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Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

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Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#91
FF f'd up when they banned Dissenter extension and with their welcome screen full of google tracking. Not to mention a ton of "metric" requests FF is doing in the background.

As we've learnt, Chrome has a ton of google-specific code built into it(most notably the tracking id on youtube that was exposed few weeks ago) and a ton of background requests.

MS Edge is not that different. Sure it is cleaner Chrome but MS is the big daddy of tracking, just like google. they just call it "telemetry" instead of spying. their edge won't be any different.

Any other web browser out there is essentially derived from chrome. So I put zero trust in any of them. If mozilla would make FF into OS work that others could use to build web browsers off of, like chrome, it would be much better environment because there are no options left. Webkit has been superseded by chrome these days, gecko is slow and outdated(is it even public?) and so on. So the only way to sort of safely use your god damn web browser these days is to filter all the traffic manually(pihole, host file or advanced firewall) and use a ton of adblocking extensions that allow you to spoof referrer header and clean up headers and cookies altogether(google cdn, google captcha, google analytics, goodle dns, google this and google that).... even then google has so much data that just by ip address they have your persona pinpointed to a byte.

If you look at how much external resources the websites pull in these days, most if it has some sort of tracking in it, even if you do not see it directly(mostly cdn stuff).

tl;dr they are all bad. if it is free, you are the product. it's as simple as that. and they will make opting out so impossible that you just give up.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#92
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty interesting article. > "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said. > "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say,…

> All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. Is it though? It blows my mind how Google gets a pass on stuff like this. Way back when MS got slapped for monopolistic practices the key argument was that by bundling IE with Windows they were leveraging their dominant position in desktop OSs to gain an unfair advantage in another industry (browsers/web, via IE). Meanwhile Google leverages their posi…

Presumably there's an investigation ongoing in the US: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/09/google-an...

That's besides the EU's investigation and fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Andr...

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#94
As an user I am pissed of about these actions from Google but I can't really switch otherwise I would fall in the same oopses traps.

Is there a way to use Firefox and have some add-on or something that fixes those oopses? I suppose it's not only a matter of masking up user-agent strings.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#95
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Gmail anymore as a primary address, but when I do check my old address, Gmail takes up to 30 seconds to load on Firefox. Emails often take several seconds to delete, and if I close the tab a few seconds after deleting the emails, they don't actually get deleted, even if they appear to. I am not sure what exactly Gmail does on Firefox, but it makes using AOL.com in 2020 feel like a better email experience.

That’s something broken with your Firefox install or computer then. It’s very performant on any of my two G Suite and one Gmail accounts on Firefox as well as Chrome.

Or something broken in how Gmail handles a wide variety of Firefox installs/configurations (this is a common reported issue). The fact that you personally haven't seen it ("works on my machine!") doesn't mean the issue doesn't exist.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#96

How is the default ad blocking on Edge? I imagine that's the leverage Google fears.

Edge has tracking protection like Firefox and Safari do. Chrome is the only major browser without it on by default.

Tracking prevention as it is implemented in Safari helps Google. It does not block first party cookies. If Google implemented that, it would face antitrust investigations.

Firefox and Edge have tracking prevention that harms Google. Edge implements the same default ad blocking as Chrome, which helps Google.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#97
post #64
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. Is it though? It blows my mind how Google gets a pass on stuff like this. Way back when MS got slapped for monopolistic practices the key argument was that by bundling IE with Windows they were leveraging their dominant position in desktop OSs to gain an unfair advantage in another industry (browsers/web, via IE). Meanwhile Google leverages their posi…

Or bundling Chrome and Android

Supposedly they now ask users in the EU which browser they want to use: https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/suppo...

I can't say I've ever seen that dialog, though.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#98

It was incredible to me how aggressively Microsoft came out supportive of the Chrome team and how loudly they discussed the wonderful amount of collaboration the two companies had been up to since starting work on the new Edge. I've seen Googlers responding to Edge developers about how they'll get some mishandling of Edge fixed internally at Google. But really, this is just the same story as before: The "oops" have b…

>The "oops" have begun... Try running gmail in firefox. It's abysmal. A single click takes a few seconds to open email. This is malice, not incompetence. And I'm not even going to get into the whole endless captcha on firefox 'feature'.

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice" -Hacker News

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#99
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty interesting article. > "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said. > "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say,…

> Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms Why don't webdevs fight back and put "best viewed on Firefox" pop-ups on their pages (whenever the user is using Chrome).

If browser market share trends are comparable among webdevs & non-webdevs, a majority of webdevs are still using Chrome as their primary browser.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#100
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty interesting article. > "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said. > "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say,…

> Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms Why don't webdevs fight back and put "best viewed on Firefox" pop-ups on their pages (whenever the user is using Chrome).

I don't see how that would be a true statement in almost any context, barring specifically using features that you know Chrome doesn't work well with or going through the chromium bug tracker to find things to do that break Chrome.
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