Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

vivaldi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 253 posts

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#61

Post by jhasse »

roblabla wrote: post #50
klondike_ wrote: post #39

I wish I could use Vivaldi, it seems like a nice browser for power users. Unfortunately it's closed source (besides the Webkit parts). Considering how much sensitive information goes through a browser nowadays, I would never consider something closed source. I'm sure Vivaldi has no intentions of becoming "evil" like Google, but because of its closed source nature it wouldn't be hard to slip a tracker or two in the br…

I don't know what browser you're using, but assuming chrome : it's not open source either. Chromium is open source, but Google Chrome is proprietary, much in the same way vivaldi is. If you want a truly open source modern browser, the only options are chromium or firefox these days, AFAIK ? (If you know an alternative I'm interested !)

On Linux there are quite a few other options e.g. Eolie. https://github.com/gnumdk/eolie

On Android I can recommend Lightning: https://github.com/anthonycr/Lightning-Browser

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#62

Post by wilun »

kuschku wrote: post #45
nostrademons wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I used to work on the webserver for Google Search. Left Google several years ago, have no more vested interest in them.) The reason for the browser-sniffing in search is a combination of ease of testing + latency reduction. By supporting a known set of browsers, you can write a test plan for each and shard it out among contractors (or ideally, automate it with a Selenium config). Manual tests run on every release (2…

> If you're manually spoofing your user agent, then Google figures that you know what you're doing and it's "use at your own risk anyway", and that if you get a broken experience, your first thought will be to disable the user-agent spoofing. Actually, some browsers, including Firefox Mobile, now spoof the user-agent by default on some sites, because of Google's broken systems.

Web history repeats over and over.

This might lead to an even more interesting browser UA string in the future.

Like "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36 MOZILLA IS FUCKING WRITTEN AT THE BEGINNING ANYWAY POOR SUCKERS!"

10 years latter, Firefox will take over the world again (when people will have enough of calling Google evil all day without doing anything...), and that part will again be engraved as a useless appendix, with an additional From_Google_The_Previously_Too_Big_To_Care_Much_About_Big_Browsers_Company at the end if you use their browser of that day.

What is sad is corporation doing so much evil they do not even have the time to see the history repeating itself, and the absurdness of their seemingly reasoned development approach (they think...)

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#63

Post by Endy »

klondike_ wrote: post #39

I wish I could use Vivaldi, it seems like a nice browser for power users. Unfortunately it's closed source (besides the Webkit parts). Considering how much sensitive information goes through a browser nowadays, I would never consider something closed source. I'm sure Vivaldi has no intentions of becoming "evil" like Google, but because of its closed source nature it wouldn't be hard to slip a tracker or two in the br…

Unlike you, it's the open-source parts of Vivaldi I'm most afraid of. I trust them to support their users and I believe they desire to have users who trust & respect them.

I don't trust people who are more code-savvy than I am (that's most people) not to insert or exploit weaknesses in open-source software or other open code. With closed-source software, I know the origin point of the software I install, I know the names of the individuals or teams who developed it, and therefore I know who stands behind it, because their reputation is based on that released software working. If something goes wrong, I can take clear action because I know who is to blame, e.g. Vivaldi, Microsoft, etc. With open-source software, that liability for the software developer is thus offloaded to "the community", and users have no viable recourse - meaning that attacks on open-source software are a lot safer for the individual attacker.

I support 100% closed-source development and extended release schedules. Open source & rapid development / release scares the daylights out of me. Too many people can see it, too many people can make changes, and it's happening way too fast.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#64

Post by cm2187 »

sandov wrote: post #52
tryingagainbro wrote: post #3

Vivaldi CEO – “Google: it is time to return to not being evil” Me: that train has left the station. When you have monopoly power (70%-98% of market share) the governments should return Google and Whatever Corp to not being evil.

Me: When a company treats its users badly, users can stop using Google and Whatever Corp treats them badly. If users voluntarily subject themselves to mistreating, then I don't see why governments should intervene.

There is some truth. A cigarette company would definitely agree.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#65

Post by Endy »

protomyth wrote: post #24
lightedman wrote: post #8

Really sounds like some sort of RICO or extortion charge should be filed against Google, assuming this is all 100% factual.

it is probably not RICO https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-... (a bit salty on the language)

Sorry for going to a further tangent but... I'm definitely not a lawyer, but do I get a little frustrated at its overuse in pop culture too. Of course, most people don't think of "conspiracy to commit" as a crime, so they immediately jump to "is it RICO?" and say yes.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#66

Post by freedomben »

chki wrote: post #16
akerl_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like companies are stuck in a losing game. We constantly push small companies to capture more market share. Any companies that fold during that effort, we bring out the pitchforks because the services they ran get shut off. Any companies that succeed , we bring out the pitchforks because they own too much market power. It seems a bit much that we ask for companies to constantly grow and simultaneously ensure…

Do "we" really push companies to capture market share? I mean sure, stockholders do, but "we" as the general public don't really care about a companies size until they become too big.

I respectfully disagree that "we the general public" don't really care about a company's size. I know a lot of people who will not adopt an app or product until the company has proven and/or established itself in the market. I think this describes a lot of Apple users who won't adopt new products until Apple gets in the game (the Apple watch being a recent example). A lot of people want a seamless and connected experience, and you have to be a massive player in order to provide that in a lot of cases.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#68

Post by vram22 »

nostrademons wrote: post #35
Jonnax wrote: post #12

Google are really shitty with their web browser especially on mobile. If you run Firefox you get a stripped down version of Google Search also with no infinite scrolling for images and low resolution. Use a user agent spoofer like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-... And it seems to work fine on Firefox. I'm sure their official excuse is that they only support WebKit based browsers on…

(I used to work on the webserver for Google Search. Left Google several years ago, have no more vested interest in them.) The reason for the browser-sniffing in search is a combination of ease of testing + latency reduction. By supporting a known set of browsers, you can write a test plan for each and shard it out among contractors (or ideally, automate it with a Selenium config). Manual tests run on every release (2…

I was just going to ask why search should be browser-specific, until I read your last paragraph.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#69

Post by vram22 »

shmerl wrote: post #46
fyrstenberg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I discovered this as well. Not only, they're faking it with the new YouTube design as well. I had to set my user agent to Chrome to get the new dark theme (it may have changed later). I did try different user-agents using AgentX[1] and with Edge UA they said the new look wouldn't work (or in effect something along those lines), so there is not much actual feature check going on. Only setting Chrome would give me all…

I'm using Youtube dark theme with Firefox just fine. But I had to jump through some hoops in their site settings, though without spoofing the user agent. What doesn't work at all is their Hangounts, because Google are doing something fishy with WebRTC there: Hangouts video and voice calls don’t work in Firefox for now. Google is working to fix this as soon as possible. Until then, use a different supported browser. N…

Leaving aside XMPP federation (though that is a good point), killing Google Talk itself was a bad idea. It was very good and useful, both the text chat and the voice calls feature, and Hangouts, its replacement, sucks heavily.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#70

Post by cm2187 »

amirmasoudabdol wrote: post #30

YouTube website does everything to be unusable on the iPad. They don't use the default player. They won't save your settings if you use Safari. They do not allow full screen video. Even when you request the desktop site, they resist to load the video properly in first few trials. They are being as annoying as they can!

And the video will stop playing if you switch to another tab.
Post reply on HN