281–290 of 475 posts
Next up is "we recently made a change to simplify giving us all of your movements."
https://twitter.com/jonathanmayer/status/1044300922149588993
This is causing me to re-evaluate my personal technology stack.
Won’t change my mind and will stick to Firefox after having switched because of this. First I don’t want to be logged in in my browser at all. Second, and probably more important, software is about trust. Even for an open source project, no one has the time to review millions of lines of code. So unfortunately one has to rely on what one believes is the behavior of the authors of the software. And what google did is…
How did you expect them to announce a change they probably perceive as a minor UX improvement? Also this has been brewing for months in canary/beta, it's not like they actually snuck the change as you imply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather have the poor decide what is good for them, and not you.
That sounds like a good theory from our comfortable, affluent office chairs... until you think about it for approximately five seconds. Would you rather have the children decide what they should learn in school, or the injured decide how their wound should be dressed? A fundamental aspect of our society's advancement is that we have become specialists: we almost all wear socks but very few of us would know how to mak…
Can we agree that mentally stable adult humans, generally, should have some agency and responsibility to choose how they consume media?
Everyone seems to be arguing the utilitarian merit of this feature, but I just don't like what it signals for Google's approach to the web. They're building in features that integrate their browser into their web pages. As far as I'm aware no other major browser holder has done anything of that sort, but I'm probably missing some examples.
IE's NTLM authentication, which can integrate with your Windows login, might come close.
Won’t change my mind and will stick to Firefox after having switched because of this. First I don’t want to be logged in in my browser at all. Second, and probably more important, software is about trust. Even for an open source project, no one has the time to review millions of lines of code. So unfortunately one has to rely on what one believes is the behavior of the authors of the software. And what google did is…
>And what google did is to shatter that trust by sneaking that change discretely. How did you expect them to announce a change they probably perceive as a minor UX improvement? Also this has been brewing for months in canary/beta, it's not like they actually snuck the change as you imply.
Just because you split a large change into a set of minor UX improvements and have different excuses for each individual change, that doesn't make the direction of travel any less damaging.
To be clear, the direction of travel is for Google to abuse their de-facto monopoly on search and browsers to own SSO across the web and track their users completely, at which point they will pretty much own your entire web experience (logins, browser history, maps, news, search, tracking, analytics - all this data will form a huge moat making it hard to compete and hard to resist decisions made by google about the web) - even if you don't use them they'll own the experience of the majority of your customers. This is why these small changes are so pernicious, and why people have reacted badly to them. This is why people reacted so badly to AMP.
This is not an argument over technicalities or quibbles over UX, this is a fundamental question of who owns the web.
Google have built up a lot of trust over the years by keeping the browser independent of their other operations, and making great technical progress with Chrome, but these changes (and others like starting to abuse their search monopoly by privileging certain google results) show that is not going to last - they are now at the monetising phase of their lifecycle, and nothing can stop it - a huge corporation has a momentum of its own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does seem weird that this would be lauded. I want my browser to be completely independent of what I'm doing on the website because there is no telling what the browser might be doing on my OS and frankly if I want to sign into a website, I will. It's not any of my browser's business what I do on the websites I visit. This seems like a fundamental part of sandboxing but maybe other people don't see it that way. I i…
> maybe other people don't see it that way If the HN backlash is anything to go by, a lot of people see it the same way as you (me included). Every company will act in it's best interest not ours, particularly in the case of Google who are blatantly building out a vision of what they want the web to be for 1 singular purpose: to more closely monitor you for the purpose of selling your online activity to the highest b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>And what google did is to shatter that trust by sneaking that change discretely. How did you expect them to announce a change they probably perceive as a minor UX improvement? Also this has been brewing for months in canary/beta, it's not like they actually snuck the change as you imply.
How did you expect them to announce a change they probably perceive as a minor UX improvement? Just because you split a large change into a set of minor UX improvements and have different excuses for each individual change, that doesn't make the direction of travel any less damaging. To be clear, the direction of travel is for Google to abuse their de-facto monopoly on search and browsers to own SSO across the web an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 upse…
You seem to be looking at the choice of opt-in vs. opt-out from the perspective of a user who actually cares about the feature. Much more common, though, I'd say, is the type of user who will accept whatever the default is, because they just don't care . Compare: the organ-donor registry. When it's opt-in, most people don't opt in. When it's opt-out, most people don't opt out. Most people just don't care. If you thin…
Therein lies the disagreement - Google thinks it is good for people to log in to Google services via their browser, and to always be logged in (it's certainly good for Google!), therefore they choose these defaults, opting in to login and to tracking.
Many disagree.
I'm sick and tired of Google (as well as FireFox) and have increased the use of alternative browsers, thank you very much.