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Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#731

Post by scott_s »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #719
namdnay wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did Google leadership call to subvert democracy? At no point in the video do they instruct or encourage employees to do that. They're discussing what Trump means for their employees, not for their customers

I said Google staff had, and I didn't say they did that in this video. But then to be fair, I don't have any hard evidence for this. EDIT: As it turns out, sources for this are pretty easy to come across online: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-travelban/google-s...

This is the main claim: "Google employees discussed how they could tweak the company's search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, the WSJ said. The ideas were not implemented."

To me, that is not "subverting democracy." It is, however, taking an active political stance.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#732

Post by jwr »

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…

Well, it does show favicons on tabs (with the recent update). I'm not sure what you mean "everything seems to be worse", I haven't found this to be the case. As for extensions, there are indeed fewer Safari extensions than for other browsers. I checked and I regularly use only: 1Password, Ghostery, AdBlock and Harvest.

As I said, it provides the best performance, experience and battery life.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#733

Post by MrEfficiency »

zdkl wrote: post #640
randomsearch wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Don’t forget not to be evil” I don’t believe the founders have had personality transplant, so why has google become evil?

It's not evil it's shareholder... value... optimisation ! I blame corporate on that one.

Shareholders= You and your parents and your grandparents retirement.

This need to have 7-13% yearly returns force companies to grind their employees and customers.

I like capitalism, but I can easily see capitalism doing evil things to create short term profit.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#734

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

scott_s wrote: post #731
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said Google staff had, and I didn't say they did that in this video. But then to be fair, I don't have any hard evidence for this. EDIT: As it turns out, sources for this are pretty easy to come across online: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-travelban/google-s...

This is the main claim: "Google employees discussed how they could tweak the company's search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, the WSJ said. The ideas were not implemented." To me, that is not "subverting democracy." It is, however, taking an active political stance.

I respectfully and strongly disagree. A functioning democracy is fundamentally predicated on a well-informed electorate.

If the primary source of information is manipulated in the name of political activism, how can they become well-informed?

Sadly I must qualify this by saying I don't believe the general public in the West are well-informed, but that doesn't mean that ideal should be given up entirely.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#735

Post by wild_preference »

akvadrako wrote: post #593
sweetp wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the new extensions model is ridiculously useless... You need to build your extension in Xcode now, and for anything other than content blocking, the APIs are non existent... for instance, you can't even close tabs! I made an extremely simple extension using the new model around 2months - before I try migrating an older "actually useful" extension. But theres just no way its possible to migrate. Apple doesn't care abo…

This is wrong - you can inject arbitrary scripts and styles: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...

You didn’t reply to or contradict anything they said. You need Xcode to build extensions and Safari has a super limited API. Executing JS and CSS don’t address either.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#736

Post by SnowingXIV »

sergiotapia wrote: post #381
chrisweekly wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Brave support quality dev tools?

Literally the same as Chrome re: dev tools. Example: https://i.imgur.com/ZfHnNmX.png

Development tools held me back and why I don't use Mozilla. Using Chrome dev tools on a daily basis keeps me stuck. Also having different profiles for work and personal is super useful (different bookmarks, logins, history that syncs) it's really slick. Does Brave offer this along with 1Password integration?

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#738

Post by jMyles »

rovr138 wrote: post #727
dhimes wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not absurd, but there is a page that fits the search term better in the same domain. That's what makes it "suspicious."

The title and domain is not the only thing that matter for Google’s ranking.

Right - of course. So the question is: are the other "things that matter" designed to:

1) Inform the user and help the user quickly find facts, narratives, and meaningful content related to the search phrase? 2) Sell things? 3) Promote modes of political control by narrowing the scope of acceptable thought and connection between search phrase and content?

We all hope for #1. We all accept #2. But I think that most of us, at least until recently, had thought that #3 wasn't happening to any significant degree.

I agree that results like this one are befuddling - a search for "Politically controversial and anti-state concept " brings as the first result, "Related but saccharine pro-state concept " when both foo and bar appear in approximately equal stature in the domain in question.

Yeah, I think that's odd. And I don't see a way to easily explain it in the context of numbers 1 and 2 above.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#739

Post by llampx »

sct202 wrote: post #725
auto wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is a wikipedia article for gun rights, or at least a separately titled one that is redirected from gun rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms Why wouldn't that get autofilled on the front page of the search results instead?

And right under that there is a suggested link for "Right to keep and bear arms." What is most likely happening is that the Gun Control page is more popular than the Right to keep and bear arms page, so the algo picked that one for the single card that they load. IDK what they use for ranking, but I would imagine that the fact that 'gun' appears in the title of one and not the other is impacting the matching and also…

You don't seriously believe that, do you? Google has an agenda. They don't hire lobbyists on K street to fight for more neutral search results.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#740

Post by CydeWeys »

bordercases wrote: post #353
CydeWeys wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mistaken include in a build file, most likely. I've removed all sorts of dumb stuff slowing down the build that was included by accident or unnecessarily on my project at work. Never attribute to malice ...

> Never attribute to malice ... This principle is heuristical and as such can result in down-side when one doesn't actually resolve the uncertainty within the heuristic (read: guess) with detailed evidence. The obvious downside here is that you can accumulate a bunch of risks which each independently satisfy the heuristic, and so don't seem like risks, but in aggregate can result in a swing towards the opposite of wh…

Can you say what you mean in plainer words? Are you saying that the combination of many such incidents likely isn't an accident, but intentional?
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