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Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#521

Post by Antrikshy »

hellofunk wrote: post #22
brian-armstrong wrote: post #10

Firefox is a truly fantastic browser now. I've been using it again for about 2 years and haven't regretted it at all. There have been a couple of weird feature hiccups but generally Mozilla seems to get things right.

I wish I could use it but it has serious performance problems on macOS. I tried and it was just terrible. (thought not all Mac users have problems, quite a number do, and Mozilla has an open issue asking for debugging logs from Macs to find the reasons).

The current Firefox beta changeling has a couple items that suggest better performance on macOS:

"Faster tab switching in the majority of cases for our macOS users"

"Improved the reactivity of Firefox on macOS"

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/63.0beta/releasenotes

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#522

Post by inferiorhuman »

zmw wrote: post #177
inferiorhuman wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to self-host because I could run really strict spam filtering. Unfortunately Sonic dropped their plans to offer static IPs and reverse DNS with their fiber products so I'm stuck with using their servers as a smarthost at least. Can't say I enjoy it (especially with their all-day outage this week), but it does give me a chance to at least easily run aggressive spamassasin filters.

I have a self-hosted domain too, with docker-mailserver, but only for less important email. For important communications I really worry about ending up on a spam list somewhere and landing directly in people's spam box, plus there are potential downtime concerns, so I stick to GSuite for that.

I've had a couple occasions where things have disappeared into the void. This was, of course, after moving away from a static IP (thanks Sonic). On the inbound side, I've had repeated delivery problems with Sonic blackholing mail from some financial institutions.

Otherwise I've had pretty good luck.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#523

Post by ChuckMcM »

As I have mentioned this is consistent with a trend of trying to squeeze money out of things that didn't need to generate cash back when search advertising paid for everything. Now, not so much and not getting better.

That said, I appreciate the discussion with even my "non-tech" type friends who are starting to understand the cost of 'free' stuff. That folks are learning I find refreshing, it makes the opportunity for products that explicitly protect privacy or disavow surveillance-as-a-service type businesses that much more competitive.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#524

Post by gaius »

bad_user wrote: post #502
tananaev wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add my very recent negative experience with Google. I have a couple of apps on the Google Play that use Firebase analytics and crash reporting. This weekend both apps were removed by Google without any warnings. The issue was that apps were in "Violation of Usage of Android Advertising ID" because by default Firebase collects Advertising ID. I don't really need Advertising ID in my app or my analytics and there…

> Collecting information that most people probably don't care about I care about that information and I’m glad they removed your apps, maybe now you’ll start taking privacy more seriously.

The issue is that Google are shipping something with a default configuration that violates their own policy, then blaming the user of it

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#525

Post by kwijibob »

lucio wrote: post #514
kwijibob wrote: post #349

A minority view: I do care about privacy but this behaviour is what I expect from Chrome. We have a number of profiles on our shared family PC and people expect logging into chrome or gmail will also log into the other. For me it's the price of entry for using the google ecosystem. I was already using gmail/gdocs/chrome sync daily, so it just makes life easier. If I really need privacy I go to incognito or another br…

shouldn't you use different OS users?

That would slow things down, also we share the same files/dropbox.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#526

Post by colordrops »

slededit wrote: post #386
thrower123 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is much less adept at avoiding the ire of antitrust agencies, particularly under the current administration. Google is considerably more evil in the popular imagination at this point.

Were you around back then? It’s realy hard to describe how much MS was hated. There’s nowhere near that animosity towards Google today.

The difference is that MS was only hated by nerds, whereas Google is hated by everyone on earth.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#527

Post by jiggunjer »

The author gives 3 arguments for not wanting to sign in at all. I find them all rather weak. The first two are actually a single argument.

The first argument: He likes to give consent. He fails to mention why he feels the need to consent to signing in, but the second argument implies it, making this just a prelude to that argument. This need seems irrational as there is no difference in the browsing experience between being signed in (and unsynced) vs being not signed in. The only difference is a minor UX change: you can now accidentally sync (which is his second, and most significant, argument).

His second argument, making it dangerously easy to sync, is actually a good thing for the average user. It is also not that simple to do by accident if you have a separate password set-up for syncing. I think it is safe to say on the whole that people who never sync will still not sync.

His third argument can be written off as paranoia: "For all we know, the new approach has privacy implications even if sync is off. ". Sure, maybe by simply being signed in you are being data-mined in secret, but if you trust Google that little why are you using their services? And what would be preventing them from mining you while not signed in?

Lastly, I think the author is slightly conflating "sync" with "data mining"? For all we know synced data is end-to-end encrypted and Google can't even read your bookmarks? The terms of service "signed-in mode" just states that data gets saved to the cloud, not that Google uses it?

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#528

Post by hexane360 »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #404
qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP was what did it for me.

When Gmail came out, I said to people "as long as it stays on gmail.com then they can't use email scraping with your search history. No privacy issues." (or minmal ones) Within a few months of Gmail going public it changed from gmail.com to gmail.google.com or google.com/gmail or some such thing, and I knew instantly they had bamboozled everyone. That was years ago, the rest has been the expected trend.

Why does the front-facing domain have anything to do with what data they can or cannot collect?

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#529

Post by kbenson »

zmw wrote: post #171
kbenson wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's web tools are slightly different, but very comparable. Firefox container tabs are game changing.

Container tabs just makes up for lack of easy profile switching (at least on macOS, not sure about Windows or Linux), which was in Chrome for years. Even after it came, I gave it a try and found it pretty cumbersome. (Before I get you-can-do-this-and-that replies, I know Profile Manager exists, and that's an ugly hack: macOS users should not need to run multiple copies of the same app bundle.)

No, container tabs are fundamentally different than just supporting different profiles, in that how it extends that concept allows for a whole new mode of use. Container tabs allows for domains to be tagged to always (or sometimes, with a prompt) open in a specific container, so after you've correctly configured it, you don't ever have to switch profiles. If I click a link to Amazon, it opens in my Amazon/shopping container. If I open a link to Goodreads, it does the same. If I open a link to any of the banking sites I need to use for different car/house/card payments, that automatically goes in it's own container.

The big thing that's different with container tabs is that after you set it up (which is done little by little as you decide to open something in a specific tab and then mark it to always open there), it's not something you actively manage, it passively does what you want. That's why it's so different.

Having every site be it's own container (which is also a mode Firefox supports, to my knowledge) would be slightly more passive, but also likely cause problems with some sites that use multiple domains, so I think container tabs is a good compromise (for now) that allows good compartmentalization while also allowing escape hatches for sires that require it.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#530

Post by metahost »

wild_preference wrote: post #516
jwr wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are on MacOS, why don't you use Safari? I'm puzzled as to why people seem to dismiss the "built-in" browser. It's the fastest, smoothest, best integrated, and least power-hungry browser on the platform. I regularly use all three major browsers (for testing, I write web applications) and I consistently switch back to Safari for all my non-special browsing.

It has the worst UX. It doesn't show favicons on tabs. It has the worst selection of extensions: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/safari/ . Everything just seems to be worse than Firefox/Chrome from the developer tools to extension development (you need Xcode). To use Safari, you pretty much need to decide that performance / battery life are more important than anything else which only describes my needs when I nee…

Safari has just added favicon support for pinned tabs.
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