow any extensions on their mobile browsers?

(Note: You can't use extensions on Chrome on mobile devices)

Brave is on the Play store (it's what I use on Mobile), as are several other browsing options with built in ad-blocking support.

Chrome Mobile is very stripped down, but the idea that they disabled all extensions just to get at ad-blockers is completely unfounded.

"Brave is on the play store" is a very similar argument to "You do not have to use IE, you can install Netscape". And subject to the same logical holes.

Why? If it were a browser extension, you would still have to install that manually too. Are you mad that Google doesn't ship ad-blocking functionality by default in their standard build?

Google - a company that makes most of its money on ads - removed the ability to install ad blocking extensions on the default mobile browser for over 2 billion devices.

If that does not seem shady to you, then I will be unable to make you understand the point.

> assume positive intent

This rule applies to discourse, not perspectives. I also wouldn't call many of these concerns "fantasies," because anyone with a basic understanding of public-key cryptography can tell you exactly how this technology, even its most basic form, could be used to:

- Create an absolute monopoly on browsers.

- Give the holder of the browser monopoly the power to control who can/can't crawl the web.

- Give the holder of the browser monopoly the power to control what OS you use to access the web.

and so much more that it's head-spinning.

Is OP's title clickbaity? Yes. Are the concerns brought up by commenters totally legitimate? Yes.

> Create an absolute monopoly on browsers.

Your premise is broken. How is this even possible in an open source ecosystem? Chrome was built to be forked, and there are several healthy forks that are thriving. There is zero chance of there being a browser monopoly any time soon. Basically every proprietary browser is now dead.

Whether or not the browser is open-source has no impact on this issue. The monopoly would not exist because Google/Apple/whoever are the only people allowed to make browsers. Google would simply have the power to make all of its services (search, docs, etc) totally unusable on any browser that isn't a version of Chrome compiled and distributed by them, thus making all other browsers useless to the vast majority of the population. Because analytics data is money, other companies would have financial incentive to follow suit.

By the way, Chrome contains proprietary code. Chrome and Chromium are not identical.

People in your personal life deserve the assumption of positive intent.

Corporations, corporate communications, public figures, etc. are not deserving of the assumption of positive intent.

Your hand wavy description of manifest v3 which conveniently skips the core issues makes me skeptical of your position and intent. Sounds like users and developers are the problem here -- I never see anyone else talk about Chrome with such a positive tone. Manifest v3, privacy sandbox and now the "integrity" nonsense should say enough about Chrome and Google.

My bank has had MFA literally since the moment they first offered a web service. Hardware authenticators and everything.

This was over a decade before any other web service I know of even had optional MFA support.

Must be nice. The major Canadian banks only offered 2FA with SMS until recently and still don't support TOTP or hardware tokens, opting instead for some kind of proprietary flow through their phone app.

Okay, top three banks in the US.. Chase requires MFA, but still allows SMS, which can be broken easily with SIM swapping. BoA and Wells Fargo MFA can be completely disabled, which is how many people likely have their accounts set up.

Until just a few years ago, mine would pop up an MFA prompt, but if you hit the "mobile website" button, it would just bypass it completely. I reported it to them for at least five years before it got fixed, and it's more likely that they just fixed it on accident.

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