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A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

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Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#391

Post by consentreality »

tux1968 wrote: post #370
consentreality wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. It's an important part of my workflow to have a separate profile for home/work/other, with history, bookmarks, etc. Container tabs are not a good replacement. Worse, I get irritated with the fact that Firefox fully supports this under the hood, but seems to push back against actually implementing a convenient way to use it. I'm currently do…

> The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. Switching profiles can be as easy as restarting the browser. For instance, you could create an icon on your desktop for each profile, or just a single icon to run : firefox --ProfileManager And you'll get a menu to choose which profile you want to use. > I also can't open links in anything but the default profile Interesting. Running on L…

That is interesting. Googling "firefox open links in active profile" provides plenty of results about the same issue.

I do know there's a flag to launch the profile manager, but I find that to be a nuisance. I don't want to launch it every time, because I'm constantly launching and killing browser instances. Dedicated shortcuts cuts out that step, but in my case would require 5+ shortcuts via .desktop files on my Linux machine, and a matching set of icons on my Windows machine, with the mental overhead that comes from selecting and switching.

The extension is much closer to the behavior I want (Chrome's).

Conversely, I experience a frustrating Chrome bug on Linux, where after some amount of time, external links open a new instance of every profile, and an error window. I've had no luck troubleshooting that, and it helped motivate me to try Firefox again.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#392

Post by magicalhippo »

concordDance wrote: post #386
magicalhippo wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.

Can't you have Firefox unload old tabs?

I have not found a good way besides restarting FF. There is an extension but it wasn't reliable, as in unloaded active tabs and not unloading inactive tabs. IIRC the extension API didn't have sensible hooks so it was difficult.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#393

Post by p1mrx »

I would add these to the list:

- Removing "http://" from URLs. This was partially fixed several years later on Desktop, as now you can right-click the URL bar and check "Always show full URLs"

- Replacing the linear tab view on Android with a 2D grid (so the first tab is hardest to reach with your thumb), and gradually removing all the workarounds as people discovered them.

- Lack of extensions (e.g. ad blocking) on Android

- When using a bluetooth mouse on a Chromebook, the scroll wheel has been really janky for years, and it can only be temporarily fixed using "gesture_prop" in the crosh console. Not sure if this is intentional or just laziness.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#394

Post by throwaway290 »

sph wrote: post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

I do not use Chrome, but I recommend it to my tech illiterate friends or relatives because it's sadly probably the most secure browser among user friendly ones. In large part to Google Zero. (Ofc I try to also remember to warn against installing random extensions)

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#395

Post by AtNightWeCode »

sph wrote: post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

I only use Chrome for web dev things. Been living for decades and I still don't understand how people can be so fking stupid.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#398

Post by xethos »

colordrops wrote: post #4
dbish wrote: post #3

The problem is there are almost 0 alternatives beyond Firefox so if you don’t like their UX you’re stuck. All the “new” browsers are just chromium skins (edge, arc, etc.) Are there any real competitors building a new browser?

Aa long as chromium is open source and various entities are able to build and remove/modify anti-user features, i don't see a problem with alternatives being a "skin". If Google makes moves to make it difficult to modify chromium then browser maintainers will quickly migrate to other engines.

Once upon a time Lineage OS had Privacy Guard settings. You could feed an app fake data for things like location and contacts, leaving you with the best of both worlds: apps that "require" location will open, but you remain anonymous.

Over time, AOSP became harder and harder to build this feature back in to. AOSP (and Chromium) is Open Source in name only. One may view, download, and build the source, but maintaining modifications long-term isn't feasible without massive amounts of dev time and/or cash.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#399

Post by robin_reala »

worrycue wrote: post #273
robin_reala wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can see exactly Mozilla’s position on JPEG-XL: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#jpegxl JPEG-XL includes features and performance that might differentiate it from other formats, but the benefits it provides are not significant enough on their own to justify the cost of adding another raster image format to the Web.

Yet it supports AVIF, a a directly competing format ... There is nothing neutral about supporting one format and not supporting another.

If the functionality is effectively the same then supporting one of two formats reduces the attack surface for security exploits for little loss.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#400

Post by burkaman »

insanitybit wrote: post #383
burkaman wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any concerns about Google's CEO's salary ($226 million) or failed products ( https://killedbygoogle.com/ )?

> Do you have any concerns about Google's CEO's salary ($226 million) or failed products ( https://killedbygoogle.com/ )? The question here isn't "is Google's CEO bad?" it's "Should I be using Firefox on the assumption that it will help create a 'free' web?". I don't care about anyone else's salary. And no I don't care about their other failed products, it's totally irrelevant.

Ok, but your points have nothing to do with that question. I agree, salary and unrelated products are irrelevant to this discussion.

And nobody is asking you to "bet on" Firefox. If you start using it and the company somehow collapses, you could switch to another browser in less than 10 minutes. You don't need to buy stock in Mozilla or something.

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