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Comment by tobr | Hacker News Reader

Just got this blocking modal. In mine, the title says “Turn on an ad privacy feature”. That is misleading to say the least. This is a privacy-invading feature, leaking summaries of my browsing history to anyone who wants to have a look. What’s worse, the modal completely blocks the UI, so you can’t even search for it to understand more.

Why am I even using this browser anymore?

EDIT: Note this section about privacy goals, from the draft proposal by two Googlers: “Users should be able to understand the API, recognize what is being communicated about them, and have clear controls. This is largely a UX responsibility but it does require that the API be designed in a way such that the UX is feasible.” [1]

I guess it’s just a little oopsie that made the people responsible for the UX present it to the user through misleading copy.

1: https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics

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> Why am I even using this browser anymore?

Yeah, stop putting up with all these anti-features! Firefox, Brave etc are not perfect but at least they're not THAT. No matter how many hoops you jump through, still using Chrome means it is being endorsed. Wish more people would reconsider it like you and jump ship!

Firefox seems ok to a layman so far. Time to throw Chrome of the Windows part of my daily now.

I have been using Firefox since version 2.x and I never understood what downsides people find with it. I've used chrome and the only difference i saw was annoying pushes from google to log in so that i could be tracked all the time. Otherwise, it shows web pages, what more do you want?

I quite dislike all the crap they try to tack on like Sync or Pocket, sometimes cluttering the UI after an update. But still everything can be disabled, so not too much of an annoyance.

I wouldn't use Firefox if it cloudn't sync history and bookmarks between computers and my phone. Sending tabs is also a nice bonus.

Firefox's branding has always felt a little unusual to me. not as bad as some other popular free apps (SumatraPDF, VLC) but perhaps that subconsciously puts people off? Chrome has always looked and sounded quite clean and cool in comparison. I say this as someone who only ever uses FF or Safari

I've used Firefox as my main browser for 15+ years, and the only times I've needed Chrome have been for performance-related reasons in some browser games or some heavier sites. Though recently it feels like firefox's performance has gotten better and I rarely find myself having to launch chrome anymore.

Using Chrome at work and Firefox at home, the only features I missed were low-effort 'translate this page' and extensionless reverse image search.

Wise Google have decided to remove the second point by replacing it with terrible Lens.

The differences aren't really important any more. Both have converged on similar UIs, both have important privacy extensions, both have password managers and payment storage. My only caveat for suggesting Firefox is that it's a possible frying pan -> fire situation, since they push their own revenue-building tat and get paid by Google.

You can use Mozilla's offline translate extension - it doesn't support many languages but it works.

I installed Brave the other day, and it has a page translation feature.

That's promising: I've so far only tried it when it was young and unstable

> I have been using Firefox since version 2.x and I never understood what downsides people find with it.

For some weird reason somes sites just dont open on Firefox on my work computer when I connect to the company VPN on it. Safari and Chrome can open all sites just fine.

I really want to use Firefox especially for the container feature but just cannot figure out why somes sites dont work when I on the vpn.

When you say don't open, what do you mean? Sometimes companies configure their SSL cert in only safari and chrome, so you might be able to just add it to Firefox's store.

It could be that the proxy is set up as a non-system proxy too, so you could try checking Chrome's configured proxy and setting it in settings.

I've been back to Firefox for 3-4 years and it has been rock solid on MacOS and Android. I have only very minor gripes not worth mentioning.

Im sorry but if you are using Chrome as a “pro” nowadays, its your own fault. There are countless alternatives available, starting from Firefox, to Brave, to some exotic browsers, and if you must use Chrome, then there is a de-Googled one called Chromium.

Its clear that Google is milking every single one of its users using their browser, since they have access to your computers.

Probably this is the “vector” they use to gather the most info about users, apart from Android maybe.

> there is a de-Googled one called Chromium

There's Chromium and there's Ungoogled Chromium[1]. If you're looking for (some) independence from Google, you want the latter. Or just avoid it altogether and use other browsers.

I wouldn't recommend Blink-based browsers (Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc.) You're still indirectly giving Google power over the web by using their engine.

[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

IMO the browser is far too important to use third-party builds containing patches that don't receive serious audit.

For example, the Chromium packages provided by the vast majority of Linux distros disable security features like CFI (check your favorite distro's x86_64 Chromium package build log and look for the "is_cfi" argument). I think Arch is the only exception.

ungoogled-chromium has similar problems https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/

If you are going to use a Blink-based browser, I would recommend just using the official Google release, or maybe Edge or Brave if you trust the organizations behind them. Otherwise, just switch to Firefox. It has its own problems, like being overall less hardened than Chromium, but it's far less user-hostile. And regarding security, for browsing untrusted sites, I think you should always virtualize the browser since they're all routinely exploited anyway.

> Linux distros disable security features like CFI

Why would they even do that?

I'm not sure, but I think CFI also requires building Chromium as a single binary with LTO, and this has extremely high memory requirements that their build infrastructure might not be able to handle. Also, I think some distros use GCC instead of LLVM/Clang, so CFI isn't even an option.

Just want to pour one out to my fellow corporate drones on locked down work laptops, who can usually choose between a pre-installed and managed installation of Chrome (a rock) and/or Edge (a hard place).

The popup is absolutely disgusting. I would love to think this would backfire and push more people towards Firefox but their target is obviously not HN readers, they know what they are doing.

I was wondering why I didn't see this popup and realized that I've been using Firefox for almost a year now. Haven't looked back.

Ditched Chrome years ago.

> I would love to think this would backfire and push more people towards Firefox but their target is obviously not HN readers, they know what they are doing.

I am gonna make a generalization but HN readers is not the demographic pushing for Firefox usage and when they do it's usually for the wrong reason: "performance".

Which is false BTW, unless you are using some Google services optimized for Chrome, such as Google Sheets.

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