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Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

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Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#181

Post by vincentmarle »

Bekwnn wrote: post #96
eudora wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on. The logical thing to do, if your real aim is to have browser sign in state reflect cookie state, is to sign out the browser when someone clears their cookies. That would make total sense to users. I think this is clear evidence that Google made this change to keep more users signed into Google so they can collect more of your data without telling you.

"Performing this action will log you out of chrome. (You may sign in again immediately afterwards.)" Problem solved?

It’s a dangerous precedent to begin with, I remember platform abuse was a serious concern when Google first launched Chrome. Over the years they’ve built up enormous trust by keeping Chrome (mostly) conflict-free. The moment Chrome really turns into “Google Browser” it will no longer be the default choice (although I suspect we may already be too late to undo this).

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#182

Post by esalman »

dannyw wrote: post #12

I have already switched to Firefox and loving it (Facebook container, tracking protection enabled), but these changes are welcome and responsive. I hope this is a wake up call that privacy implications need to be seriously considered during product design (even if the intent was better UX), and hidden changes without any UI/notice is going to make issues blow up far more than if there was clear in-app communication.

I switched to Firefox developer edition couple weeks ago before this incident. Reason: my laptop temperature goes up to 80C+ with about 10 tabs opened in Chrome, whereas with Firefox it stays around 60C. But with this sync and cookie fiasco I am never going back, even if they fix the CPU optimization issue in a future update.

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#183

Post by fermienrico »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #159
fermienrico wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like integrating auto sign in, tracking and Google cookies is less of a disorganized decision and more of a premeditated, carefully snuck in effort for their ads business. All the stars align for the bottom line. Just look at the state of Android. Try being a cell phone OEM who wants to use Android but without Google integration. Impossible.

> Try being a cell phone OEM who wants to use Android but without Google integration. Impossible. Tell that to Vivo, Oppo, Honor, Huawei, Xiaomi, Meizu, OnePlus, Lenovo, Qiku, Smartisan, Amazon, etc.

Yet most of them have to install play store. There is no going away from Google completely unless you're Amazon on large budget and you make a big branch off Android source.

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#185

Post by mivanov »

tptacek wrote: post #2

Like Eric Law[1], I felt like while there were some rough spots in the UX for the Chrome login and sync features, the issue was very overblown (I'd feel very differently if sync had been enabled automatically). I don't have much more to say than Law does --- except maybe that when your arch-competitor is speaking out on your behalf , maybe the narrative has gone a little haywire. I figured Google would do something c…

It's Eric Lawrence and while I don't think he's off base, the disclaimer literally says he used to work on Chrome, so I don't think he is speaking as a competitor here.

Also, in my (admittedly, n=1) experience, Sync was enabled automatically, perhaps because I had tried it at some point.

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#186

Post by snaky »

greglindahl wrote: post #170
snaky wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and a huge number of free developers Why do you think the search engine is unable to build a model leveraging a huge number of free developers?

Well, for one thing, search is a tightly-coupled problem that revolves around a big and expensive data store. That's quite different from a browser. Blekko did get volunteers to help edit our slashtags, and duckduckgo used to have volunteers help out with their duckduckhacks.

I think the main point is to not try to copy Google. DDG is power users' search engine for now, and that's OK. You may leverage power users help in tags, and other features, that would minimize the overhead in hardware platform. To make an extreme example - imagine how many data about the particular user would you need to have and how many resources would you need to spend on AI models training to give the same result by guessing and AI that user would get from SQLite, having formulated simple request in SQL.

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#187

Post by AnthonyMouse »

fermienrico wrote: post #109
codezero wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to age myself I remember how cool Google was in 1999. The joy of actually finding what you wanted and not getting sucked into some ad sponsored portal. Now Google is the portal. I’m done with it.

Google has invested billions into search and it is nearly impossible for a small startup to invade the search business. For example, imagine a company that allows you to search the internet without ads but charging say $2.99/month fee to use it. Even if I am willing to pay, the search accuracy and ability for a small company to compete with google is nearly impossible. So here we are. Perhaps I’ll switch to DuckDuckG…

> For example, imagine a company that allows you to search the internet without ads but charging say $2.99/month fee to use it. Even if I am willing to pay, the search accuracy and ability for a small company to compete with google is nearly impossible.

It doesn't even require payment. Even if you don't do any user targeting at all, insurance companies will transport a Scrooge McDuck money bin full of gold bullion to your location if you can show their car insurance ads to all the people who search for "car insurance" etc. Google itself operated this way for many years.

What you need is some competitive advantage over the incumbent.

I suspect a good way to do this is to make products for more technical users. Support powerful filters and scripting and regular expressions. Expose the internals of how it works to the user. Publish the source code and let people improve it -- do for search what Red Hat does for operating systems. It's a great model here because the cost of doing the indexing is still a moat even if the search code itself is completely open.

Big companies concentrate on the mass market. They've gone so far in the direction of making things so simple and generic that literally everyone can use it that they're leaving open an opportunity for someone to capture the subset of the market willing to suffer the complexity that comes from a more powerful interface.

You don't need 99% of the users, 5% is quite sufficient. If you make that you're worth a billion dollars and have the resources to make further improvements that allow you to compete in the wider market.

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#189

Post by kodablah »

statictype wrote: post #180
tptacek wrote: post #2

Like Eric Law[1], I felt like while there were some rough spots in the UX for the Chrome login and sync features, the issue was very overblown (I'd feel very differently if sync had been enabled automatically). I don't have much more to say than Law does --- except maybe that when your arch-competitor is speaking out on your behalf , maybe the narrative has gone a little haywire. I figured Google would do something c…

The sync thing was overblown. The cookies thing was a bit more concerning to me. Not so much from a privacy angle but from more of a 'Chrome has lots its way' angle. A lot of our software's more complex interfaces are Chrome-first since its faster to develop - yesterday was the first time I made a serious consideration to change that approach. Glad to see they are listening to user feedback and reacting quickly.

> Glad to see they are listening to user feedback and reacting quickly.

I consider an opt-out as paying lip service to the feedback. Clearly they feel the default is more important than the generated angst. Reaction clearly needs to be even stronger to affect real change. An opt-in (e.g. a dialog on next Google login from Chrome asking for feature enable) is a compromise, an opt-out is to appease the temporarily upset while keeping all that they added in place and defaulted.

This is not an olive branch, don't accept it, condemn the continued incremental marriage of Google browser+services, and continue to move on and de-google yourself where you reasonably can.

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#190

Post by nhf »

fermienrico wrote: post #117
romed wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience at Google, "people at higher positions" do not really make these kinds of decisions. Someone at the leafmost position in the organization comes up with some research and recommendations and if nobody stops them, they go ahead and do it. It's actually really disorganized.

I feel like integrating auto sign in, tracking and Google cookies is less of a disorganized decision and more of a premeditated, carefully snuck in effort for their ads business. All the stars align for the bottom line. Just look at the state of Android. Try being a cell phone OEM who wants to use Android but without Google integration. Impossible.

Honestly, I'm going to have to disagree with the first statement. Like any large project, it was planned, but all for separate reasons.

- Auto sign in and the "Google account indicator": this is almost certainly the result of discussions between the Chrome security team (security indicators, phishing, etc) and Google UX requests. Heck, they even say that the indicator was motivated by user research around session management.

- Tracking: I'm not sure what extra tracking was added to Chrome beyond the existing telemetry they've had since the beginning of the project.

- Google cookies: explained above - a reasonable idea at some manager or UX designer's local scope that got misinterpreted.

If they really wanted to sneak in goodies to supercharge their ad business, it would look a lot worse (and be a lot less obvious) than this. For instance, there's nothing stopping them* from automatically enabling Chrome Sync and removing the option for encrypted syncs tomorrow... which is another issue, but a different scope of discussion.

* Aside from their entire legal department, of course.

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