It is an abuse of Chrome's position in the marketplace. Google is using their powerful position to give themselves tracking capabilities that other online players can't access. It is a major competitive advantage for Google.
can't alternate browser makers who base on chromium simply disable that portion? like, I expect identifying users was a key business concern in moving Edge to Chromium. Is there something (other than work) preventing them from making it so it'll report back to microsoft-owned domains instead?
Is it because Google's webapps will have their own a/b tests which use experimental features only available in Chrome perhaps?
I mean personally I think they should do client-side feature detection and be back to being standards compliant and not creepy. The only reason why I'd consider such a flag is because they optimize the payload server-side to return a certain a/b test, but even with that they could do the default version first, do feature detection, and then set a session cookie for that domain only that loads the a/b test.
My other Thought was that they test a feature that is implemented across Google's properties, e.g. something having to do with their account management.
It is an abuse of Chrome's position in the marketplace. Google is using their powerful position to give themselves tracking capabilities that other online players can't access. It is a major competitive advantage for Google.
can't alternate browser makers who base on chromium simply disable that portion? like, I expect identifying users was a key business concern in moving Edge to Chromium. Is there something (other than work) preventing them from making it so it'll report back to microsoft-owned domains instead?
I'm using Vivaldi on MacOS and it doesn't send this header. I'm sure others like Brave don't send it either.
Is it because Google's webapps will have their own a/b tests which use experimental features only available in Chrome perhaps?
I mean personally I think they should do client-side feature detection and be back to being standards compliant and not creepy. The only reason why I'd consider such a flag is because they optimize the payload server-side to return a certain a/b test, but even with that they could do the default version first, do feature detection, and then set a session cookie for that domain only that loads the a/b test.
My other Thought was that they test a feature that is implemented across Google's properties, e.g. something having to do with their account management.
Isn't this what cookies are for?
Cross-site cookies are soon getting blocked by Chrome starting Chrome 80 if I'm right (whereas this header isn't)
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I can think of a hundreds reasons why they do this. It doesn't make it right in any of those.
Err yeah, because it adds loads of data that can be used to track you.