Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

I am only talking about marketshare.

I feel like there's some implied assumption here that this change lets Google do something evil that they couldn't do before, but I don't really see what.

If you're logged into Google properties (independent of browser), Google can already track you across most of the internet, via their Ads and Analytics embedded in a rather large percentage of web sites. If you don't want Google to track you on non-Google web sites, then you really need to use separate browser profiles (or separate browsers). Have one profile for Google properties and a separate one for other things.

Ironically, Chrome has really good multi-profile support. It's easy to have different Chrome windows running different profiles, each of which has all its own settings, storage, login state, etc. Give each one a different theme to make it easy to tell which profile you're using.

Firefox has a concept of profiles but AFAICT you can only run one profile at a time. :(

> To 99% of people, these features are useful and helpful, with the downsides being mostly philosophical or theoretical.

There is something there that makes it comparable to the early nature conservation movements. Fast forward a couple generations and nearly 99% of the population is pretty convinced on climate change and that we've messed up quite severely - but not enough to stop messing up.

For me its similar as well

- Firefox incognito and Bing for sites I dont trust and/or wanting to watch any videos I want (tv shows, movies, porn, etc). Bing is miles better anyhow for this because of googles DMCA takedowns. Theres no risk of XSS because firefox is sandboxed and I have nothing important there.

- Firefox I occasionally use for devdocs.io and some documentation resources.

- Google for everything else. I have too many plugins though here though.

I am debating on using a 3rd browser bc I do occasionally scrape things and keeping track what I am being tracked on is hard to remember. Id rather not run the risk of getting banned anywhere. At the sametime, getting tracked through cookies is convenient to me so I dont have to relogin etc.

So I also run a scorched earth policy. Possibly using a 4th browser for seperating bank logins, social media etc on a different browser entirely. Granted I 2FA everything

VPN for everything, I turn it off only during gaming. Rather not deal with my ISP and net neutrality implications.

I dont care what google or microsoft knows about me in all honesty. There are so many ways to fingerprint users on the web that its almost impossible not to get tracked, unless you took extraorindary measures against it.

Anything I do on my phone I assume is compromised, managing app permissions is too much work. I dont take photos with potential blackmail material. Same with anything I use chrome with, I use a lot of extensions. They always get compromised.

This update really broke a lot of things. There are a lot of services that rely on the first logged in google account. I used to log into chrome with a personal account, and log into gmail/etc first with my business account. That way, my bookmarks and history would stay with me personally, but things that I use a lot, work email/google cloud etc would open as default under the work account.

One common issue is some sites (google’s gallery.io even), only really associate based with the first account logged into chrome, or the OAuth flow breaks.

Now if you log out of google, to set the base login to your work email for example, it logs you out of chrome also, so there goes your password manager/bookmarks/cookies etc.

I’m still figuring the best strategy, currently I just made a second chrome profile to separate but it’s super time consuming/annoying.

I feel like it was a major change without any heads up.