Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome

news.ycombinator.com

291–300 of 332 posts

Re: Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple users may use the same browser/devices but different Gmail accounts. Even ignoring the ( many ) privacy implications, this causes problems for syncing across devices. Lets say I share a computer with my partner, but we have separate phones. Should I need to check which Gmail account is logged in before bookmarking something? Why can't we share a Chrome profile across those 3 devices while still maintaining s…

> Multiple users may use the same browser/devices but different Gmail accounts. Why would they use the same browser logon. Sure they might use the same be, sure, they might even not use a different user account on the computer, but your are suggesting that they would use the same Google account to log into the browser yet different Google Accounts to log into Google. That seems improbable, and likely to have unintend…

My parents share computer accounts; heck, they even share bank accounts. It is not implausible to me that you'd want to have separate emails, but also want all of your bookmarks to sync across multiple devices regardless of who they belong to.

The privacy implications here are in regards to stuff like Google stripping search terms off of urls from competing services. Caring about that doesn't mean you will necessarily care about hiding search history from your partner. Even with syncing passwords -- both of my parents know how to log into each other's Gmail accounts. Anecdotally, that is relatively common for older generations; sometimes they'll even ask each other to check their email if a computer isn't nearby.

If you have sync turned on in that scenario, you are going to end up with bookmarks and passwords that randomly disappear depending on who was logged into what when they were added.

And sure, you can get around that by just not using sync. The privacy implications are still worse in that situation, because you no longer have a choice not to log into Chrome. But even if you don't care about that, it still seems like a strict downgrade in functionality. You lose the ability to sync bookmarks between computers and you lose the ability to easily share logins.

The response to, "hey, you made this feature less useful!" probably shouldn't be, "well, but you won't notice if you just stop using it." It's hard to make that sound like an upgrade.

Re: Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome

#292
post #290
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though Vivaldi occasionally releases tarballs, the main browser is a proprietary product. See https://vivaldi.com/privacy/vivaldi-end-user-license-agreeme...

Tarballs?

Vivaldi source code[0] is released in .tar archives.

.tar archives are often referenced as tarballs[1].

[0]https://vivaldi.com/source/

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing)

Re: Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same - I use Safari for Google services (since Apple is unlikely to collude with Google), I use Chrome to browse Facebook (since Google is unlikely to collude with Facebook), and I use Firefox for actually browsing the web.

Why not use Firefox for Facebook as well? If your worry is Facebook tracking you across the web, you can use Firefox Containers to give Facebook it's own container when you're browsing facebook.com.

I'd never heard of "Firefox Containers" before - thanks, I'll look into it.

Re: Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely switched whenever FF quantum was released to stable. The experience is amazing. I will say I think chrome dev tools are better though.

The only reason I use chrome is the easy debugger hookup for VSCode. If anyone has any tips on how to get that running with FF, I'm all ears!

I got it working together really fast (like 3 minutes) last time, but earlier this summer it took me 30 minutes or more and before that I couldn't get it working.

Of course now it just seems obvious and I cannot understand what I did earlier.

Re: Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might depend on your system resources, but I have +300 tabs open right now and I don't experience any problems. The only thing that's a bit slow is if I restart the browser, it takes a bit long to start up.

Why would you want so many tabs open in the first place? Is this really a common way to use a browser?

> Why would you want so many tabs open in the first place?

Some reasons:

- Ctrl-clicking to open tabs since I can then load them in the background (because I'm impatient, and because I don't want to get distracted by clicking into all the references in the main tab while reading.

- using tab tree extension I can then easily see what path lead to some interesting page I found

- by default, if you type ab address you already have open in another tab, Firefox will jump to that tab.

> Is this really a common way to use a browser?

Yep. Bot extremely common but I do it and a number of other HN-ers as well. Mozilla seems to be aware of it and seems to have it in their performance tests or something.

Re: Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might depend on your system resources, but I have +300 tabs open right now and I don't experience any problems. The only thing that's a bit slow is if I restart the browser, it takes a bit long to start up.

Why would you want so many tabs open in the first place? Is this really a common way to use a browser?

My workflow is the same. I'll usually have 100 tabs open on a particular device, going up to nearly 1000 tabs across my phone, laptop, and desktop in rare instances.

Re: Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome

#299
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have. Unfortunately, I run my screen at a scaled resolution, so Firefox routinely pegs a full core redrawing itself, and burns my battery like it was punctured. Until that's fixed, I can't use it as my primary browser. This saddens me, because I otherwise love it. EDIT: This is actually more reason for me to switch back to Linux; FF doesn't have this bug there.

Something like this came up the other day. Perhaps setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in about:config as suggested by pcwalton might help you until this bug is properly fixed? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17934764

It seems to have mitigated the issue some, but it hasn't eliminated it. I had somehow inferred from the web of related issues in the FF bug tracker that I'd need to use a nightly build for this to be effective.

Thanks!

Re: Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome

#300
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tarballs?

Vivaldi source code[0] is released in .tar archives. .tar archives are often referenced as tarballs[1]. [0] https://vivaldi.com/source/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing)

Thanks, Vivaldi is literally the only "proprietary" software I use and had looked for the source before, can't believe I didn't know about this...
Post reply on HN