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Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

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Re: Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you almost got it rigth. safari and arc are as bad as chrome. arc is just stable-chrome (it will have the same nonsense with a custom ui next release) firefox sadly is still what you should use.

I started giving a try to Zen (based on firefox) a few days ago. I like it especially while heavily relying on a tiling window manager.

Agree with sibling comment as someone who used Zen for many months, maybe as long as a year or two. It constantly breaks and often stays broken in small but fundamentally important ways, to the point that I just switched back to FF last week and am glad to be off the roller coaster. Before Zen I had tried Arc and left for a lot of the same reasons.

For all of the (valid) criticism against FF, it's still the best available browser that's not just an experiment IMHO.

Edit to add: part of the switch back is that FF now supports, to some degree, all the features I was using Zen for: vertical tabs (needs customization but works well enough), custom search "engines" (ie, shortcuts), split view, not-Chrome

Re: Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

#32
The heuristics powering this, as well as the Windows Defender whitelisting, are terrible.

My understanding is that a specific binary needs to become popular for it to stop being flagged. This creates a chicken and egg problem. Users are not incentivized to use the program with the warning. But removing the warning requires many people to ignore the warning.

This is a big problem for anyone writing Windows software. An indie developer or small open source project is not going to do well with this.

Re: Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

#33

for what it is worth, when downloading the latest .exe from github, firefox says "this file is not commonly downloaded" and i have to select "allow download". scans of it are fine. probably just a heuristic-based false-positive, and not a news-worthy story of chrome abusing their monopoly or whatever.

Isn’t firefox using Google “safe browsing” database ?

Re: Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

#36

Reminds me of how Bing search for Google takes people to a page meant to resemble Google.com. Can't trust huge companies. But as others have pointed out, it's probably a coincidence in this case. But who knows.

"Never let a good tragedy go to waste"

Re: Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

#38
post #5

The binaries they offer are complied using PyInstaller, which can give false positives in anti virus software.

Why would a browser(be designed to) care about this?

You could also ask why Android care about banning side loading to "prevent scams and spyware", and I honestly don't have an answer at all.

Re: Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

#39
break this shit up, break all of this shit up.

Google needs to be at least what four companies.. gcp, youtube, search, workspaces...

Apple needs to be at least two hardware/os, music/tv+

Microsoft, meta, etc, Monopolies are bad and our SEC/FTC/Government is doing a poor job of controlling them. At least as equally trecherous are these businesses that overly vertically integrate... anyways, we're fucked.

Re: Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp

#40
post #5

The binaries they offer are complied using PyInstaller, which can give false positives in anti virus software.

Why would a browser(be designed to) care about this?

To protect the normies from harmful malware… not on their approved vendor list.
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