I find it interesting reading all the comments here. I can understand the frustration of many HN users, but I also have seen "average" users be confused about switching google accounts on a shared computer. This change is aimed at helping the vast majority of their users understand which account is currently active, and if my experience helping family is any indication it is a good change.
Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
401–410 of 475 posts
Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
#402Won’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…
Google pays the salaries of every tech person whose opinion it values at a rate of > $0.00.
Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
#403Google is going to continue this pattern of behavior. Two steps forward, backlash is too bad, one step back. Let the dust settle, another two steps forward...
Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
#404Google business model is the greatest con the Internet has ever seen. I mean, it's a con when your front says "we do no evil, we are cool", and your back is squeezing your users for everything they gave you (gmail monitoring, browsing habits, location history, adsense scam, and now permanent logging). Mind you, I just uninstalled Chrome. Luckily, I never really used it. I recommend Safari and Firefox.
Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
#405> We’re also going to change the way we handle the clearing of auth cookies. In the current version of Chrome, we keep the Google auth cookies to allow you to stay signed in after cookies are cleared. We will change this behavior that so all cookies are deleted and you will be signed out. I really want to know who the internal champion was for getting the cookies to be perma-stored in the first place. It has to be so…
Based on what I know of the Chrome team, it was probably the conclusion of some UX manager or the result of a user study they did around Google authentication. If I had to guess: their end goal is not explicitly to collect more advertising data for Google, but it's to minimize friction around the use of Google services. This leads to decisions like the cookie one.
And no one from the engineering of the chrome team had balls to tell the manager "No, not doing it. It is wrong".
Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sync isn't turned on by default. Sign in is. They're different settings.
With "sign-in sync" I meant the fact that signing in to a Google service will automatically sign you in to Google Chrome.
But then the feature you mention didn't affect storage if user data.
Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poverty should be over soon. Twenty to thirty years max.
I wish I could think of some reason to believe that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-population-in-extre...
It's a straightforward extrapolation from data.
Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who can't remember their password often forget it due to having used that feature. Forcing yourself to type a password in over and over will pretty quickly encode it into muscle memory.
This is a little ridiculous. Do you think there is no value in password managers? It's almost certainly better to have many complex passwords managed for you and only one strong password to protect them all, than to remember the same few passwords used across many accounts, decreasing the overall security of those accounts. I understand healthy skepticism of Google, but essentially claiming password managers (which i…
I think you've misunderstood me. I'm not criticising Google here. I just dislike any tool that encourages people to unintentionally forget passwords for the sake of "getting this annoying prompt out of my way". This can be a "remember me" on a website's own page, or a browser feature.
A good password manager is a great tool and more secure than a few simple memorable passwords. But when I use it, I'm making a conscious trade-off between memorable passwords and secure ones, but usually I'll at least need to memorise a master.
I'm fact just thinking about it - if Chrome's signin affinity is turned on, and I have chosen "remember me", AND I use the password manager, isn't that effectively equivalent to having your entire password manager with a "remember me"?
Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Google representative has claimed on the domain hiding bug report that the change is shelved due to the feedback. Edit: Permalink to the relevant comment: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=883038...
The URL hiding change is NOT reversed or shelved, only delayed: > Thanks for the feedback so far. We plan to collect additional feedback, particularly about the enterprise use case, before launching the feature. We will not be launching the "www" elision in M70. Note: “before launching” the feature post-M70.
Maybe it’s just a vocabulary quirk — to me, “shelved” implies “postponed indefinitely, but might come back someday”, not “cancelled forever”. So it is “shelved” according to how I understand that word.
As you correctly point out, it’s not necessarily cancelled forever.
Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But what is the user facing benefit? Syncing bookmarks, recently opened tabs, passwords, autofill(?). These are genuine benefits when you're working with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. Whether they're worth the cost of data mining is another matter of course.
Out of the total population of the chrome users, how many really use more than 1 computer? These benefits may apply only for few users, probably in single percentage figures, which does not justify pushing it down the throats of everyone.
I think the majority of cases where it's helpful is between some traditional computing device, such as a laptop or desktop, and a mobile device such as a smart phone or small tablet. I think that's actually a fairly large amount of people.
That's also one of the situations it's most useful in, as having your saved passwords already present on your phone when you try to log into a site you generally don't from your phone is extremely helpful.