Comment by sneak
1 year ago
The issue I have is not that they did it; it’s that they lied about why.
Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it. People can use a different browser if they wish (I do).
This whole “better for users” bullshit is why I don’t respect Google as a company. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.
> Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it.
Google has a long history of "accidentally" breaking gmail on firefox and funneling users to Chrome back in the day. It's beyond stupid to argue they should be able to do whatever they want with their vertically integrated monopoly.
Like, if you want to dig holes in your own driveway sure whatever, but if you own all the roads in Detroit and you want to dig holes in them, then make a killing selling new tires and suspension repair a fair society wouldn't move out of Detroit, they'd fucking run you out of town.
Not even "back in the day". Youtube and Gsuite constantly break on firefox.
If people don’t like this, they can stop using gmail. Neither Chrome, nor Gmail is a monopoly.
The more things Google does to make gmail less useful, the better.
It’s no secret that Google is an ad company. Anyone still using gmail deserves what they get.
Why be bitter at the people dealing with the shit, why not be angry at the people making the world shit? My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.
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You're behind with the times, words have new meanings
Organizations I don't like = Monopoly!
Organizations I like = ...
The only thing that can stop a monopoly is a bigger monopoly, the government.
You don't own the roads in Detroit; the government owns most of them.
Gmail is not a government service. Google is free to make that work with only one browser, if they want.
You can't assert that Google must make Gmail work with any browser whatsoever, because that means supporting someone using Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 5.5.
I'm not going to waste my time explaining to you what a metaphor is, but I will say this Firefox was the dominant player in the 00's 2010's when they did this, not the 2% market share it is now.
I don’t work for Google and genuinely think it’s better for users. It’s always bugged me that ad blockers request arbitrary read write permissions for all websites I visit, and it didn’t seem like that was ever going to change until Chrome forced the issue.
Read/write permissions are necessary to effectively block ads. There's a lot of sites that will throw up a screen saying "please turn off your adblocker" and refuse to let you view the page if they detect ads aren't being loaded. Read/write permissions allows uBlock Origin to inject scripts into the page to fool the anti-adblock scripts into thinking that ads are being served.
It's not ideal, but if that's what it takes to block ads as well as uBlock Origin does, then that's a price I'm willing to pay.
Anyone with a mildly popular extension that has read/write * would be offered lots of money to sell it to, usually, scammers or hackers.
Maybe you're willing to pay the price, but that doesn't mean it was what's best for the ecosystem.
At the platform level, you have to have a security model, and sometimes it will conflict with functionality. I’m sure there’s a lot of potentially interesting browser extensions you could build with the ability to read and write arbitrary files, but Chrome has decided (much less controversially) that the sandbox is key to their security model and extensions can’t ask to escape it.
If manifest V3 ad blockers were nonfunctional to the point of being broken, I’d be more concerned, but in my experience they’re perfectly OK.
uBO Lite exists and I can't see any visible difference in how well it works. So, it's not a price you need to pay at all.
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My content blocker on Safari blocks all the same ads as ublock origin in Chrome, with no supposedly no risk of outbound data.
It's my computer. I will run code that I choose and disallow code that I choose. If I choose to run code that blocks your code, that's my prerogative. Whether that's a full blown right is another topic.
You're just pissed because I've chosen to block your code in software you created. Next, you'll tell me I have to watch your programming on a TV I bought with your code on it.
The idea that we have to do anything that evilCorp wants us to do is just insane that people have come to the point of accepting that.
It really isn't. They can spend some of their billions of revenue to review changes when popular extensions are updated, just like Mozilla does. Every uBO update is vetted by Mozilla and is only then pushed out to users. But doing this is not in Google's interest at all.
Mozilla’s guidance on this (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tips-assessing-safety-e...) is that only some extensions are manually reviewed and you shouldn’t trust this as a guarantee of safety if you don’t trust the developer who owns the extension.
If I’m going to be the devil’s advocate, it’s probably better for performance.
When I maintained a hook-based plugin system, I learned that many programmers do not know data structures or algorithms and would slow down the whole software by writing plugins that looked up rules using extremely slow ways extremely often. And if users wanted to complain about the software being slow, they would always blame me first.
But when I replaced it with rule lists, now I was in control and could implement fast data structures.
Actually I have a problem is both. Chrome/Chromium is Google's product and it's theirs to do with what they please, but if they do user-hostile things with it, that's enough to criticise them for me, even if they're honest about it.
Of course lying about why makes it worse, but I don't think it would've been that much more okay if Google was honest and said "users' ability to install highly effective ad blockers hurts our bottom line so we're removing them".
Where I live, Google rented out a huge Billboard to advertise Chrome, and it cites Chrome as "the world's most trusted browser"
I LOL every time I see it. Imagine the lengths they have to go to, to try to make people trust a product they have.
Trusted is known to not be the same as trustworthy.
The Bible is a widely trusted source on topics such as the origin of the world, and life.
Repeat the lie often enough and loud enough, it becomes accepted as truth. A billboard is pretty loud in this context.
Like Chomsky said: (corporate) propaganda is incredibly widespread but about an ankle deep.
> Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it.
They shouldn't be free to use all the money in the world to corner a market, rope in the conpetition and then abuse that position.
It only works because nobody can touch them, it's otherwise straight illegal in most markets.
And I don't understand what is the benefit of lying as well - everyone on the internet knows what this is about, at least if they used ad blockers. A lot of people don't, but they will not be affected anyway.
Only users who are tech-savy know they are lying.
My mom, who has Ublock Origin installed on her Chrome by me, will never know these details.
Their engineers genuinely believe that shit too, which is just absurd bullshit.
Perfect time to read again The Gervais Principle!
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Ah yes, "determinedly deluded loyalty to the company that will never be loyal to him".
Do they really? Or are you assuming?
I've seen a lot of their engineers here on HN defending Google's position, and very few of the anti-Google crowd here claim to be (x)googlers.
That said, I know a number of xooglers (myself included) who don't believe for a moment that this would have gotten off the ground if someone important hadn't opined on the usefulness WRT ad-serving.
I have seen engineers defend that position here and on Github, so unless you assume they're lying, I would take them at their word.
Of course not all of them do, Google is a big company.
More like the willfully blind engineers, disingenuously claim to believe that absurd bullshit. There's not a lot genuine left in that company.