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Google launches new “portal” HTML element

zdnet.com

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Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#221

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> as they see fit They're doing this in the open through the W3C WICG process [1]. They're not doing this as they see fit. > for their own purposes. Open standards are available for anyone to use and benefit from. That they may have had a use case in mind when defining the spec does not invalidate it; rather, it reinforces it and shows its value. 1: https://wicg.github.io/portals/

> They're not doing this as they see fit. Sure they are. It's already part of Chromium. https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/browser/portal/... It's been there since at least last August.

It's turned off by default.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#223
post #126
post #48

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It’s a real shame you still can’t install a third party content blocker easily in the default browser on Android. Setup a VPN and PiHole for sure works, but my goodness what a lot of effort when simpler approaches exist, even on Safari on iOS... I’m aware other browsers exist that can do this, but this basically forces me to use a different browser on my phone versus my desktop. Such is the reality of using an OS mad…

I know it sounds complicated, but it's a one-step process that only increases to pay off the more devices are connected. I used to have four adblockers on my laptop (two operating systems x 2 browsers), one on my smartphone, one on an additional smartphone I use... and how do I stop my TV and my ebook reader from serving me ads? Pi-hole requires little to no maintenance, and offers a lot of benefit. Two people have p…

Are there any DNS servers on the public Internet that work similarly?

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is prefetching taking the imperative away about what you see? You can click or not click. As for "tracking", the website could already ping as many servers as it wanted in the background, it's not like it can do anything new here. I honestly don't see how the server gets any more "power" than it already did.

If I go to foo.com, I generally expect that bar.com, baz.com, and qux.com are not also loading. We already have enough issues with tracking pixels, but now we'll have to worry about multiple sites worth of trackers (which I'm sure google will do their absolute best to obfuscate behind the background network call and other sandboxing shenanigans)? No thanks.

As you mention, foo.com could just as well have pixel trackers/scripts from bar.com, baz.com and qux.com. Nothing about portals makes it any more or less of an issue than it already is.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#227
post #212

Looks to me as an effort to make any user visiting google.com to not actually leave google.com FOREVER. Users will get portal-ed to a result page (with the browser's url bar showing foo.com, instead of google.com), but the user will be tracked the entire time from google, since they would be still on google.com.

I'm so happy that duckduckgo.com is getting better and better over time. I tried to use it for a month 2 years ago and switched back to Google. Now it has been 3 months and I don't notice -- which is a very good thing!

Doesn't duckduckgo use Bing on the back end?

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent extension-disabling problem made me realize how awful the unfiltered web is. Trying to use mobile Chrome for the first time ever was a dreadful experience. I legitimately had no idea that mobile Chrome doesn't have any extension capability whatsoever. I always assumed it was a Firefox-style unified experience where the same desktop extensions worked on mobile. I was horrified to discover otherwise. Ads ads…

I don’t use an Adblocker due to ethical concerns. (Not trying to convince you to do the same, just explaining.) It’s, uh, really not that bad. I rarely notice banner ads and the like. If a particular site gets really egrigious, I leave the site. I suspect that after using Adblock for years, your brain has forgotten how to ignore them.

It's not so much ads being annoying as ads completely blocking the content. A lot of sites are completely unusable on a phone; a malicious ad redirects the browser to a scam almost immediately. That's how looking at a link from the Facebook application works, but opening it in Brave gets you the site you want minus malvertising.
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