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Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

341–350 of 876 posts

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#341
post #15

This + the screwup of hiding ".m." and ".www." substrings in URLs + the public threat of getting rid of URLs entirely = patience wearing very thin. Also, enabling webUSB and webMIDI by default earlier, both of which apparently unneccesarily exposed vulnerabilities makes me wonder who's in charge, marketing or security engineering?

Marketing is in charge, of course. This has been abundantly clear for years if not from the outset.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#342
After they dropped inbox, I'm actively trying to leave google products but it is definitely hard. The band-aid is fused with the skin. It also made me realize that tying oneself to a single product/company is definitely to avoid.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there’s just no good alternative Are you referring to the chromium space options, or the browser market as a whole? I’ve never left Firefox and still find it to be a pleasant browser, one with which I’ve never felt really left out barring a few annoying bugs from time to time that are typically short lived.

I love Firefox in theory, it's just that in practice I've never been able to stick with it. One thing or another always leaves me running back to Chrome. It's possible that it's just my own bias and familiarity, but I'm not principled enough to endure an inferior experience in any way. Plus working in chrome dev tools all day long, you really miss it when you want to pop something open and look under the hood real qu…

I use Firefox exclusively to browse, I use Chromium for local development.

It is true the Firefox's dev tools are a lot better now than they used to be - I use them regularly when I test sites cross browser. But they lack critical features like source editing and stack rewinding, and the tiny visual/layout improvements they've made are not enough to get over that. In Chromium, if I pause a script, I can edit a line code earlier in the function, resume, and Chromium will rewind the stack to that point and replay it forward with my changes.

It is insanely useful, hands down the single tool that I use most often. Stuff like that blows Firefox's dev tools out of the water, because it turns out that I debug Javascript more often than I debug Grid layouts.

A while back I looked into whether or not anyone at Mozilla was working on something comparable, and there was somebody. But then everything went silent and I don't know the status anymore. I've been wondering for multiple years now why this kind of stuff isn't higher priority than new Grid tools or color selectors or whatever.

Firefox's dev tools are way behind Chrome's in basic functionality, even if the user experience is otherwise excellent. You can't even set breakpoints on DOM elements. I would disagree with anyone who claims that they're even remotely comparable tools at this point.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#344
post #322

Anyone who thinks Google doesn't already have all of that mined data on you, wether you are signed into sync or not, is kidding themselves.Google search, Google plus, chrome, play, Android, analytics, wifi, isp services- that already know where you go on the internet. By not syncing your fooling yourself into believe that your internet usage is yours.

Genuine question: what are you advocating should be done? Give up on privacy? Or something else?

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#345
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, most of the fighting against "invasive mass surveillance and questionable social engineering practices" has also been done by leftists, so there's that... Centrist average Joes usually don't care about such things, and right wingers applaud them to help the police and such. As for libertarians they are against them when it's by the government, but fine with them when a private company (even one the size of a sm…

Realistically the left/right spectrum is orthogonal to the authoritarian/libertarian spectrum. Classic liberalism is, I think, more aligned with the right but also profoundly anti-authoritarian. Similarly, the left has a proud tradition of supporting individual liberty but also a strong tradition of suppressing it in favour of collective power. Corporations of all stripes tend towards authoritarianism though, in my v…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#346
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can run either Firefox ESR Then I have the exact same problem when support dies in the coming months though. > or the unbranded builds [1] Interesting, so does this mean that if I want stable builds, I'd have to manually update to the exact unbranded counterpart of that stable version? > I'm curious what your concerns are with the unlisted extensions option from Mozilla? I guess because I really don't see what…

I know this is exactly what you're trying to avoid, but could you upload an example unsigned extension? I'll try to figure it out, could be a bug somewhere.

Thank you for offering to help! I actually just figured out how to fix it right now myself. The solution is to delete the following lines in prefs.js, then restart unbranded-Firefox twice:

  user_pref("extensions.databaseSchema", 27);
  user_pref("extensions.e10s.rollout.policy", "50allmpc");
The first start takes longer, so I can tell it's resetting something internally (not sure what). However, the second restart is what makes it start working. Not sure why.

Edit:

For anyone else trying to auto-obtain the latest stable Firefox nightly, here's a hacky command (change for your OS as needed):

  curl -s "https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing" | sed -n "0,/Windows 64-bit Installer/{s/.*href=\"\\(https:[^\"]*\\.zip\\)\">Windows 64-bit Installer

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#348
post #322

Anyone who thinks Google doesn't already have all of that mined data on you, wether you are signed into sync or not, is kidding themselves.Google search, Google plus, chrome, play, Android, analytics, wifi, isp services- that already know where you go on the internet. By not syncing your fooling yourself into believe that your internet usage is yours.

This thought is addressed in the submission: Google wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think they'd be getting value out of it.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#349
A minority view: I do care about privacy but this behaviour is what I expect from Chrome.

We have a number of profiles on our shared family PC and people expect logging into chrome or gmail will also log into the other.

For me it's the price of entry for using the google ecosystem. I was already using gmail/gdocs/chrome sync daily, so it just makes life easier.

If I really need privacy I go to incognito or another browser.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#350
post #9

I engaged with the folks pushing this feature internally when my own browser started enforcing omnidirectional login. One of my specific complaints was that it was an end-run around the user-provided sync passphrase, which nominally prevents Google from hoovering up my logged-out history. They didn't grok my privacy issue. Maybe they were deliberately misunderstanding me. Doesn't matter either way. Now I use Firefox.

Google's culture breeds internal arrogance and blindness to outside concerns. Arguing with Google people about issues with their products is approximately as effective as arguing with a brick wall.

This is the culture of having hundreds of millions of users. One user asking for something is just a data point and you have to rely on user research and surveys to know what users really want on average. But surveys have their blind spots as well.

The thing is, as a developer without having access to user research, all I know is what I want, and as a developer I assume I'm atypical. Whether it corresponds to what anyone else wants is questionable.

The opposite of this is people who assume that whatever they personally want is Obviously the Right Thing For All Users. You will find that attitude everywhere on the Internet. And that has its own flaws.

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