> Two steps backwards in every conceivable way. The giants gain more invisible power and powerusers suffer decreased productivity/privacy. Not going to happen.

> Two steps backwards in every conceivable way. The giants gain more invisible power and powerusers suffer decreased productivity/privacy. Not going to happen. I agree with the first two sentences, but disagree with the third. I believe that this state is actually the intended end goal. Previously, for many years, I browsed the web with Javascript disabled. At the time, this had very little impact on my browsing experience; perhaps some of the layout would be broken, but not in a way that would interfere with the functionality or content of the site. Nowadays, not only is this totally impossible, blocking even a subset of a site's JS (such as through uMatrix) is trial and error to get the site to load at all, or to do simple tasks like click on a "login" button. With Google's plan to "phase out" cookies [0], I expect the web to become even more opaque and difficult to modify "on the fly" -- that is, on the user's local machine prior to displaying the content. In particular, this will affect ad and tracker blocking the most, as the pain from effective ad blockers starts to bite harder and harder. So, when you say "The giants gain more invisible power", that is true and desireable from their perspective, and since they write the code that actually underpins most web browsers, why wouldn't they? When you say, "powerusers suffer decreates productivity/privacy", yes, that's absolutely true. Why would they care? It's such a small fraction of their business. Some users will go to more and more extremes to preserve their privacy, eventually accessing only some small subset of sites from an esoteric Kali-derived distro, and others will capitulate and shift their behavior back to the herd. In the end, the giants still win. [0]: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-says-chrome-will-end-support-for-third-party-cookies-that-track-you-thats-not-all-good-news.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-says-chrome-will-end-s...