Is this at the "Chrome" level, or baked in at the "Chromuim" level? And therefore also an issue for Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, new-Edge, and anything else jumping on the browser engine monoculture?
This is specifically on Chrome, it seems.
Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
331–340 of 642 posts
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Btw, Firefox is too slow. Ahh, the good ol' "Firefox is too slow for me to consider it" statement. Is there any evidence that Firefox is slower then Chrome other than old lingering memories of Firefox being slow ten years ago? I have used both Firefox and Chrome and I can't subjectively tell that one is significantly faster or slower than the other. To be fair, I only have a handful of extensions and rarely have mo…
I love that Firefox exists and Quantum is an amazing step forward, but Firefox still regularly runs away with gigabytes of RAM and hung worker processes. I have no problem with long-lived Chrome sessions but I need to restart Firefox ~daily. It's not bad memories of 10-years ago.
Same for me.
I've been using FF for a couple of months and I get huge random CPU spikes on my MBP that go away once I restart it. It works fine on my iMac and Windows tower though albeit JS execution seems slower (I mostly work on front end stuff).
It also seems to consume more battery on Android than Chrome although I admit I've never made any serious testing.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#333If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.
As someone who had repeatedly tried to make the jump to Firefox, it _finally_ stuck after quite a few attempts. (CPU and laptop heat issues were problems for a while, now they aren't!)
I second this; keep trying even if it isn't for you after a few times, it was worth it to keep trying, officially Firefoxer :)
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#334If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.
I used FF for a couple of months. Its heart is noble but it's just not as polished as other options. Edit: I didn't want to expand because I've already banged that drum too many times on HN. See these other comments of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059567
Thank you! Someone said that finally. I really tried hard to like Firefox. But it just really doesn't replace Chrome for me. Maybe it's the ecosystem, extensions, user experience, I'm not sure but the browsing experience is never really the same on FF.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
You complained that it was hosted on Google specifically. I tested that Chrome specifically copies the canonical URL and not the location bar URL when I share that AMP page, which doesn't fit your narrative. Also, the reason the AMP page is faster is that it prerenders above the fold from a SERP, not due to total page weight.
AMP is, hosting aside, a problematic project when it comes to Google's business ethics. And the differences in rendering speed were negligible, to my eyes. IIRC from the dev tools, it was about 1/10th of a second difference to get readable content.
AMP is basically gobbling up other contributor’s content and shamelessly profits at the expense of the content owner. As an end user I also don’t like amp. Im on duckduckgo now
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#336If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.
The one thing that keeps bugging me is the widgets in Firefox (Ubuntu 18.04) look super-dated -- reminds me of NCSA Mosaic and makes me want to close it. Can they please update their widget library?
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#337I haven't read this carefully enough to decide exactly how bad it is, but one thing seems clear to me: From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore. I consider it more likely than not that Google will take some real beatings in the years to come. Kind of like Microsoft was fined by the US and EU, forced to advertise for competing browsers and ridiculed…
There is little point trying to correct misinformation about Google on Hacker News anymore, because people will just make up more tomorrow, and it will get hundreds of upvotes if it looks vaguely plausible. So, people who want to dislike Google will find everything they need to confirm their biases here.
IIRC it's not that long ago that trying to criticize Google here on HN was an exercise in futility.
I won't say that the current situation is perfect but I can see why. In my view Google had earned the current criticism by hard work:
- mismanagement of services people loved to the point were Google always running 3 different more or less incompatible message services, while closing services east and west has become a meme,
- shoving other ideas down people's throats (hi identity and real name part of Google+)
- etc
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
... what? If you aren't paying for it; you are the product. Simple.
Nowadays you are the product even if you pay. (E.g. Subscription news sites including trackers on subscribed users, smartTVs siphoning data etc)
I agree completely, that's what's so messed up with this "freemium" model that's so popular these days. If companies need to develop the ad-ridden version with tons of tracking to monetize free users anyway, what's the incentive for them to turn it off for paying users?
It's not like 99% of them are going to care and/or notice anyway, and if anything it would be more work to test and maintain a different version of the code without trackers.
Just pay for the things you use people, and block everything you can with browser plugins. This model needs to die.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#339If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.
The days of Firefox are over. Every site I work on has less than a few percent of Firefox users. We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em - I never liked the way Mozilla did anything anyway and their painfully obviously false, preachy holier-than-thou brainwashing campaign that they're constantly running in order to keep getting daddy Google's money has always been annoying. I'd rather use MS Edge. It's actu…
> We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em
You are the types of people who are slowly destroying the internet, nice work.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#340I haven't read this carefully enough to decide exactly how bad it is, but one thing seems clear to me: From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore. I consider it more likely than not that Google will take some real beatings in the years to come. Kind of like Microsoft was fined by the US and EU, forced to advertise for competing browsers and ridiculed…
>From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
Be careful, most of us on HN are part of a very small echo chamber. "What you see" is a small, non-representative portion of "techies". If it wasn't Firefox wouldn't be at sub-5% in general usage surveys and AMP would've died years ago.