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Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

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Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#281

Post by nologic01 »

lock-the-spock wrote: post #265
nologic01 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is really no downside to Firefox The Dutch national TV (NPO) videos do not play on Firefox for Android [1]. They do play on Chrome for Android and they do play on the Linux desktop firefox. Not sure if its some hidden setting that I need to find or something for the firefox team to look into. Everybody and their dog want you to download "apps" - I wonder why? Firefox on android is one of the few defence mecha…

It might be that you turned off playing DRM materials

Its allowed as a general setting. But digging deeper it seems that this site has somehow been placed on the exceptions list.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#282

Post by shadowgovt »

maccard wrote: post #125
shadowgovt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who cares if Chrome is 2% faster on some obscure CSS parsing test? The person who has to access a site that takes advantage of that parsing trick every day, I assume.

Shaving a few microseconds off of internal loading is absolutely meaningless when there are hundreds of milliseconds of third party JavaScript being downloaded, and your browser is actively removong the features that allow you to not do that.

You'd be surprised. I had to chase down a rendering bug that made an infinite scrolling widget unusable on Firefox because it did recursive layout when flexboxes were within a scrollable div. A 2% performance hit can matter in the modern context of hundreds to thousands of layout elements.

That having been said... This is an ecosystem thing and if everybody were to switch to Firefox it would be Chrome that had the weird rendering bugs because people would be testing on Firefox first and wouldn't be using layouts that Firefox didn't handle cleanly.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#283

Post by [deleted] »

jurynulifcation wrote: post #234
scarface_74 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean Firefox that also gets 90% of its funding from Google ads?

Yeah, but at least it's not chrome or directly benefits google. If China came out with a web browser, I'd use it. Just to starve American spyware corporations of a tiny bit of data.

[deleted]

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#286

Post by [deleted] »

vladharbuz wrote: post #31

Delete Chrome. “The intent of the Topics API is to provide callers (including third-party ad-tech or advertising providers on the page that run script) with coarse-grained advertising topics that the page visitor might currently be interested in.” https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#the-api-an...

[deleted]

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#287

Post by noirscape »

NayamAmarshe wrote: post #212
jadbox wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like that Vivaldi is also a great option, and the company is a legitimate employee owned cooperative. https://vivaldi.com/blog/news/alert-no-google-topics-in-viva...

Vivaldi is closed source, even worse than Chrome in privacy features: https://privacytests.org Brave is objectively the best mainstream privacy browser.

That site is ran by a Brave employee[0]. The author claims that there's no COI, but one ought to be suspicious if Brave passes almost every single test barring the ones that no browser can pass.

[0]: https://github.com/privacytests/privacytests.org/issues/166

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#289

Post by paholg »

data-ottawa wrote: post #268
bjackman wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Chrome at work and Firefox on personal devices (including my Android phone). As a heavy user of both browsers, as far as I can see there is really no downside to Firefox. In fact, even though presumably there are way more engineers working on Chrome than on Firefox, I guess most of Chrome's engineering effort goes towards benefitting advertisers, not users. While Chrome seems entirely stagnant since I adopted i…

Chrome Mobile is the largest reason I would not recommend an Android (specifically Pixel) device to friends or family. I bought one, and I found myself actively avoiding browsing the web on it. Even after installing Firefox you can’t get rid of the Google Chrome web search bar on the home screen, and in-app web views are Chrome, so you’re never really free from Chrome. I do understand the why of ads, and I’m okay wit…

I've been using Android since the G1.

I don't think I've ever had the search bar on the home screen for more than a couple minutes after getting a new phone.

My in-app web views are also in Firefox. I'm pretty sure just changing the default browser changes this, though there may be a second setting I'm forgetting about.

This is actually my main sticking point on refusing to try iOs. You can't even install Firefox on an iPhone, their "Firefox" is just a wrapper around Safari.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#290

Post by vxNsr »

dspillett wrote: post #89
esteth wrote: post #36

Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies? *If* this lets chrome remove third-party cookies, doesn't it effectively increase your privacy by putting that tracking data on the user's machine instead of having random third-parties involved in every page load to harvest that tracking info? I understand that you can currently turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if yo…

> Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies? How about thinking the other way around: Can you, or anyone else for that matter, explain to me why this is better than commercial interests not following us around at all ? > turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that Most of what breaks is just tracking for ad serving purposes. I'm fine with that breaking. So…

> Some authentication services have trouble, but there are other ways of implementing that, so they could be fixed without needing to keep 3rd party cookies enabled.

not to mention that if the goal is to remove 3PC, this new ad tracking doesn't solve the auth problem at all.

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