Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings
lapcatsoftware.com
lapcatsoftware.com
I abandoned firefox when a mozilla dev claimed Linux users can only listen to audio via systemd+pulseaudio (unless you recompile firefox but who in his sane mind wants to use mozconfig in 2026 - https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...). On adChromium, audio on youtube videos (also owned by Google) works fine, without me having to change anything. And older firefox versions also worked fine. At that moment in time I realised that firefox was no longer about the people. I stopped using it and I seem to not have been the only one who got frustrated with mozilla.
I don't use pulseaudio and audio works fine. (I use pipeware)
you are a bit out of the loop if you think this is a partisan issue, or specifically one thats only there when trump is in charge
She did not get appointed under Trump nor did substantial work done under his administration.
Edit: I do not necessarily disagree with your comment on the partisan aspects of this issue. This is only meant to respond to the first paragraph.
You can very easily look up exactly when Lina Khan was appointed and get answer very quickly. Is it not worth the effort checking these things before commenting?
Ok rant over. Sorry to be an asshole. This is not your fault as much a standard which should be changed.
Yes, I have worked for 400,000 employees corp, then for a 70,000. For the last 15 years I have staid under 100. The pay is less, but it's easier to look into the mirror each morning.
What about Trump's threats after Google was hit with a 2.95 billion Euro fine from the European Commission's antitrust investigation?
From last year: "EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič on Monday made an 11th-hour intervention to stop the European Commission from issuing a penalty against American tech giant Google for its search advertising practices, amid continued trade threats from U.S. President Donald Trump." https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-google-antitrust-decision...
Or from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/google-meta-big-tech-6-billi... "In February, Trump signed a memorandum stating the U.S. would consider tariffs to “combat digital service taxes (DSTs), fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”"
That memorandum is at https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-googl...
Exactly. They have been determined to be a monopoly, but have been allowed to continue to be a monopoly because not being a monopoly could damage their business.
Why wouldn't they do anything that they felt like doing if they had been assured immunity to any government intervention. Every company in the country, tech or not, heard this loud and clear. Thanks, Obama. Thanks, Clinton.
It is not a democracy nor a republic state. It is an oligarchy. Thankfully more and more people realise how corrupt the orange mafia is. Recent polls show that - people learn slowly, but they learn.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
> Google used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in search and search advertising.
It’s fun to bang on the anti administration drum but this is a court thing. Edit: they did do the thing you said they didn’t
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
Not justifying it (I don't use chrome) but that's likely what's happening here.
Can google justify why are they doing this? I wish google will die sooner if they start behaving like this.
2) So you can't know what's searched without getting tracked
You're the product, not the customer.
Baby steps and they’ll try again.
why wouldn't they expand it?
Look at Google's earnings reports and see what constitutes 80-90% of their revenues and profits
No.
My screenshots do not show this, but my screenshots were not intended as proof, merely as explanation. Chrome is available to everyone and used by millions of people, so anyone who wants proof can reproduce the issue themselves, and I hope that they do.
Every screenshot in the blog post is the same size, which made it easier to do the <img> tags. (I write my blog in raw HTML.) Also, the first screenshot shows that my start page in Chrome is not Google Search, which is in fact quite relevant to the content of the blog post.
For the same reason, I showed a screenshot of Chrome sign-in disabled. Nonetheless, another commenter (who doesn't even use Chrome!) claimed that Chrome sign-in was the cause: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582989 To be honest, these comments depress me.
I just said that there was another reason: "Also, the first screenshot shows that my start page in Chrome is not Google Search, which is in fact quite relevant to the content of the blog post." So contrary to your claim, I did in fact choose carefully to convey meaning with images.
> you hide behind that
I'm not hiding anything.
> can't even see why it's disrespectful to the readers.
You're right, I can't see why it's disrespectful to the readers. But you speak only for yourself, singular reader, not other readers, plural. I suspect that if we took a poll, we might find that you're the only person on Earth who thinks my first screenshot was "disrespectful". It's such a bizarre cause for offense, I'm truly baffled by that.
Moreover, the HN guidelines say, "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Thus, your comments are disrespectful to HN readers.
Perhaps the sibling comment was correct: I have to ignore your comment if I want to stay sane.
It's not just Google.com but any site using Compression Dictionary Transport (which google.com was an early adopter of - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/search-compression-diction...). The shared dictionaries are an additional storage added with this feature but are not getting correctly cleared on close.
A fix is being worked on to resolve that. Follow above bug if interested when that lands...
Use this before using chrome://settings/siteData
Not sure if this is still the case with current versions
One of the top comments in this thread suggests Chrome is a keylogger
https://thomascountz.com/2025/07/17/chromes-ssl-bypass-cheat...
This blog calls this a "cheat code". One could also call it a keylogger as that's what it feels like when using it; there's no display of the characters being typed
Using a local TLS forward proxy is a more effective way to control cookies than using Chrome settings. Of course, Google tries to make this more difficult with the requirement for the "cheat code" but typing into the keyloagger is not always necessary, not every site requires the "cheat code"
We must do something about Google. They ruin the www.
If you don't want to hand the biggest ad company a monopoly over web-browsing, start using a gecko based browser like librewolf, zen, mullvad or firefox.
Until the day it no longer works. Sad.
I'm not surprised they do this since advertising represents almost 3/4 of Google 's revenue. If anything, why should anyone expect something else? Company in the ads business modifies monopolistic browser to make money with ads and more news at 11. If it's not this, it's going to be another thing in the future.
I'm also not surprised and do fault Google for it. We shouldn't give them a pass just because they're regular offenders, it should be the opposite IMHO.
That is a likely case. Chrome is their closed source software unlike the Chromium browser.
It’s their fault. The people. The humans. The ones working there. The ones knowingly employing their knowledge in service of the company.
It’s always the humans.
Your opinion honestly does seem mostly aligned with mine (there's potentially blame for both the corporation and the individuals, with the corporation's portion of the blame being from influence on the individuals), and personally I find it kind of hard to determine how much the individual deserves since it depends a lot on circumstances we might never know (e.g. if the individual had a really sick family member, I genuinely might find it understandable that taking a job from Google that pays well even if it's doing some weird stuff with browsers; that's an extreme example, but my point is that I don't think whether it's blameworthy or not is a binary). I just don't read the comment I responded to as agreeing with any sort of nuance like that; my reading is that they're asserting that the individuals are fully and solely blameworthy and that the fact that they were operating under the behalf of a corporation is insignificant.
We see this in politics. Orgs are political too.
(no "political" doesn't mean US Left/Righr here. It means simply "political" which can have nothing to do with government or party politics)
Exactly in the same way as humans are just groups of cells working under a common genetic identity towards a common goal.
If the ads were useless, advertisers would not pay for them to exist.
>without better ad blocks in mv3
MV3 adblockers were built before MV2 was deprecated.
Useless to users, not to advertisers. And, many people like me have never purchased any products after seeing ads at least on internet.
It's hip to say ads make things worse, but reality is often much more nuanced.
My original point being, many times an external person may think something is intentional when it may very well be a bug or may be there for a good reason.
I have observed a few of those both as an external person or an internal person.
But with fewer ads influencing their spending, readers might have more disposible income left over to fund content.
One thing that made Microsoft successful was a strategy called embrace, extend and extinguish ("EEE"). This is what they tried to do to Java back when it was believed that Java was a threat to Microsoft's platform monopoly since the Java mantra was "write once, run anywhere". Microsoft added all these proprietary extensions after licensing Java.
Well, Microsoft basically did the same thing to knock Netscape off its throne. It was the whole basis for the antitrust suit. This was aimed at Java too because Java introduced applets. MS added ActiveX controls. MS did succeed at killing Netscape but the antitrust suit (and probably the victory over Java and Netscape) led us to more than a decade of hell with IE6 compatibility as MS basically abandoned their browser.
Google did something in the mid-2000s that nobody thought was possible: they created a browser and got mass adoption without having a platform. People willingly downloaded it. And when it was first released, it was magical. They pioneered one process per tab. At the time, Netscape had faded into Fireforx and it was pretty bad. Your entire browser could hang since it was one thread per tab and it absolutely did hang.
At this time and really through the mid-2010s, Google was a good actor with Chrome (IMHO). Chrome was secure, stable and a pretty open platform. Unfortunately for Google, this became a problem as use of ad blockers became more widespread. Where Chrome once became a posterchild for standards support, other parts of Google weren't so... open. Youtube at this time started playing games when people were using non-Chrome browsers.
Anyone who uses Chrome knows that the anti-ad blocking really stepped up. Changes to what extensions are allowed to do killed uBlock Origin. Google has risked regulatory wrath by special-casing their own user-tracking and ad cookies while blocking other third-party cookies. They also tried to phase out third-party cookies in favor of what sounded like a first-party only tracking (FLoC? I think it was called?).
Another issue is that Google always wanted people to be logged in with search and for the longest time they weren't. Well, people basically opted in to this by using Chrome and using a Google account. I used to really like the Google account syncing with Chrome. A lot of that for me has been replaced by using a password manager.
My point is I once was a huge Chrome fan and now I really want there to be an alternative. I trust Apple with Safari/iOS more than Google with Chrome/Android at this point. YMMV. I find myself using Firefox a lot (again).
Anyway, this whole messing with user tracking and ads I think could be Chrome's downfall and might invite regulatory scrutiny.
MS was successful at killing Netscape largely because paid software is difficult to compete against free software. The ActiveX controls weren't a feature with a lot of use--I can probably count all the sites I usedwith ActiveX controls on one hand. More common were the four big plugins: Java (for applets), Flash (counting Shockwave as part of Flash), Adobe Acrobot Reader, and Silverlight.
Netscape famously rewrote its codebase to try to implement the new web standards (like CSS2) more quickly, which contributed greatly to its ultimate collapse. After Netscape collapsed, MS laid off most of its browser development team, which let IE6 languish for years without improvements, going from the most standards-compliant browser on the market to the least standards-compliant. The rise of Firefox caused MS to pay attention again to web browsers, eventually restarting development and leading to IE7 being finally released. Only subsequent to that (and Firefox taking a large chunk of the browser market) did Google Chrome come out.
> Google did something in the mid-2000s that nobody thought was possible: they created a browser and got mass adoption without having a platform. People willingly downloaded it
How? Well, remember that Windows had (or: has) no equivalent of Linux software repositories. People browsed the internet and downloaded software (including malware) from big download sites. Google sponsored those sites and had google chrome injected in every installer. Think about that when Google talks about 'sideloading Android apps'. People just had no idea, but all of a sudden their internet had changed.
Secondly, Google hijacked other browsers by urging people on the Google homepage to install Google Toolbar (if I remember the name correctly) This provided a different way to spy on user's browsing activity, plus it provided a springboard toward a full chrome install.
Thirdly, Google pushed users aggressively to download Chrome across all of their products. I remember Google telling me on every page that my browser was not Chrome.
Chrome was never an offer from a benevolent party, on the contrary. I have been talking against many a deaf ear that it isn't that smart to install an ad viewer from an ad company, even if the first page load feels more flashy in Chrome. I am glad that people finally are starting to wise up, better late than never. Especially the stupid excuses I heard from tech people that insisted Chrome is the only way has learnt me that tech people aren't as smart as we think they are. Don't take that personally.
We now have to free the internet for the average Joe. That won't be easy if we can't evade consequences from crime as Google can.
Google is too big a company to let something this essential slip through. Therefore the only reasonable position is to assume it's intentional, unless somehow proven that it was just incompetence.
If intentional, that would count as a repeat offense. I hope EU regulators throw a crack team of coders/researchers at this, disassemble every last bit of binaries involved, check history of changes, turn Google offices upside down for relevant internal docs/memo's etc. The works.
Then -unless proven to be an honest mistake- fire up another anti-trust case. But this time tripling or x5 the fine.
A company of Google's size & influence, pulling this kind of shenanigans repeatedly, should either be forced out of business or become unprofitable. Oh and have the responsible leaders up top (CEO?) serve actual jail time.
Why? Hanlon's razor has never been a good heuristic when dealing with faceless corporation. An on top of that, Goodhart's law applies - when incompetence becomes an accepted excuse then bad actors will use that to hide their maliciousness.
I couldn't have been any more explicit that it's not an accepted excuse: "Google has no excuse for incompetence".