“Did any user in the world want a user-tracking and ad platform baked directly into their browser? Probably not, but this is Google, and they control Chrome, and this probably still won’t make people switch to Firefox.”
Their idea is that is hides all the user info from advertising companies. Downside is your browser is an ad slot machine.
Which is best?
Tracked or ad machine?
I’m more surprised people aren’t talking about the fact that since it’s running on the client side, someone would just figure out a way to hack and block all the ads even easier.
This also further consolidates Google’s advertising power. Block all their competitors from gathering the information and give them a neutered “topics list”. Google still maintains every ability to allow their own products and ad platform to bypass and use the full information.
It hides user information from companies which aren’t Google. The best is not using anything Chromium based.
Extensions require APIs from the browser to work, and Google is going to nerf the APIs which allow for ad blocking. Extensions don’t have unfettered access to the DOM. FF used to be like that, but Chrome never allowed that.
Because the entire design of it is to mathematically prevent you from having the option to hack or block the ads. THe way to get around it is to… not use chrome.
You’re thinking about it the wrong way. How does this directly and noticably harm the user experience of the average user of chrome? If it doesn’t then there’s no incentive for them to switch.
Not everyone knows about this kind of thing or cares. Firefox has to be significantly better in obvious ways and market that to grow their market share.
I wish I could stick to Firefox but I’ve been having trouble with looping captchas on there. 90% of the time Firefox works fine but there’s still a handful of websites that just refuse to work unless I’m using chrome.
Some websites intentionally change behavior based on your user agent. There are plenty of extensions for Firefox that let you change it so sites think you’re using chrome instead. It’s wild to me that’s even a thing, but ¯\(ツ)/¯
I used to use the good browser. But then they changed what the good browser was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me.
Mozilla Phoenix user here. Good old times. Then Firebird came along. Then Firefox… What an odd name change that was, IMO. Firefox. Huh.
Then Chrome came and I jumped on that ship for years until the new revamped Firefox came in 2018, and as it looks nowadays, I won’t ever leave Firefox until it dies of death.
Chrome has a pretty sleek design these days, but my conscience tells me I can’t use it.
I use Chromium for web development (testing purposes only), but I’m not sure if Chromium is any better. At least I’m not signed in to it.
The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an "alternative" tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can't just not be spied on.
lmao what the fuck kind of dystopia are we living in
So this means that the internet could have always worked fine without invasive cookies and everything they told us about it being impossible was just a lie.
Cookies serve important purposes for doing things like keeping you signed in as you navigate through multiple pages on a site.
The issue is that most parts of the internet were developed by people more interested in all the cool stuff you could do with it, and not at all concerned about the potential misuse by large multi billion dollar corporations.
Cookies are a part of the http protocol and the server side design of the websites themselves. You can’t just replace them with a password manager on your individual client.
no a password manager can’t replace cookies, Like a JPEG can’t replace a 2 hour long film.
I have however forgone cookies for the most part. Great for privacy.
I’d recommend keepassxc, bookmarking and some addons like ublock, no script, libredirect. Most sites still work and the few that don’t aren’t worth my time
Cookies are literally how a website keeps track of you having logged with a username and password into that site on your browser, for all other pages after you leave the log-in page.
The reason for this is because the Web protocols were designed for the web server to get a request from a browser, send the page to the browser and after that close the connection (though since HTTP version 1.1 connections might stay up for things like sending the pictures linked to a page, a mechanism known as Keep-Alive).
For performance by default the web server doesn’t really care which browser has asked it for a given page or what it has asked for before unless some kind of tracking is added to the pages your receive so that in subsequent requests you’re identified.
So the only way for a website to keep track of a specific browser so that it can do different things for that browser (i.e. know a user has logged-in via that browser so send to that browser pages that user has access to rather than sending “You are not logged-in” errors) is by sending some kind of token to the browser which the browser will then present along with each subesequent request to that site.
Cookies are by far the easiest way to do this.
The problem with cookies is that their ability to track a browser has be abused for things far beyond their original purpose (mainly things like track the browser were a user logged-in, to know to which browsers it can send certain protected pages and information).
There are some sites that can track a user in that site after log-in with a different method (basically all the links you get in pages on that website have a tiny bit of extra information that identifies each request as coming from a specific browser, but for example if you come into the website again from a bookmark all that is lost), but those are pretty rare nowadays because it can be quite complex to get it work whilst cookies are pretty straightforward to get to work reliably.
Indeed it is. Unfortunately though it’s also important enough that it means people will go along with fascist stuff if the “security” excuse is used, and people who stand up to it will be mocked and ridiculed at best, or be accused of being cyber attackers at worst.
In some ways, it is unavoidable, because chrome is also embedded in Windows, and the electron framework. You can’t blame someone for using it that way.
Are you serious? You can’t be compassionate toward people who use a certain browser? It’s probably because they don’t understand/know/care. 🤷♂️ Educate them.
People who care make the switch so not sure what there is to feel compassionate about.
Its kinda nice they slowed YouTube down first, that got at least 3 people i know into using firefox, though if i still want to annoy them i could tell them to run a invidius docker instead.
I’m not sure that quote is especially helpful. We trade security for convenience all the time - if things were too secure, we wouldn’t be able to do anything with our computers.
Waiting to hear if my company follows suit. Most of our internal tools are built with Chrome in mind, so it would be a big effort to standardize on something else.
Meanwhile my work mandates that we must use Edge. It’s fine from a usability perspective but I would much prefer my beloved Firefox at work, especially with the tab groups they have where you can have multiple different sessions
I’ve been using Edge at work. I literally made the decision as “this is a Microsoft heavy shop, Microsoft is pushing Edge hard, and Bing is kinda good now, so let’s see how this goes” and I haven’t had a need to switch back.
I use Edge’s different profiles for testing, work stuff and personal stuff to keep them nicely separated and prevent any from bleeding too hard into eachother
Switch to Edge would make sense due to how well it integrates with things like your Entra ID account, choosing Chrome now is bizarre. We also had Chrome as primary browser for years, but now we are pushing Edge as primary browser. Firefox was and still is an option for us as well.
Ditto. The security department made the push because too many people were installing unapproved addons like ublock. They are mandating chrome, “for security”. LMAO
The irony is that people are signing into chrome with personal gmail and leaking stuff.
You can lockdown user addons in both chrome and firefox via GPO. You can also auto install them with the same policies if you like. Both browsers have enterpise admx files available.
Your security department sounds like they are bad at their jobs.
When I lost my job over the summer I put my resume on dice and immediately had 3-4 guys with Indian accents calling me every day. I found a new job within a week. I still get emails and texts though, can’t put the genie back in the bottle
Tech is a boogie man to many executypes. I’ve seen plenty of IT pros that were in over their head but smooth enough con men. If they keep coming up with things to throw money at/trim money out of convincingly they have long and successful careers.
Which is getting worse now too.
It now searches “related” locations to what you searched for to show you more bought ads for locations instead of what you looked for originally. Get ready for the slow crawl of enshitification of maps now too.
Their maps are pretty bad, there are better alternatives although it can depend on your region. Navigation and POI search wise though they still seem the best to me.
Have you tried open street map? The geography nerds building that have a surprisingly up to date and high quality map of the rural midwestern region I live in so you might be pleasantly surprised
I’ve been using it as my main search engine for around a year now. I accidentally used google today to look up “best screwdriver sets” and the results were all ads instead of results with screwdriver set reviews. I put the same thing in DuckDuckGo and immediately got relevant results.
Interest of avoiding Google’s ad platform which is arguably more invasive you should use a browser in search engine that is not developed by Google thus use duck duck go. I mean it’s at least tangentially related.
I don’t mean half the websites don’t work. I mean half the time Firefox won’t load ANYTHING. It basically stops working with any DNS for a few hours at a time.
I have had this issue a few times and find that usually there is some weird update or something behind the scenes and a reboot of Firefox lets it start loading again. I’m not techy enough to know why but I have found that closing all tabs is mandatory maintenance for Firefox every so often.
The big problem with Privacy Sandbox is who is implementing it. I was on the fence about it for similar reasons until I saw who came out against it. Mozilla, the EFF, etc. all heavily condemned it, so I knew it was safe to say its bad (limited time, unlimited desire for knowledge and all I did not have the time to do a deep dive on Google’s newest way to get people okay with invasive tracking)
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