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Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting

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Re: Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting

#151

Post by tazjin »

Timshel wrote: post #68
tazjin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is just less usable. It's slower and a lot of config options are missing. Stuff that is common in enterprises and has buttons in Chrome (e.g. "add the intranet search to your browser!") is hard in Firefox (you have to write and serve a specific XML file somewhere). Also it has a big incredible redesign every 2 weeks, as far as I can tell from HN, while Chrome's UI is mostly boring and stable.

Multiple solutions without any xml: https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-sea...

These are not solutions, these are workarounds. Adding a bookmark with a keyword, because the internal UI isn't good enough? Come on.

Re: Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting

#152

Post by penneallagricia »

dgan wrote: post #37
bbor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of them think they’re supporting the free and open internet. I can promise you that many ad engineers take privacy very seriously, and from their perspective, google is leading the charge on less invasive Display ad tech. I seriously doubt the people in this thread will agree with any of that, but I thought I’d answer the question. Of course, the money helps too - Google just recently laid off thousands of worke…

On another spectrum, RuZZians invading Ukraine right now are really thinking they are "liberating" it.

Nice display of unwarranted racism on a completely unrelated thread.

Re: Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting

#153

Post by penneallagricia »

dgan wrote: post #84
penneallagricia wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Aw, poor invaders, such tough times with racism nowadays, can't even invade peacefully

War or not, that doesn't justify you being a racist. Otherwise anyone could say that Ukrainians are all nostalgic of nazism.

Re: Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting

#154

Post by dindobre »

chomp wrote: post #141
pyrale wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter what Mozilla did. They never had the budget to compete with Google on browser advertising anyway. If you look at the market share progression of the old opera and mozilla vs. internet explorer, and you compare it to the stellar rise of Chrome when it came out, it's really obvious that Chrome's success is due mostly to advertising.

Blows my mind that people think that there’s some magical way that Firefox could have competed. Chrome had ads on google.com, like the home page. No one except Google gets those ads. 90-second prime time tv spots. And they also scattered nudges throughout their entire website. Google ran a relentless ad campaign to get people to switch, and no browser on Earth was able to compete with that.

I agree Firefox never had a chance, but there is losing a battle and there is diving head first onto the floor. Mozilla played the few cards it had not that well.

Re: Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting

#155

Post by ryandrake »

nicbou wrote: post #125
the_gipsy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point you would have to set a weekly (daily?) reminder to turn off all new sell-out "features" that get added. Also, at some point those "features" stop being an option you can opt-out. The real solution is switching to Firefox.

When human beings act like this they get labelled as predators. This industry has a terrifying understanding of what consent means.

If computing was a night club, "Silicon Valley" would be the creepy guy who goes up to women with "Do you want to dance? [Yes] [Ask again later]". Or more often: "We are now dating. I'll pick you up at 7PM tomorrow for dinner. To opt out, send me a letter in the post."

Re: Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting

#156

Post by akyuu »

bmicraft wrote: post #147
akyuu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the browser is far too important to use third-party builds containing patches that don't receive serious audit. For example, the Chromium packages provided by the vast majority of Linux distros disable security features like CFI (check your favorite distro's x86_64 Chromium package build log and look for the "is_cfi" argument). I think Arch is the only exception. ungoogled-chromium has similar problems https://qu…

> Linux distros disable security features like CFI Why would they even do that?

I'm not sure, but I think CFI also requires building Chromium as a single binary with LTO, and this has extremely high memory requirements that their build infrastructure might not be able to handle. Also, I think some distros use GCC instead of LLVM/Clang, so CFI isn't even an option.

Re: Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting

#159

Post by Tistron »

yaps8 wrote: post #47
Tistron wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. For me, the main feature that has me use chrome instead is that it can remember my credit card details. I don't understand how it can be that firefox doesn't do this, it's so annoying.

Firefox actually also does it, maybe limited based on location. For instance here they announce it for UK, France, Germany (in 2022) and say it was available in the US/Canada since 2018: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...

That's good news I guess. Any idea about why it's geographically limited? I'm not in one of those countries, unfortunately.

Re: Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting

#160

Post by eviks »

stareatgoats wrote: post #57
jtriangle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could... use any other chromium based browser that doesn't do this. Might I suggest Vivaldi? It's nice, lots of built in features that you probably are running extensions for currently.

Yeah, I like Vivaldi too. It's been a string of largely pleasant surprises since I started using it a few months back, along the lines of "I had no idea I needed this until now". The only downside has been the occasional crash, perhaps because I've gone overboard with workspaces relative to the specs of my old PC.

Same boat (workspaces are great), only in addition to crashes it slows down with many tabs even when they're all hibernated (so the number of tabs/workspaces should not matter), and it's in general not the fastest , but the latest version claims some big improvements in opening new tabs/windows
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