Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

"I got annoyed with the occasional inability to use the 'Copy' menu item and couldn't fathom training my muscle memory to instead use ctrl+c, so I switched to a browser that spies on me and actively ignores my consent."

I really don't get how people work, sometimes. Stuff like this tells me the privacy fight is just completely unwinnable. It's not even that people don't care; people actively make choices that make their privacy situation worse, because apparently enduring the most minor of annoyances is unthinkable as an alternative.

(And this isn't even an unloved bug that someone arrogantly thinks doesn't matter, and has been languishing for years. It's actively being worked on, and it turns out the various interactions involved makes tracking it down and fixing it difficult. And it looks like there are patches that might fix the problem after all.)

View on HN

> the privacy fight is just completely unwinnable

I'm afraid it is, in the current state of things.

Another depressing example is how we collectively seem to accepted to keep referring to "unique fingerprinting and observation throughout any activity of the web and apps" as "Cookies! :))", while way too many people even blame EU privacy laws for all the purposefully annoying and misleading dark patterns used by the very entities spying on them.

But you can't blame anyone for choosing convenience and preference over a threat that is utterly overwhelming to mitigate, to the point of feeling impossible to avoid anyway.

Not to mention that a number of people rely on very specific UI features -- OP could well be my colleague, who has a muscular condition and simply cannot press "Ctrl + C" without discomfortable effort, or by constantly moving his other hand between mouse and keyboard. Others in turn may even be completely unable to do either, and fully rely on a pointer device to use GUI applications.

The only chance to win the privacy war is by providing and maintaining free and open alternatives that respect and protect your privacy, and are not only on par with, but better and more user friendly than the existing spyware.

I really don't get how people work, sometimes.

Same. I can’t fathom having a reaction like this to someone using a web browser that I didn’t.

> Stuff like this tells me the privacy fight is just completely unwinnable

Mozilla has done so many things to weaken users' trust in it (like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39166801) that at this point many regard them as the least worst (rather than best) alternative to the competition when it comes to privacy and the open web.

I'd like to hope that Ladybird will give us a genuine alternative, but Google has ensured that current web standards are so complex that even MSFT (another megacap tech company) threw in the towel on maintaining their own browser engine.

I mean, yeah I don't care if Microsoft realizes I'm a parent and want to buy diapers. I've been using Firefox since it was version 0.1 and was called Phoenix, and I used it because it was better than Internet Explorer 6 and had themes and add-ons and tabbed browsing.

Current Firefox hasn't introduced anything unique to the browser and that's why their share is continuing to dwindle. Edge supports vertical tabs natively without any weird hacks to userchrome.css. Arc has an easy way to hide all browser chrome as well as "mini Arc" for different pages. Vivaldi has mouse gestures, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com