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Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#541

Post by chipotle_coyote »

dijit wrote: post #496
partiallypro wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google already bullies hardware vendors that don't package Google services with Android devices...which is what Microsoft did in the 90s. They also bundle all their services...which is essentially the very thing that Microsoft ended up getting slapped for. Google gets a way with a lot. Apple does too, but Apple's reach is limited to when you leave their hardware, Google's is always with you. You can't escape unless y…

>Apple is so locked down that I essentially have to use their services I want to touch on this because in my experience this is less true than it seems on the surface. The contacts app and calendar app support carddav/caldav respectively- photos use the standard camera interface (mpd?) the things that suck are that you need to use Xcode to develop for it, and you need iTunes to put music on the default music player a…

You're not, really.

On the one hand I understand the complaints about Apple's "walled garden," but I've pretty effortlessly connected to both Google Calendar and Exchange services. (And I don't use Apple's own Calendar app anyway, although I configure the calendars through the iOS system preferences so they integrate with all the Apple stuff relatively gracefully.) I do file syncing with Dropbox, which integrates with Apple's Files app pretty nicely as of iOS 11. I keep passwords in 1Password, which always integrated fairly well with iOS and does even better as of iOS 12. I get a lot of ebooks in DRM-free ePub format from various vendors and can just open them directly in iBooks. (I suppose using iTunes is still a problem, although iTunes Match and, now, Apple Music actually made syncing pretty painless for me. After the initial pain of moving from iTunes Match, which worked great, to Apple Music, which did...not...work great for its first year. But I digress.)

More apropos to the linked post, I trust Apple with my data rather more than most companies I deal with. They not only don't treat it as a profit center, they seem to prefer to minimize the amount of personally-identifiable and unencrypted information they deal with. I do still use some Google services, but I prefer to use Apple's equivalents when possible -- and I've been using Safari instead of Chrome for years. A lot of people think I'm nuts for that, but occasionally I feel a bit vindicated...

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#543

Post by lh7777 »

staktrace wrote: post #326
lh7777 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've actually fixed a number of minor issues over the past year or so, but Firefox still doesn't support pinch zoom on Windows[1]. Being able to reorder tabs using the touchscreen would also be nice, but not as critical. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990

Reordering tabs via touch should work, it was fixed in Firefox 59 ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1362065 ). And yes, pinch zoom is not supported (we do text/reflowing zoom, but not mobile-style pinch zoom). It's something that's being worked on but there's a lot of dependencies in order to get it done.

Thanks -- I didn't realize that reordering tabs had been fixed. It only works on the active tab[1] and I guess I've only ever tried moving inactive tabs before. It's not perfect, but so far seems better than in Edge (which allows reordering of inactive tabs but is often rather janky) and Chrome (which has no ability to scroll the tab bar, so tabs quickly get uselessly tiny).

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1362065#c57

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#544

Post by aphextron »

sergiotapia wrote: post #127
aphextron wrote: post #2

So I wanted to drop Chrome a while ago, and looked at Chromium. Apparently using the "no sync" version you can no longer even log into Gmail (or any other Google service) on the web. That was definitely the last straw for me losing trust in Google, but there's just no good alternative. I'm not sure where to go from here because it seems pointless to even use Chromium if I can't remove Google from it and still be able…

Go to Brave - it's fantastic.

Thanks for for reminding me to try that out again. It felt a bit rough at launch but I've been using it all day now and I think I'll switch for good.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#545

Post by hcs »

Too wrote: post #520
hcs wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Might be nice to have an adblocker-style filter that says what domains should be considered a single origin, plug that into containers.

Container tabs has that feature built in, you can say that google.com and youtube.com always automatically should open in the same container. It's still too difficult and cumbersome to use. I might want to have one tab with gmail signed in but another to make anonymous searches on Google, both are on google domains so i have to manually fiddle with the containers again. Then you click a link in an email or search res…

I know that feature is there, I was thinking that there could be a maintained list of domain groups you could subscribe to like filterlists. That way you wouldn't have to wait for a Facebook Container addon and a Google Container addon &c.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#546

Post by Latteland »

briandear wrote: post #470
partiallypro wrote: post #248

Google started going down the path I would describe as an "evil" path years ago. I'm glad people are starting to notice. I used to be a huge Google advocate, up until about 2008. So many things have changed since then. Adsense was the first breach in trust for me, when they banned my account for no reason and ruined any chance of every monetizing my content...since they are basically a monopoly in that area. Getting…

> it sucks it leaked to nutty Brietbart and not a real news organization. That right there is the issue. “Real” news organizations share ideological views and their choice of what to investigate is a result of that ideology. When a newsroom cheers or is despondent over an election result, it’s unrealistic to expect them to provide hard-hitting coverage that potentially undercuts their own biases. The coverage of Russ…

all serious presidential campaigns have some contact, especially after they win an election, with major world powers. the big difference is they'd run away and report it to the fbi et al if said world powers offered to help them in the election.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#548

Post by fencepost »

mtgx wrote: post #119
reaperducer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does. There appears to be absolutely no benefit in turning this on. Over the last year or so, it feels more and more like Google, as a company, is getting desperate. Like it feels the external tide of popular opinion turning against it. But rather than mend its ways, a decision has been made somewher…

I think it was also more advertisers switching to facebook and new ones giving fb ads a try first and not even considering Google ads (btw the rebranding from Google adworfs is another sign that Google is losing new advertisers to FB and yet another thing pointing to that desperation). This ultimately affects Google's future growth and it's why you'll see Google do more such "desperate" moves like trying to become a…

I imagine android users will soon see os-wide ads, too.

Except they won't be OS-wide, they'll be Play Services wide and mandatory if you're an vendor including Play Services.

If you don't want Google's ads, you can go do your own thing on AOSP like Amazon and other largely-flopped attempts.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#549

Post by r2dof »

Some of you here might be thinking, "well you can always use a passphrase while using chrome sync" to mitigate all privacy issues. I generally advocate use of a passphrase to people I know. BUT digging a bit into it I found that chrome's encryption is NOT STRONG AT ALL. Here[1] the author describes that brute force is possible within 4 days if the sync passphrase has 40 bits of entropy, with $1000 hardware. So with more expensive hardware, this can be done within minutes.

TBF even firefox is not excellent in this regard(based on the article), but it is much better.

[1]:https://palant.de/2018/03/13/can-chrome-sync-or-firefox-sync... and associate chrome bug : https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=820976

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#550

Post by mschuetz »

jwr wrote: post #389
hellofunk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Safari doesn't support WebGL2 and probably never will because of Apple's stance on OpenGL. Disqualifies it for me and I've had to tell customers that I can't support it, even if they'd pay for it.
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