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Comment by nalekberov

1 day ago

> When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech.

Because this is something expected from Google. Google has never committed to security, but Mozilla did.

EDIT: I meant privacy, not security.

Google has invested significantly in security. I believe you are referring to privacy?

  • Having rock-solid security for quietly transferring all of your deeply personal and private data to Google feels like a win for the pedants, but a loss for everyone else.

  • This is a significant point. To many people security includes privacy, which is a fair assumption: in a non-evil timeline user privacy will be one of the first-class components high on the priority list for being secured. Unfortunately companies and the people high up running them only care about their own privacy¹, everyone else is expected to be grateful that we are being stalked so we can be targetted for sales purposes.

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    [1] Follow one of them around the way they track us online, or let out a bit of information about, for example, their tax affairs, and see how fast lawyers or law enforcement arrive on your doorstep…

Google has invested massively into security. On various platforms (non-Chromium Linux excluded), Google Chrome uses advanced defence-in-depth that make Chrome much more secure than Firefox on the same machine. Their origin-based process separation make Chrome a memory hog but protect tab processes from each other in a way Firefox doesn't bother with just yet.

Chrome may be a privacy nightmare, but in terms of security it beats Mozilla.

  • Not supporting real ad blockers makes it strictly less secure for any threat model that matters for normal people - most importantly less secure against predatory corporations like Google.

  • Same could be said about Windows vs Linux back in the day, but as another person already pointed out it doesn't make sense when the owner is one of the ones you are trying to protect yourself against.

    Also, as it turned out, Windows wasn't much more secure than Linux, and I guess we'll find this with Chrome as well. In fact I wonder if this isn't obvious already now that uBlock Origin doesn't work on Chrome any longer?

    Besides, isn't Chrome approaching 20 years now and I still cannot have tree style tabs on it so it is still a toy browser meant for causual browsing, not work ;-)

  • Defense is not very meaningful if your browser is provided by one of the parties you need to defend yourself yourself _against_.