this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Google did it again.

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[–] [email protected] 210 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Orrrr.... don't use Google Chrome.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Agreed. I never understood why anyone goes out of their way to install Chrome.

Rant:

Why not use Edge, which comes with the OS? I'm not promoting Edge, but it's already there. If you're going to install another browser, why not use Firefox instead? Every time I ask someone why they've installed Chrome, they either don't have an answer or say something like "it looks nice".

That said, Firefox' handling of tabs is still horrible. "Go Vivaldi" on this count. Sadly it's a Chromium browser.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (8 children)

How does Firefox fail you at tabs? I've always been happy with it, I sandbox my FB and Google social stuff, Save groups for opening at once, share tabs across devices, I don't want for anything.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The tab categories and paging are excellent. I don't understand what else you need. There are even 3rd party tools that improve this functionality.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Idk what people have about chromium tabs. Firefox does tabs just fine.

Also, edge does not come with most os, just w*ndows

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Vivaldi does this out of the box: Tab grouping, tab stacking, tab stack renaming, vertical tabs, periodic tab reloading, etc.

Firefox has some catching up to do in this regard. I need extensions to do some of this. Tab stacking, for example, simply does not exist on Firefox, which means that my tab bar eventually makes me scroll horizontally.

Not badmouthing Firefox. Just saying that it isn't the greatest in this area. Am still using it daily. I just don't use it for tasks that require having many tabs at my disposal.

Edit: I didn't say that Edge comes with most OSs. But Windows is the most widespread Desktop OS, so most people will have access to Edge "out of the box".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Love Vivaldi, but when I hit a site that has excess crap on it, I'll switch to FF and tap the reader mode for a cruft-free experience.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Vivaldi also has a reader mode 🤔

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why not use Edge, which comes with the OS?

lol

Not with any of my OSes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Fair enough. 🙂

Am sure all know what I'm talking about.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Inertia. For years: IE sucked and Mozilla was painfully slow and missing features. I know it’s been quite a few years since that was a thing, but people don’t like to change, so I really think it’s still leftover behavior.

Or at least it is for me, but I’m mostly in the Apple ecosystem now, so it’s not as relevant

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Using edge is probably a bigger offense than using chrome.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I don't know they're likely getting most of the information from the OS anyway.

Installing chrome is like doubling it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

My computer doesn't come with edge

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I go out of my way to purge Edge from Windows every time it works it's way back in no matter what registry edits I have to make, what Windows "features" it breaks or whatever script I have to write.

Edge is like having a roommate constantly hitting on you and occasionally withholding things from you when you reject them and you're basically over here going "They're already living with you, why not go with them instead of hooking up with someone from outside"

Chrome is ethically questionable admittedly at best, but Edge is straight up cancer.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Chrome was pretty good and somewhat faster than FF for a while in the oughts. At least it felt that way, and Google didn't seem so evil at the time. My guess is people go with chrome out of inertia

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yes unfortunately I've found chromium is just much better than Firefox when it comes to tabs. It's at least a step removed from Chrome.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I started using Chrome instead of IE11, which was crap for standards, and before Edge was a thing. When Edge came along, I got really ticked off by the constant nagging to use it, which made me hate it without even trying it. I will probably carry on with Chrome for now, whist I can still turn off all the ad tracking stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

After dragging my feet for years I finally moved back to Firefox a few weeks ago. Sure, there's a few features I miss from Chrome/Edge (vertical tabs, PWA support, tab groups, etc.) but I was able to 'fix' many issues with extensions and a custom userchrome.css, and trust is ultimately more important to me.

I'm thankful there are still free, open, privacy respecting options out there.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

There are Tab Groups add-ons for Firefox. I’m sure there might be vertical tab add-ons, too.

As someone who never went to Chrome, I’m just sitting here trying not to be all “I told you so!” from when Chrome started to really take off a decade ago.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Step 1. Uninstall Chrome why are you still running it? Stop giving Google power over the internet. Just stop. Uninstall it. Use Firefox, Brave if you must. Just ditch Chrome.

Step 2. See above. Just flipping stop. No, don't install another browser and keep chrome. Just DITCH CHROME. TOTALLY. If you need a backup use Edge or Brave or Firefox. STOP GIVING GOOGLE POWER OVER THE INTERNET.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Unfortunately, it's not like it would realistically change the monopoly Google has over the internet. The greatest financial backer of Mozilla is Alphabet and if Firefox starts to gain too much traction, they will simply axe Mozilla and unless they manage to get another backer fast, Alphabet will have THE monopoly over the Internet.

Don't get me wrong, I'm doing my part and using Firefox (when it doesn't constantly crash), but Alphabet's holding way too many strings currently for any change to happen.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My understanding is that Google pays Firefox to use Google as the default search engine, which they also pay Apple for the same, so it's a win-win situation and unlikely Google would ever do such (especially since Chrome is already the dominant browser for user base)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

To stop supporting Firefox would be begging for antitrust investigation (if not in the US then in the EU). Plus Mozilla would probably find another sponsor so all they'd be doing is draw attention to themselves. If it were a large piece of the marketshare at stake I could see it but Firefox is currently at 3-5% (depending on who you ask) so it's not even worth the aggravation.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just install another more privacy friendly browser

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Firefox is the only answer here

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I personally use librewolf. Firefox is making it look like they are private, but you need to tweak a lot of settings to get there

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

They forgot to add "Switch to Firefox" at the end of the title

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I read this article from top to bottom and didn't find a clear explanation of why you should disable this feature.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because it doesn't protect your privacy (Google still tracks everything), but it gives Google an even stronger monopoly to make taking other actions to protect your privacy less viable.

The end game is still their web DRM pretending to be "security" to make it impossible for you to choose how a page is displayed to you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Google doesn't track everything. The browser determines your interests locally; the only information shared with Google (and advertisers) is which broad topics you've recently shown an interest in.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It’s an underhanded way of implementing a browser supported foolproof adblock detector. Even its stated goal of “give advertisers a unified, browser backed, ‘private’ way of tracking you for advertising” isn’t especially appealing or useful when you get something better than that from adblock anyway. Turning it off will be reflected in telemetry sites gather about feature availability and hopefully low adoption numbers discourage them from taking advantage of this “feature”.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm, not having read up on the tech, what's stopping someone from making a Firefox plugin that just spoofs fake data back? It's all done client side if I'm understanding, so everything necessary to do so must be available. Only wrinkle I could see is if they have signing and ship the cert with Chrome and regularly rotate it. It's still not impossible in that case, just more annoying.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My understanding is vague but the sandbox environment is cryptographically integrity checked in some fashion that makes the spoofing you’re suggesting difficult or impossible.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well, I did a little digging, and while parts of the stuff proposed by Google might be tricky, the actual topics portion of the API looks pretty easy to spoof. It seems like there's really only two things that need to be done. The first is to spoof the feature detection logic to return true for calls to document.featurePolicy.allowsFeature('browsing-topics'). The second would be to return randomly selected topics from all available topics from calls to document.browsingTopics() (care might need to be taken to return a consistent set of random topics to a given page, otherwise clever sites might poll the API many times to detect randomness). That really seems to be all there is to the topics API part of this. As for spoofing the rest of the web DRM parts, that's going to be a lot trickier, but with control of the browser I can't see how it could be made insurmountable.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Gawd Google really is just a despicable company

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Everyone here has probably seen Scott McCloud's Contra Chrome web-comic. In the off chance you haven't, it details exactly why you shouldn't use Chrome.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Let me guess ... every new update reverts Chrome back to default settings

Chrome feels like it's updated every week

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh man! Time to give Google a damn good show of a ~~morbidly obese balding 40 something world of warcraft guy beating it heavily to lesbian futanari furry content staring into the camera as he gets busy!~~

Google wanted this to happen, so why not give those suckers the VIP First Class treatment?

Anybody else think of things that'll make those Google folk writhe in visual and audial agony and cut the privacy invasion act?

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