This is the point that company breakups start to make a lot of sense.
When Google can do something that every one of it's users hates and none of us can do anything about it, they perhaps have too much market power.
I don't think this is remotely the case. Quite a few tech-savvy people I know (some of them software developers) use Chrome and mostly don't care about whatever Google does with it. I mention "manifest v3" and get a blank stare. I talk about advertising and ad blockers, and most people don't care, with some of them not even using ad blockers.
We really live in a bubble, here on HN. Most people think of privacy as some abstract thing that they have little control over, and are mostly fine with that. And some are even also fine with government erosion of privacy, in the name of "save the children" style arguments, and of corporate erosion of privacy, in the name of getting free stuff in exchange for their personal information.
It's a sad state of affairs. If most people really did care strongly about these sorts of issues, then I think it would be baffling why we haven't seen more change here -- after all, Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use. But the lack of change is no surprise: most people don't care.
On top of all this, a lot of users don't care, which is a problem itself, but also leads to an even harder time trying to navigate a company breakup. The convenience is too great for them, and it's too easy for the above noted companies (alongside other giants like Walmart) to shift public opinion.
The best time to break up Google was 10 years ago.
The second-best time to break up Google is today.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
How would this have changed the existence of the Web Integrity API?
Multiple bubbles on HN. Obviously, most of us are complicit in some techbro business conventions today that, 30 years ago, would've gotten us shunned by our peers, and reported to the authorities.
(Not that current phenomena weren't foreseen. SF writers had already been all over it. Anecdotally, Internet-savvy techies were often informed by various forward-looking thinking and by world history, and tended to act like stewards rather than exploiters.)
If this weren't true, Apple could just start inserting ads into every iphone's Safari window tomorrow, and Youtube could serve the ad in the same stream as the video to defeat adblockers, and they'd make a bunch of extra money with no downside. The fact that they don't do this suggests that Apple and Google understand this: people only tolerate restricted platforms that do a convincing job of pretending to be unrestricted. In practice, this means that step 1 of Google foisting off user-hostile stuff on us is getting Firefox to include it too, which is presumably why they spend so much money on it.
This is not support, this is lack of awareness or apathy.
So get a front row seat and get ready for what is to come in September this year to witness the beginning of the end of a company once adored by hundreds of techies finally getting broken up to pieces.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/20/doj-antitrust-lawsuit-agains...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/doj-files-second-antitrust-l...
A competitive market is way more important than Google.
I don't use Firefox because it's slower than Chrome and because their behavior regarding limiting which extensions are available in phones, requiring signed extensions, Firefox Pocket, ads in new tab page, etc, does not exactly give me confidence that Mozilla truly has my interests in mind. In fact I bet they'll implement the nightmare DRM API once it's done swiftly and without complaint lest their money flow suffer.
If Mozilla ever decides to stop screwing around, clearly position themselves as an ally of the consumer, clearly express support for adblockers and put resources into making the browser faster and better and more customizable instead of whatever makes their CEO richer then I'll switch to Firefox even if it is a bit slower or has some flaws.
In the meantime uBlock works right now in Chrome which makes it usable, so since Chrome is the fastest right now, Chrome it is.
Also, Firefox just passed ahead of Chrome on some JS speed benchmark, so you should get ready to switch back!
Archive: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/
So much of our current hellscape was foretold long ago.
and that's exactly it. putting something in your music library is a hugely more visible and tangible thing than all the nebulous privacy concerns the internet wants me to be afraid of. nobody gives a shit if google or apple or facebook or whoever else introduces some techical measure that could be used for nefarious things. they only care if that api is actually used for nefarious things. as long as the argument is "well if google implements X, then it would potentially allow them to do Y*, that's a failing argument.
like it or not, people actually do trust the big tech companies. as long as they aren't actively abusing that trust in ways that people care about, things like "google wants to know if you're a real person or a bot" aren't going to cause a whole lot of outrage. most people can understand that letting fake people pretend to be real is bad, and that preventing that is probably a good thing.
When you talk about communications technology adopted at a societal scale, changes in norms and routine have ripple effects. Most certainly one of those is a change in asymmetric power relations by central communications companies, versus the user of their systems who get strictly limited information views of what is happening with their phone calls or emails.
When you have asymmetric power relations with market advantage and secondly literal surveillance at stake, a unilateral change in the service agreement is not a small "oh well" matter.
This single statement "people do not care" does not show all the players, and most especially does not show the players making decisions, the management of the companies making more money or new revenues with new decisions.
The problem is that it isn't.
Do you know why Firefox managed to usurp IE6 in the first place? Because it won the adoption and appeal of tech enthusiasts and professionals. Mom and pop (read: the general population) switched to Firefox from IE6 because their tech nerd kids installed it for them, and the enterprise largely moved off of IE6 dependence because the general population moved off.
But the Firefox today is not the Firefox that defeated IE6. Mozilla steadily eroded and destroyed every single thing tech enthusiasts and professionals loved about Firefox, to the point it practically became just a Chrome ripoff. At that point, why bother? Chrome's right there, the real deal.
Not to mention Mozilla happily takes money from Google with no shame at all so their CEO can get her fat paychecks.
Firefox is not a viable alternative, Firefox is literally controlled opposition to pedantically argue Chrome is not a monopoly. Not even the Intel and AMD x86 duopoly is this blatant.
Look, I will absolutely criticize Mozilla for some of its policies. Pretty much every issue you've raised there is spot-on, in fact I'll go a step further and remind everyone that Pocket was kind of supposed to be Open Source by now, and it still isn't.
But it's cutting off your nose to spite your face to use Chrome. Google is less receptive to criticism than Mozilla is, has worse extension APIs and is more restrictive of how extensions get installed, has worse privacy features, allows for no extensions on phones, is more directly tied into an advertising network, and is actively trying to make the web worse.
Use Firefox.
I am not telling you to be complacent or to ignore Mozilla's problems, I am telling you not to lend support to the browser that is actively trying to make the web worse. We're all very happy for you that you're very principled about not just picking the better of two bad options. We're happy that you have those standards. But we're less thrilled about your policy of picking the worst of two bad options. At the very heckin least you're not even going to use a Chromium fork? You're just going to make the worst browser choice you can make for the Open web?
Firefox fails because there is no actual industry pressure to build a better browser. you simply can't sell a browser alone anymore: the free offerings have been good enough since the early 2000s.
Safari only needs to be good enough for iOS users to not abandon the platform entirely, and the ecosystem wants to push you into native apps anyway (Apple wants their IAP cut).
Chredge is, well, _there_, but basically just a minimum batteries included that maybe funnels some set of users into other Microsoft offerings, but it isn't the core product.
Chrome is, well, Chrome.
Firefox is comfortably supported by Google funding as an antitrust action shield. there's no real pressure for them to try and beat Chrome in market share because they're explicitly paid to be minority market share, and aren't really going to lose that share because they already have all of the "intentionally don't want to use Chrome" market. Mozilla faffs about making also-ran internet services (idk, whatever the heck that VPN offering was, etc.) because they fundamentally can't lose their main revenue stream so long as Google wants to avoid antitrust action, and have no real pressure to offer a competitive product.
Yet, noone cares, even on HN.
As for performance... That sounds dubious. Declarative blocking surely will be faster than v2, but what is being blocked by v2, I would imagine, is generally way slower than the difference between v2 and v3. At the end of the day, I don't see the performance of my browser negatively impacted by uBlock Origin, I see it saving CPU, bandwidth, memory, privacy, etc.
I'd be willing to bet that whatever isn't blocked by v3 is sifnificantly slower than whatever supposed slowness there is with v2 (in general).
That's true, I was talking about desktop, I probably should have not mentioned the phone extension thing.
In Android I use Bromite (a Chromium fork) which I should probably replace since it's fairly outdated at this point.
But you're wrong about me not using Firefox out of spite, the real reason I don't use it is because it is (or apparently was according to the other replies) slower to the point it is noticeable, at least on my desktop (and even more so on my old phone). The rest is just why I don't support them despite being worse.
Their hold on these claims are extremely tenuous. No one would be surprised if Firefox, Bing, or iOS resurged and killed Google’s offering, for example.
The original reason Google started the Chrome project was that the stagnation of IE6 was a barrier to implementing the web software they wanted to build. At least that's what they told us.
It seems this particular moment in history has been either forgotten or rewritten, judging from this thread and another one from yesterday.
Just like I'll have some conversations on WeChat but if I want to talk about Chinese politics maybe I'll do that on another platform.
I don't really see the erosion in the corporate space. The erosion of privacy is happening at the government level. With "forced backdoor" laws and/or just outright forking the internet backbone (ala PRISM). I've never really understood "Corporate erosion of privacy"... It's opposite, Privacy is literally a USP of Apple products. They had to back out changes that hinted at an erosion of that trust with the on-device processing of Photos for cloud-sync. People are more aware than ever.
As opposed to chrome, which doesn't allow any extensions on mobile
> requiring signed extensions,
So does chrome
> ads in new tab page
Chrome is made by a company whose main business is selling ads ...
> clearly express support for adblockers
Mozilla has long shown support for ad blockers for example, uBlock origin was the first extension aupported on mobile, Mozilla has no plans to drop the blocking WebRequest API, largely because it is needed for sophisticated ad blockers like uBlock origin, etc.
I don't agree with everything Mozilla has done, but I still think Firefox is better than the alternatives.
This is false. Safari supports Manifest V2 and has no plans to deprecate it.
I'd guess that you're confused because Safari lacks support for webRequest BlockingResponse: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
This quote is from page 2 of the article. It is common for certain HN commenters to remind us that HN is a bubble. True. However, the author of this article is not necessarily in this bubble.
But, honestly, what difference does it make whether HN is a bubble or not. Google is a bubble. The Register, another entity outside the HN bubble, calls Google "The Chocolate Factory".^1 Does it matter that Google is a bubble.
1. Of course it's also common for certain HN commenters to try to broadly dismiss all journalism, on a news aggregator site no less. Maybe there is a pattern here.
Would anyone outside the HN bubble try to discredit the observations about so-called "tech" companies mabe by those inside it. (Besides those with vested interests in so-called "tech" companies.) All evidence I've seen since 2009 points to the contrary.
The only circumstance where I wouldn’t be surprised would involve regulatory action I see as an outside chance.
If a journalist would explain these news to the masses AND the news has a way to reach the masses.
These days these kinds of news do not make it to broadcasted news and most people do not watch the old broadcasted news.
The news currently get people attention from the news feed on Android and Apples phones. Those feeds recommend only the kind of content you usually interact with. No many people gets tech articles. And you can even argue that there is some extra filters on what news get on the feed in first place.
It's a small difference, perhaps, but its "my" browser in a way chrome will never be. Blink sucks.
Also, not a clue what you are on about - I don't have an issue with firefox. Chrome is basically for dealing with google stuff, and for the rest of the web I don't care about them.
Google Chrome is "open source".
Android is "open source".
ChromeOS is "open source".
Nevermind the truth being more "open source" with proprietary bits (the bits that matter).
So the opening argument often is; well, someone else can enter the market and do what they do. But that's missing the trees for the forest (and the devil's in the details).
They're quite happy scrambling for the crumbs as it is.
Firefox got better dev tools and mozilla did random crap for a bit, meanwhile brain-dead devs insisted on continuing to use chrome. When the devs supported it, they started favoring the googlified things.
Honestly it's a terrible browser - we are back to the bad old IE days (almost).
They aren't great, just another proprietary browser. Every time I've used it has been sub-par. It reminded me a lot of Opera in that it was very opinionated, even if it tried to offer some feature. Apple makes money off of apps, not websites, though, so it makes sense they don't invest much into their browser.
Yeah, Apple was toast after they did that. Their share price in 2014 when they did that was $24, and immediately afterwards it rose to $33 over the next 12 months. And since then, it's just been one long slow decline to almost $200 a share, as their global mobile market share has gone from the 24% it enjoyed in 2014 to the measly 29% it enjoys today.
Online outrage does not translate to action.
It's similar to privacy 'dead bodies'[1], where users want to know actual concrete examples. I keep a collection of them in a larger directory of web pages about privacy, about instances where 'nebulous' privacy aspects meet reality and users are impacted and upset by it.
[1] Term used by a law professor in Daniel J. Solove's "I've got nothing to hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
Just slapping another name on it doesn't make the issues go away.
Just setup ublock origin to filter annoyances as well, and it actually quite quickens the browsing experience.
PS Chrome is faster because it cheats and takes shortcuts in loading CSS. Check it out, it skips some frames when loading, to show the page faster.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
Maybe it's an extension or three I'm running but I just want to use the bloody thing not sit there and figure out what extension is not working nicely (and then potentially find out it's none of them) on one platform but is fine on another.
Every so often I go back and have look to see if it's improvised but it hasn't in the last few years for me.
For example, when Apple makes a user-hostile hardware change, every major Android vendor will copy it in a matter of months[0]. The only thing you can go to after that is niche Chinese phone makers that will cause you a bunch of other pain.
I'm basically completely disconnected from Google at this point. My phone requirements forced me to get a phone without Google Play Services, and I live in a country where Google is not dominant. The only thing that still pops up is YouTube occasionally. (Also it would be nice if I could get my old Google Photos archives exported from Photos, but the export in Takeout keeps erroring! Oh well...)
[0]: Back when I worked at Google, there was a mailing list thread on a big internal engineering mailing list, where somebody point-blank asked "Did we remove the headphone port on the Pixel because Apple did?". The answer from the product team was a whole bunch of wishy-washy word soup, amounting essentially to "Yes".
There's even a post on front page right now about Mozilla's position on the very proposal we are discussing: >>36857032
Setting aside the fact that it's as fast as or faster than Chrome, it doesn't crawl any of my machines with >500 tabs (this has 562 as of now).
If you want to dig into your performance numbers there's "about:performance" to see what is using your processor and RAM.
Microsoft recommends Edge! Review your choices! 90 days free Apple TV! Upgrade your iCloud to continue backups!
The only one that slightly moved the meter is your documents moving to OneDrive, even that only had an impact because of a data loss bug.
Three year old Mac btw... everything else runs pretty well... if I get a chance I might fire up Firefox in Parallels and see if it's a Mac issue
1. Unlike EME (the controversial web DRM backed by Google that was standardized somewhat recently), the Web Integrity API requires a third-party service, which involves maintenance costs, as well as development costs to constantly adjust to the arms race against all the hackers who really want to thwart these tests.
2. In a "functioning attestation industry", many attestation servers would compete on price to validate users, making the network efficient and robust. I struggle to see this becoming reality because decent attestation would require very complicated techniques for each supported browser, and there is only 1 company that does both significant browser development and also wants to run an attestation server.
3. In a monopolized attestation industry, Google would be the single point of failure for all DRM-protected media on the internet. Google's down? So is Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc. because they can no longer validate that their users are running an approved version of Chrome. This also give Google an incredible amount of leverage over other companies, because they can change fees and policies unilaterally and there are no alternative games in town. Companies have an incentive not to put themselves in that position.
If the entire media industry coalesces around Google Chrome as the only supported browser for media on the internet, and bestowed this incredible market power and leverage upon Google, then it could work. I find it hard to believe that this will slip past every significant regulatory body on Earth, and any significant gaps in market control would make the scheme unworkable.
They know that making it so tedious means it will only be used by a handful of hobbyist and nothing more significant.
This is not true either. There are many different aspects to Manifest V3, such as restrictions on script execution.
I think this illustrates that people only worry about this kind of thing if it gets shoved into their face.
The privacy thing is OK as long as it’s only used for the good. For example, I think nobody would object against a world where every killer would be caught within an hour to get a fair trial.
However, such a world also would be one where every traffic offense could be fined, and where powers that be could find some dirt on anybody in their email history, presence on on-street cameras, etc. Worse, it would take relatively few people to pull that of.
That’s something I think nobody wants, but it’s abstract until it affects you, so few people worry about it.
Give it a go.
Same for Web Environment Integrity API. Nobody knows what those jargon terms means. That's part of how enshittification works. If everyone knew how badly they were being fucked, this would never work.
If it's so bad, why can't we bring a monopoly lawsuit against them over chrome/chromium? This is pretty similar to what Microsoft did, isn't it?
What will actually happen? Nobody knows for sure. The most likely outcome is that you will not be able to do banking, watch Twitch streams, etc. on anything other than Chrome, Firefox and Edge, on Windows and macOS. Linux will probably be relegated to the legacy web that does not enforce remote attestation. Alternate browsers like Librewolf, Brave and Mullvad Browser will just disappear as if they never existed. You can not browse Tor on clearnet websites anymore, as if you really could anyways. Etc, etc.
> If it's so bad, why can't we bring a monopoly lawsuit against them over chrome/chromium? This is pretty similar to what Microsoft did, isn't it?
Microsoft of today is doing things blatantly in the open, that Microsoft of 199x would never dream of doing. The difference now is that all of the major computer manufacturers are basically going the same way, just at different rates.
The legal system is not coming to rescue us.
May I introduce you to Tobacco?
I remember Google+ when they ignored feedback on users hating aspects of it and tried to force it on us using their dominant position and it didn't go very well for them.
Privacy absolution is never what most people signed up for.
I’d never use it due to lack of uBlock Origin and good dev tools, but it’s hard to argue with the speed and battery efficiency on macOS.
Did you try different export options? I recently had to do one export and it kept failing but exporting using another option worked. I don't remember which one but it was either email or drive.
Also, “the police” are thousands of humans. That makes it harder to use the police for oppression than if “the police” were a bunch of computers and robots.
If somebody proposed the latter, I think lots of people would object.
That was an interesting read, thank you!
Thankfully we have brave, Tor, Arc, Opera, GrapheneOS, calyxOS, LineageOS etc....
If you purchase a pixel phone, and put graphene OS onto it Google loses money.