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Comment by nickthegreek | Hacker News Reader

Safari and Firefox are capable web browsers. Where do people get this outlandish take from?

Capable is a interesting word choice. Capable means something meets a bare minimum for success. A and B are great. C is fantastic. D is arguably first class. E is capable. When making a free choice, I want the best one, so any lackluster review feels like one of those southern backhanded compliments, getting the message across without insulting it in polite company. Capable perfectly describes my feelings towards Firefox and Safari.

Seeing that Safari doesn’t drain my battery on my laptop and it doesn’t send my search engine to an adtech company…

It does; Google is the default search in Safari.

I meant browsing history. I don’t care about my search history. Even though these days I use the paid ChatGPT with the web search tool most of the time. Google is becoming more useless every month

Chrome Sync (i.e. saving your history + everything else to the cloud so it syncs to all your devices) is an optional setting. Microsoft Edge has the same thing under another name. Safari does too.

Google also uses your browsing history to create a profile for advertising

https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...

And Apple provides end to end encryption of browsing history so it can’t decrypt your browsing history

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2021/03/25/whats-in...

> What’s interesting about the Apple decision is that it appears to explicitly separate browsing history and bookmarks, rather than lumping them into a single take-it-or-leave-it package. Apple doesn’t claim to provide any end-to-end encryption guarantees whatsoever for bookmarks: presumably someone who resets your iCloud account password can get those. But your browsing history is protected in a way that even Apple won’t be able to access, in case the FBI show up with a subpoena.

That's not Chrome's browsing history - that's an ad network, adsense, profiling you, via cookies/ip/digital fingerprinting, across every website that serves it's ads. It's like logging into facebook and saying they can see your browsing history - yes some of it, but it's because they're watching a server they own serve you requests.

The entire idea behind “privacy sandbox” is to create a profile of you for advertising based on your browsing history and the profile is created by Chrome - without being logged in and without cookies.

https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/