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Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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If you can, use Firefox.

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[–] 134 points 2 years ago (3 children)

"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."

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  • [–] 37 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 38 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago

    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⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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