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No to Chrome

notochrome.org

111–120 of 319 posts

Re: No to Chrome

#111

Losing Chrome doesn't necessarily stop you being tracked. If you make a vacuum it will be filled by someone else. I am not suggesting apathy but opting out just makes holes for someone else to fill. And as we have seen in the past competition is great but it quickly gets amalgamated behind the scenes, just look at the alcohol industry. All those brands look like healthy competition, but it's largely one parent compan…

Try buying glasses that aren't made by Luxottica. I really wish we still cared about monopolization.

Re: No to Chrome

#112

Losing Chrome doesn't necessarily stop you being tracked. If you make a vacuum it will be filled by someone else. I am not suggesting apathy but opting out just makes holes for someone else to fill. And as we have seen in the past competition is great but it quickly gets amalgamated behind the scenes, just look at the alcohol industry. All those brands look like healthy competition, but it's largely one parent compan…

> The problem isn't Chrome or Google per se, it's technology. We should be pressuring the big guns to conform to our needs, not opting out...

How do you propose to do that without boycotting? I'm all for regulating overly large corporations, but until that happens I can also vote with my feet.

Re: No to Chrome

#113

Even if you have no issue with Google, this is still a good idea to encourage competition. Honestly, Chrome is not as good as it used to be anyway. For me, Google Maps and Waze are the hardest things to kick. And YouTube...

In terms of browsers, I have moved back to Firefox from Google for my personal/professional browsing, but I have a product that is heavily reliant on Puppeteer and CDP. There are moves towards interoperability in Firefox, but that's my current blocker.

Firefox DevTools member here. We are looking into Puppeteer/CDP – what is the product you depend on? If you can't post it here, feel free to email me [nickname] at mozilla org

Re: No to Chrome

#114

Even if you have no issue with Google, this is still a good idea to encourage competition. Honestly, Chrome is not as good as it used to be anyway. For me, Google Maps and Waze are the hardest things to kick. And YouTube...

In terms of browsers, I have moved back to Firefox from Google for my personal/professional browsing, but I have a product that is heavily reliant on Puppeteer and CDP. There are moves towards interoperability in Firefox, but that's my current blocker.

It's a shame WebDriver hasn't been improved. Instead we get an entirely separate, nonstandard effort from the vendor with a supermajority.

Re: No to Chrome

#115
post #99

Losing Chrome doesn't necessarily stop you being tracked. If you make a vacuum it will be filled by someone else. I am not suggesting apathy but opting out just makes holes for someone else to fill. And as we have seen in the past competition is great but it quickly gets amalgamated behind the scenes, just look at the alcohol industry. All those brands look like healthy competition, but it's largely one parent compan…

The logic is simpler. The makers of Firefox (and apparently Safari) do have an incentive to keep your privacy. The makers of Chrome have an incentive to keep you tracked. So it's not the technology, it's business models. (Basically it's the rude awakening to TANSTAAFL.)

Another perspective: browsers will be like the BIOSes of the future, a sort of invisible thing in the background that no one ever thinks about, but just works perfectly all the time.

I take it as self-evident that the form that this takes will be the simplest, most generic one, and by definition will not have any associated "business goals." This era of business models wrapped up with browser design is ephemeral; certainly browsers (in some form) will outlast Google's business model.

It's easy to forget that all of this tech is still in its infancy, and the various players are fighting for market share and to make money. It is something out of a comedic dystopian novel to imagine that the browsers of the future will be tightly coupled with something so petty and vapid as advertisements.

Re: No to Chrome

#116

Losing Chrome doesn't necessarily stop you being tracked. If you make a vacuum it will be filled by someone else. I am not suggesting apathy but opting out just makes holes for someone else to fill. And as we have seen in the past competition is great but it quickly gets amalgamated behind the scenes, just look at the alcohol industry. All those brands look like healthy competition, but it's largely one parent compan…

> The problem isn't Chrome or Google per se, it's technology. We should be pressuring the big guns to conform to our needs, not opting out... How do you propose to do that without boycotting? I'm all for regulating overly large corporations, but until that happens I can also vote with my feet.

Organize politically, at the state level, at the federal level, whatever you deem appropriate and achievable.

Push for privacy laws, push for laws around data ownership. Develop a theory of "what should people own" and "what kind of behaviors should be prohibited by companies" and "what kind of disclosures should be required."

Develop a message and start hammering your reps, and get like-minded techies and community members to do the same.

Spend a lot of time doing boring and tedious things like building a coalition, and make this an issue that can be fought for and that people will spend time advocating for.

California's privacy law didn't form in a vacuum, and neither did the EU's GDPR, and neither came into being because individuals were switching their personal browsing habits.

None of that's a technological solution so it's the sort of thing we techies overlook, but that's how you do it without merely voting with your feet and doing individual actions that, on their own, have zero impact.

When techies start organizing around issues like privacy, security disclosure, data ownership, and stuff like this, I think we'll stand to do some real good for the world.

Re: No to Chrome

#118
post #73
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? We did just fine without it up until a couple years ago.

People also only used to stay in their villages or neighbourhood and don't travel as much as they do these days. It's a different world and just because we got by with sailing the oceans and using star navigation doesn't mean we can't use modern technology to improve our lives.

You've skipped a rather large period of time in which people would travel, and would bring a map with them or buy one when they got there. You think road trips only got to be a thing after Mapquest?

Re: No to Chrome

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of browsers, I have moved back to Firefox from Google for my personal/professional browsing, but I have a product that is heavily reliant on Puppeteer and CDP. There are moves towards interoperability in Firefox, but that's my current blocker.

Firefox DevTools member here. We are looking into Puppeteer/CDP – what is the product you depend on? If you can't post it here, feel free to email me [nickname] at mozilla org

Not the OP but, I use puppeteer (and headless Chromium) as a PDF rendering service. I'd love to be able to try the same thing with a headless Gecko/Slimer.js type thing. My current build process is a major pain to keep updated (building an Alpine docker image with the right version of Chrome to match the right version of puppeteer with the right version of nodejs) And after all that, it's pretty slow.
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