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Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

lapcatsoftware.com

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Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#32

I'm privacy conscious but would not consider looking at such detailed information. For me it's delete all site state on exit. Do people actually look at this stuff?

I've looked at it before - to delete a specific cookie, or see what a website has stored. Deleting specific cookies can sometimes fix broken websites.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#33
This is part of a strategy to eliminate the openness of the web, right now your client still has full view and control of the code running on it in the browser to a certain degree.

Companies do not want this, this makes it possible to reverse engineer their process, to view what they are doing, and basically takes away control.

They want a future where your browser is instead a portal to the web where various companies just deliver black boxes of bytes to your machine and you don't have visibility into the code that is running, the actions they are performing or what is going on. In such a world they control the platform the content and the delivery mechanism.

Openness is contrary to the goals of these large companies because that causes them to lose control.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#34

Sounds like Chrome is moving more toward being a surveillance tool and ad delivery platform that also browses the web (well, more than it is right now anyway).

That's what happens when a browser made by an advertising company becomes dominant.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same idiots looking ad and data mining revenue, and then seeing what their customer's demands are. Their customers being the ones who are buying services from Google. Not you. You're the product .

Tired of this excuse. If the audience is the product, Google still has an interest in selling a quality product. That means not running off more and more of the most tech savvy "product" segment.

"Tech savvy" and "not tech savvy" are just 2 of hundreds if not thousands of tags put in your info, to steer it into the proper SALE buckets.

The 'you are the product' adage is true, but there isn't a single quality you can have that makes you stand out from thousands if not millions of others. Advertising is a numbers game for them.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#36
post #24
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lost the servo team, but isn't servo complete enough to simmer in maintenance?

Not nearly complete enough if you want a browser. MAYBE, if you want a browsing engine / "webview".

That's exactly what Servo was/is, an embeddable browser engine. It was never aiming to build a usable reference servo browser with the engine. The packaged nightly binaries were just to demo the current state of the embeddable engine which is why they were so barebones.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#37

Sounds like Chrome is moving more toward being a surveillance tool and ad delivery platform that also browses the web (well, more than it is right now anyway).

It’s more and more obvious we need competition in the browser space. Firefox as an excellent and performant alternative. Personally I use Chrome for work and Firefox for personal stuff.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#38
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developer bias, but being able to delete individual cookies is invaluable. Non-developer hat: PlayStation Network store also had a bug where you'd be logged in, but unable to buy anything. Instead of deleting all data you could delete one cookie and it would temporarily resolve the issue.

Just fyi, you can delete individual cookies in the developer tools.

> Just fyi, you can delete individual cookies in the developer tools.

While I very much agree with the point you're making, I can count on one hand (with fingers to spare) the number of family members I have who know what the developer tools even are, and that's because I showed them when troubleshooting an issue they were having. They aren't going to learn or remember how to access the dev tools to manage cookies, but they do know what it means to delete individual cookies and the current process to do so, and if they forget the exact steps they could certainly figure it out in settings/preferences.

What they're not going to do is think "well, I can't find the thing I used to use to deal with cookies, I'd better go muck around in the developer tools." I'd imagine a very large percentage of non-technical people who have heard about cookies fall into the same category as my relatives, but that's my own bias talking and YMMV of course.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#39

> By the way, before anyone runs off and yells "Switch to Safari" or something like that, keep in mind that Safari is actually in a worse state and doesn't have detailed cookie and site information at all. It does, but it's split between two places. You can see a list of all sites that have stored data in Preferences > Privacy > Manage Website Data... (no option to view here, just delete). You can also navigate to th…

> You can also navigate to the site in the browser and then view the detailed data

The author addresses this point (or has now addressed it) in the addendum to point out an "observer effect" shortcoming:

This information can be seen with the web inspector in both Chrome and Safari.

Yes, but the crucial difference is that you have to navigate to an individual site in a browser window in order to see the site data in the web inspector. Whereas in the Preferences, you can get to the site data, for every website, without having to load the sites. And remember, the very act of loading a site can make the site data change, so there's an "observer effect" if you try to examine or delete it in the web inspector.

Re: Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls

#40

Sounds like Chrome is moving more toward being a surveillance tool and ad delivery platform that also browses the web (well, more than it is right now anyway).

Google has being a surveillance tool since it's inception, they cannot work without accumulating and/or embedding people's data.
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