Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

brave.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 329 posts

Re: Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

#251

Post by Y_Y »

bad_user wrote: post #243
autoexec wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox really has been going downhill for a long time. Forcing Pocket into the browser, the ad infested new tab page, telemetry, making user accounts a thing, force installing TV show promotions, etc. What they haven't done before is spend a fortune buying up an ad-tech start up. They barely even bother to maintain a pretense that they care about Firefox users. They basically came right out and said "We know that us…

> Forcing Pocket into the browser Fun fact: by subscribing to Pocket, you're directly contributing to Firefox's development. Mozilla found itself in a situation of damned if they do, damned if they don't . People scream at them for depending on Google, and then they scream at them for trying to diversify their revenue. Nobody wants to pay for a browser, browsers are essentially incredibly complex nowadays, and I have…

> Mozilla found itself in a situation of damned if they do, damned if they don't. People scream at them for depending on Google, and then they scream at them for trying to diversify their revenue.

People didn't like Pocket as a product. It wasn't as if they just didn't like it because Firdfox wanted to make money out of it.

Sure they should diversify, but with something that isn't otherwise (so) objectionable. Like their VPN, or sponsorship, or just let go of all the upper management.

Re: Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

#252

Post by bad_user »

rpastuszak wrote: post #250
bad_user wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forcing Pocket into the browser Fun fact: by subscribing to Pocket, you're directly contributing to Firefox's development. Mozilla found itself in a situation of damned if they do, damned if they don't . People scream at them for depending on Google, and then they scream at them for trying to diversify their revenue. Nobody wants to pay for a browser, browsers are essentially incredibly complex nowadays, and I have…

> And of course they want to cater to advertisers because it is advertising that maintains the open web As someone who worked both on advertiser and publisher sides (incl. content monetisation): advertisers like to say that they support publishers and the open web, but in fact, they are keeping it hostage. We've had the means/tech to support publishers directly for years (I don't mean crypto). It's in the interest of…

> As someone who worked both on advertiser and publisher sides (incl. content monetisation): advertisers like to say that they support publishers and the open web, but in fact, they are keeping it hostage.

I know what you're saying, I agree, as I worked (in the past) on advertising platforms as well, but both of those statements can be true at the same time.

The open web was built on advertising, but the perverse incentives in advertising are also poisoning the open web.

I don't think we've ever had a good solution. People like free stuff, and also, micro-transactions are not possible given the huge banking fees. What we're seeing, the alternative, are subscription-based services behind closed hardens, and mobile apps whose ads can no longer be blocked, so here we are.

I also think that Google isn't the greater evil, because Google has an incentive to keep the web going. For instance, what happens with local newspapers, when they die, besides depriving ad networks of revenue, is that the audience of these newspapers moves to walled gardens like Facebook. The failure of advertising on the web right now results in more centralisation.

Re: Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

#253

Post by MisterTea »

codedokode wrote: post #85

Have been using Firefox for a long time, no issues, though long ago when I had little memory, Chrome was using less of it. Firefox also has HTTPS-only mode, encrypted DNS without fallbacks, supports SOCKS and Encrypted Client Hello (although almost no website support it). However, it is better to just buy more memory (unless you are lucky to use Apple products). Regarding analytics, I believe browsers should take use…

> Regarding analytics, I believe browsers should take user's side and do not cooperate with marketing companies; even better, they should implement measures to make user tracking and fingerprinting more difficult.

Kinda hard to enact when the leading browser is developed by an ad company. Worse, the same company is contributing to the firefox foundation and drives web "standards." Its all collusion and the simple fact that browsers are more complex than the OS they run on is deliberate in ensuring no scrappy team can disrupt them.

My curmudgeonly solution is to avoid as much of the web as possible and focus on human scale computing.

Re: Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

#254

Post by thayne »

IMTDb wrote: post #213
thayne wrote: post #174

This is a tough situation. Yes, this can, and will, be abused for tracking users across domains that they don't expect to be related. But there are also legitimate use cases for this. For example, consider the stackexchange family of sites. They are clearly related, have a unified branding, etc. but are on separate domains. On Firefox, which blocks third party cookies, I have to log in to each of those domains separa…

> You can argue that it would be better for those sites to be subdomains of a single unified domain, but when the sites were created there wasn't any compelling reason to need to do that I can also argue that Safari and Firefox have been blocking third party cookies for years now. So stack overflow has had plenty of time to adapt and migrate to the "right" organisation. To me it look like either they care about allow…

Or, they do care, but not enough to spend the significant resources and opportunity costs to do something about it for the minority of users who don't use chrome. Of particular note, changing domains can really hurt SEO.

Re: Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

#255

Post by bad_user »

kevwil wrote: post #86
topspin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is a Chromium derivative, not Chrome. Can't imagine why any of this would imply they would need to stop deriving Chromium: they can develop and deploy whatever cookie policies and defaults they want.

Not to disagree with you specifically, but this seems a good context to make this point: Maybe I missed the memo that we stopped hating monopolies? Every browser worth considering, except Firefox and Safari, is based on Chromium. Firefox and Safari make up about 20% global market share, meaning Chromium in about 80% [0]. A bug in Chromium is a bug in all of them. A backdoor in Chromium is a backdoor in all of them. A…

Because it doesn't matter that much, as Chromium is open source, not to mention it did a fine job thus far in advancing the open web.

I'd like Firefox to stick around, but as far as I'm concerned, if Safari goes away, I couldn't care less.

Re: Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

#256

Post by digging »

greiskul wrote: post #139
autoexec wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard that fake data, like from AdNausium, just becomes noise as the advertisers know the patterns to filter them out. It's actually much worse. That fake data is dangerous because data brokers don't really care how accurate their data is. Even the fake data AdNausium stuffs into your dossier will be used against you eventually, just like the real data will be. If you get turned down for a job, or your health…

> If you get turned down for a job, or your health insurance rates go up, or you have to pay more for something than you would have otherwise It must suck to live in a capitalist dystopia. Dunno why Americans put up with it.

> Dunno why Americans put up with it.

Have you seen the guns that enforce it?

Re: Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

#257

Post by ineptech »

autoexec wrote: post #125
codedokode wrote: post #85

Have been using Firefox for a long time, no issues, though long ago when I had little memory, Chrome was using less of it. Firefox also has HTTPS-only mode, encrypted DNS without fallbacks, supports SOCKS and Encrypted Client Hello (although almost no website support it). However, it is better to just buy more memory (unless you are lucky to use Apple products). Regarding analytics, I believe browsers should take use…

> Regarding analytics, I believe browsers should take user's side and do not cooperate with marketing companies Browsers were supposed to act as agents working for the user. User-agents. These days it's getting harder and harder to find a browser that doesn't work for an ad company at the expense of the user. Chrome's entire reason for existing is data collection. Firefox can, for now at least, be hardened to work fo…

> Mozilla is an ad-tech company too now.

I'm sorry, this seems egregious. I agree that it should've been off by default but I challenge anyone to read how the implementation works (not just the blog post and the FUD responses to it) before calling it a giveaway to the ad industry: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...

FF is currently a key tool in the fight to avoid a Google-top-to-bottom future, and before we start the meme that it's gone to shit we should be really really sure that's actually true.

Re: Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

#258

Post by fivre »

thayne wrote: post #174

This is a tough situation. Yes, this can, and will, be abused for tracking users across domains that they don't expect to be related. But there are also legitimate use cases for this. For example, consider the stackexchange family of sites. They are clearly related, have a unified branding, etc. but are on separate domains. On Firefox, which blocks third party cookies, I have to log in to each of those domains separa…

OIDC seems like it can reasonably help in a fair number of these cases, maybe? it's iffy because (a) the major providers, are, well, Google and their ilk, (b) SSO solutions trend toward reducing user confusion at the cost of choice--im still out on whether the common "enter your email/account identifier so we can select which IDP we use" login flow is something of an anti-pattern or not

i generally like having the option for "sign in with github" as opposed to the all-encompassing "sign in with google" (ignoring that github is a microsoft account but not quite at this point)

smaller-scope IDPs for a particular field ("ey, you work on code stuff? you probably have either a github or gitlab account to log into our code-adjacent service" or "ey, you use stackoverflow? you can use that same login on superuser") is maybe a decent middle ground, where shared authentication is more explicit than third-party cookies were

Re: Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

#259

Post by unethical_ban »

autoexec wrote: post #170
bluejekyll wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is not the entire point of DoH. That’s like saying the entire point of TLS is to prevent users from looking at the traffic being sent to a website. DNS without DoH, DoT, or DoQ, is wide open to anyone snooping traffic in the raw, that’s not necessarily information you want to share with the world.

Which (for people not handing all of their DNS traffic over to google anyway) usually just means that their ISP can see their DNS traffic which is kind of a moot point because your ISP can see the domains you go to even with DoH. If somebody is on your local network capturing packets or they've cracked your wifi you've got bigger problems than your DNS leaking a list of domains. They'll also see the IP of every serve…

ISPs seeing the domains of user traffic is not a given. And DoH is a step toward mitigating that.

People were setting their DNS resolver to custom values before DoH.

I agree that DoH would ideally be enabled at the OS level, or that the browser flow would default to still checking host file before sending out the query.

Re: Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

#260

Post by axolotlgod »

ineptech wrote: post #257
autoexec wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regarding analytics, I believe browsers should take user's side and do not cooperate with marketing companies Browsers were supposed to act as agents working for the user. User-agents. These days it's getting harder and harder to find a browser that doesn't work for an ad company at the expense of the user. Chrome's entire reason for existing is data collection. Firefox can, for now at least, be hardened to work fo…

> Mozilla is an ad-tech company too now. I'm sorry, this seems egregious. I agree that it should've been off by default but I challenge anyone to read how the implementation works (not just the blog post and the FUD responses to it) before calling it a giveaway to the ad industry: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime... FF is currently a key tool in the fight to avoid a Google-top-to-bottom fu…

It really is disheartening to see so many technically-inclined people berate the one browser that is preventing Apple/Google hegemony. The expectations set upon Mozilla and Firefox are so unrealistic it's laughable.

Firefox is rock solid, open-source, backed by a great organization (which has recently reinvested additional resources in it) and a joy to use imo. Also, the levels of vitriol that even the slightest bit of anonymous telemetry incurs is unhelpful and I encourage people who hold that viewpoint to really interrogate it.

Post reply on HN