If you can, use Firefox.
My question as a total luddite is whether or not it will be possible for Chromium based browsers to maintain a version without this. I use Firefox on all my devices so it’s not an issue, but I’m curious about other popular browsers, especially those like DDG or brave that emphasize privacy.
Possibly but they would have to take chromium and fork it
Yes, Chromium, from which Chrome places proprietary parts on top of, is an open source project, so anyone can fork it and remove telemetry and tracking. Most browsers are in fact forks of Chromium - e.g. Edge (which replaces Google’s trackers with Microsoft’s own), Opera (which puts in trackers going back to a Chinese corporation), Vivaldi (which doesn’t seem to do tracking but has proprietary parts so is not verifiable) - or, on the privacy respecting side Brave (which is all open source and doesn’t track you once you click opting out on its reporting back to Brave and crypto rewards stuff), Ungoogled Chromium (which tends not to be updated all that quickly) and a few others.
Seems like a quick hop to chrome://flags allows one to disable this. chrome://flags/#privacy-sandbox-ads-apis
Ads aren’t evil though. They are the main method of making people know about new things. Intrusive and privacy-defeating tracking is.
And nowadays, most online ads are intrusive and privacy-defeating tracking, so you know
Yes, absolutely. As far as I can tell, Privacy Sandbox could help with that.
The big problem with Privacy Sandbox is who is implementing it. I was on the fence about it for similar reasons until I saw who came out against it. Mozilla, the EFF, etc. all heavily condemned it, so I knew it was safe to say its bad (limited time, unlimited desire for knowledge and all I did not have the time to do a deep dive on Google’s newest way to get people okay with invasive tracking)
You know what really helps for privacy? Adblockers.
I’m totally unable to switch from chrome, the chrome icon is really the only one that works, all others are just too hard to see
Just… change the shortcut icon???
pretty sure that’s a /whoosh
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It was a power grab not a standardization. They planned this to wall you outta their networks if you won’t let them spy on you.
So, all those years creating “web standards” are for nothing…
Oh it was for something! It allowed Google to take over using Microsoft’s “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” philosophy.
What Google is doing now is exactly what Microsoft did back in the Netscape Navigator / Internet Explorer days.
Web standards are the literal opposite of that. You’re arguing against the web itself.
It’s worrisome, but it’s not exactly the same.
We’ll see whether they get abusive, and whether the Federal antitrust laws will come in and nearly dismantle the company like they did to Microsoft.
What Google is doing now is exactly what Microsoft did back in the Netscape Navigator / Internet Explorer days.
It’s almost like the tendency to monopolise is somehow baked into the ruling economic ideology, huh?
Market economies = great. Capitalism = shit. There’s a subtle but meaningful difference.
Capitalism is great, it just needs a strong and unbiased referee. Of course that can be said about any political or economic system.
Capitalism is great, it just needs a strong and unbiased referee.
So you’re saying strong regulation from some entity that isn’t driven by the same motives for profit is needed?
That’s my point. You’re conflating “market economies” to “capitalism”. They aren’t the same. Markets existed thousand of years before capitalism.
Just like “capitalism” has been conflated with “market economy”, “communism” has been conflated with “socialism”. The failed communist states all tried planned economies, which meant no market economies, which are necessary for thriving societies.
Socialism is when the means of production are “owned or regulated” by the government. Strong, well regulated markets are by definition, socialist.
I also sort of slightly disapprove of perpetuating the “well mothing’s perfect (so we shouldn’t bother trying to fix the most obviously broken bullshit systems despite having solutions)” -notion.
The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an “alternative” tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can’t just not be spied on.
lmao what the fuck kind of dystopia are we living in
It’d make the world a better place, but a big company would make slightly less money, therefore it’s unthinkable to even attempt it.
See also: vehicle emissions standards
In the case of Google, the effect on advertising bringing in “slightly less money” is an understatement :)
Google’s utopia is humanity’s dystopia.
So this means that the internet could have always worked fine without invasive cookies and everything they told us about it being impossible was just a lie.
Cookies serve important purposes for doing things like keeping you signed in as you navigate through multiple pages on a site.
The issue is that most parts of the internet were developed by people more interested in all the cool stuff you could do with it, and not at all concerned about the potential misuse by large multi billion dollar corporations.
I’d suggest a password manager. Its not the prettiest solution but its worth it.
Cookies are a part of the http protocol and the server side design of the websites themselves. You can’t just replace them with a password manager on your individual client.
no a password manager can’t replace cookies, Like a JPEG can’t replace a 2 hour long film.
I have however forgone cookies for the most part. Great for privacy.
I’d recommend keepassxc, bookmarking and some addons like ublock, no script, libredirect. Most sites still work and the few that don’t aren’t worth my time
Cookies are literally how a website keeps track of you having logged with a username and password into that site on your browser, for all other pages after you leave the log-in page.
The reason for this is because the Web protocols were designed for the web server to get a request from a browser, send the page to the browser and after that close the connection (though since HTTP version 1.1 connections might stay up for things like sending the pictures linked to a page, a mechanism known as Keep-Alive).
For performance by default the web server doesn’t really care which browser has asked it for a given page or what it has asked for before unless some kind of tracking is added to the pages your receive so that in subsequent requests you’re identified.
So the only way for a website to keep track of a specific browser so that it can do different things for that browser (i.e. know a user has logged-in via that browser so send to that browser pages that user has access to rather than sending “You are not logged-in” errors) is by sending some kind of token to the browser which the browser will then present along with each subesequent request to that site.
Cookies are by far the easiest way to do this.
The problem with cookies is that their ability to track a browser has be abused for things far beyond their original purpose (mainly things like track the browser were a user logged-in, to know to which browsers it can send certain protected pages and information).
There are some sites that can track a user in that site after log-in with a different method (basically all the links you get in pages on that website have a tiny bit of extra information that identifies each request as coming from a specific browser, but for example if you come into the website again from a bookmark all that is lost), but those are pretty rare nowadays because it can be quite complex to get it work whilst cookies are pretty straightforward to get to work reliably.
I recommend setting up logging in yourself so you can see why you’re wrong.
What part am I wrong about?
You defend cookies in general. But the person youre replying to might have meant third-party cookies by “invasive cookies” ?
Does this only affect Chrome or all Chromium based browsers? Are Brave and Edge going to be implementing this too?
Just Chrome in this instance, as it spies for Google. Any anti ad blocking features go though to all chromium based browsers and it is better to switch Firefox. If that browser disappears we won’t have a good alternative anymore.
It is better to switch to Firefox. But chromium forks can generally do whatever they want, it’s just a matter of maintenance burden. e.g. nothing is stopping a Chromium fork like Brave from running a manifest v2 compatible appstore, but it’ll cost money to make, maintain, and operate, plus you have less discoverability as an app developer when using a smaller app store.
Can we be certain this isn’t in the obsfucated binary blobs provided by Google? How can people act like Chromium and Chrome based browsers are free from Google BS when most of them still use precompiled hunks of executable provided by Google that we can’t see into?
Do they use the binary blobs? I figured MS, Vivaldi, the random Chromium in the distro repos stripped those out or replaced them with their own secret bins before compilation.
Just Chrome
Lemmy pushes hard for Firefox, but Vivaldi has not implemented this and will likely hold out as long as possible on it.
Supporting Chromium is to support Google’s control on the web. You choose.
eww icky also this article is old
eww icky also this article is old
by Ron Amadeo - Sep 7, 2023 2:35pm PST
We’re in a lose/lose scenario here. Google has been inserting ad-tracking and soon will be nuking ad-blockers.
Then you’ve got Firefox wanting to implement AI soon at the cost of employees.
Is there really anywhere else we can go before both of their shit hits the fan?
I don’t think we should equate Firefox’s AI plans with other ones.
Firefox’s AI will be trained entirely locally with data that you choose to give it, and won’t send information back to Firefox.
By the sounds of it it won’t be a chatbot either, but rather an aid for finding more sources, pointing out fake reviews, assisting in (offline, local!) translation, etc.
My two main issues with AI are unethically sourced training data, and hoovering up personal information when you use it. Neither are a problem for Mozilla’s AI plans. This is how AI should be done.
Well this is the thing here. We’re in an era of time in technology where we DON’T want people having as much of our data. Whether it’s for good or bad use, we just don’t want it. How hard is that for these companies to comprehend?
The internet was fine without this sort of thing. We were fine without AI. Why complicate it at all?
We need a federated browser.
Firefox needs to ship with IPFS & IPNS built in, then we’d have a Distributed web. Which is I think what you’re asking for maybe?
Sure, lets do that.
Uh, what?
WE NEED A FEDERATED BROWSER.
Like Tor?
TOR is a forked Firefox.
You mean Tor Browser specifically.
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Firefox is open source, bullshit can be excised if necessary
Librewolf
Maintaining a browser is crazy hard. If Firefox goes to shit, it would require some serious foundation to maintain a good fork.
Yes, and expensive. This is often overlooked when people just say don’t worry it’s FOSS. The enshitification happens slowly, and by the time there is outrage about how bad it becomes the last non intrusive fork might be several years old and take even more work to modernize. I’m not giving up all hope, but you are correct, it would be a very ambitious community undertaking to keep such a thing competitive with the plethora of evil browsers out there.
I chose my wording accurately, I never mentioned maintaining the whole browser
Opera, Vivaldi and Brave are descent alternatives.
EDIT:
Vivaldi (based on Opera, but FOSS and not Chinese) is still good.
I didn’t realize Brave inserted referral codes, TIL.
Brave is shady af and iirc Opera got bought by some Chinese spyware company.
I only listed Opera b/c Vivaldi is based on it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)
Vivaldi is absolutely a descent FOSS product, but will agree with the Opera sentiment and have edited my post more accordingly.
I’d argue Firefox is the descent alternative.
- Opera is Crappy Chinese ad-filled browser
- Vivaldi, although it’s extremely nice tab management system and unique features, isn’t open source. But probably the better chromium browser of the owns you mentioned.
- Brave… Is a crypto shilling browser run by a turd wanting to ban same sex marriage
There are a plethora of sources out there of good reasons not to use these browsers. But seriously, Firefox is an excellent browser, treat yourself to better privacy 🦊
I only listed Opera because Vivaldi’s based on it, but that’s about where it ends. Vivaldi and FF are the only two I use tbh.
No. No they aren’t.
Each of which depend on chrome and google’s decisions.
Idk why you’re being downvoted. All of these browsers are chromium browsers.
posted in 9/7/2023, 3:35 PM
Switching away from Chrome is something that is always worth repeating, but just FYI this happened last September and isn’t “new”. If you’re on Chrome and are only just now realizing this, it’s been your reality for the last 5 months.
The scary part is presenting it as a fucking privacy feature with no consequences.
Yeah Google has cleverly re-defined privacy as “give all your data to us and we will protect it from prying eyes”.
People love it though. So private and easy and awesome for scrolling.
Does anyone know what the implications are for Vanadium?
its just chrome, but if j were used I’d be switching to ff. even it it goes to shit, its open source, so it can always be picked up by the community
I love Firefox when it works, but half the time it can’t access any sites while Chrome does. It’s like Firefox can’t see the network.
Very rarely I face a website I can’t open on Firefox because it’s not compatible but half the time is surely a gross exaggeration
I don’t mean half the websites don’t work. I mean half the time Firefox won’t load ANYTHING. It basically stops working with any DNS for a few hours at a time.
DNS is an operating system level service. Your computer is screwed, not the browser.
Chrome might be fixing it up by using Google DNS behind your back.
Firefox uses its own internal cert database which could create a similar effect.
Firefox supports DNS over HTTPs or a similar protocol that escapes my memory at the moment which could very well mess with its ability to handle DNS
I have had this issue a few times and find that usually there is some weird update or something behind the scenes and a reboot of Firefox lets it start loading again. I’m not techy enough to know why but I have found that closing all tabs is mandatory maintenance for Firefox every so often.
I think that depends heavily on the pages one might frequent.
Most of the time i comfortably get by using netsurf…
Netscape Navigator has the same issue!
but half the time it can’t access any sites while Chrome does.
I smell exaggerated bullshit.
I’m really confused, everyone seems pissed about this, but if you understand what they are up to, it actually is a very privacy focused way to allow for interest based ads. Like I get if you understand that and feel like all interest based ads are evil, sure. But at the same time the ‘free web’ is built on advertising. Nobody is offering an alternative.
Advertising existed fine before the tracking part became an entitlement.
Mozilla is making a great pivot to integrate AI into Firefox. Totally what people want. /s
I want it, and I want it in a browser that isn’t controlled by Google.
The Librewolf project is up to date Firefox core with some hardening and the telemetry going back to Mozilla removed - good stuff.
… with features like local-only (i.e. privacy-respecting) language translation. Good.
No! AI bad!
Another beautiful day of ditching chrome for Firefox a long time ago
Mozilla Phoenix user here. Good old times. Then Firebird came along. Then Firefox… What an odd name change that was, IMO. Firefox. Huh.
Then Chrome came and I jumped on that ship for years until the new revamped Firefox came in 2018, and as it looks nowadays, I won’t ever leave Firefox until it dies of death.
Chrome has a pretty sleek design these days, but my conscience tells me I can’t use it.
I use Chromium for web development (testing purposes only), but I’m not sure if Chromium is any better. At least I’m not signed in to it.
They ditched Phoenix because the bios manufacturer had that copy right. There’s a whole story behind it.
Firefox in China is also known as a red panda
Ah, so that’s the reason. I never bothered to find out. Thanks! Only 20 years later or so 😅
Lol I only found out about a month ago. So I’m in the same boat.
I used to use the good browser. But then they changed what the good browser was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me.
ITLL HAPPEN TO YOU
