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When you tell Chrome to wipe private data it spares Google.com and YouTube
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 3np 6y agoI hope stuff like this is taken into account when courts decide on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836520
- macinjosh 6y agoAgreed, IMHO Google's antitrust threat in the browser space is more harmful than the search space.
- AlexandrB 6y ago> A Google spokesperson has been in touch to say the issue is a programming error, and will be fixed: "We are aware of a bug in Chrome that is impacting how cookies are cleared on some first-party Google websites. We are investigating the issue, and plan to roll out a fix in the coming days." It's really hard to give Google the benefit of the doubt at this point.
- Thaxll 6y agoI'm sure it was working before because I re-call removing everything and was unlogged from Google.
- pintxo 6y agoWouldn't this make it even worse? It worked correctly, then they changed it to _not_ work for their sites?
- Arnt 6y agoThe source is public and the version history too, so you don't need to assume, you can look. If you don't see anything particular, you may assume that it's a bug and wasn't easily visible to the developers either.
- fblifeadvice645 6y agoThis will most likely be a patch the product bits pf Chrome, not chromium. The bug isn't in Edge.
- burnerfi5724 6y agohttps://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f800edbd1b50ecc13a0d3391f5f45ba9c84625be%5E%21/#F0 https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f800edb... Here's the fix, the bug is in chromium but only affects chrome because it has some "Hosted Apps" installed out of the box.
- zelphirkalt 6y agoYou are talking about Chrome or Chromium?
- Arnt 6y agoWhen I looked at the source, around 2015, there wasn't much difference, other than the name. People called "Google" were allowed to name the result of building it "Chrome". If you weren't Google you had to call it Chromium, and could of course apply patches or change the build flags. The functional differences I saw then were all a result of patches that were applied by my distribution.
- pivor 6y agoWhere you'd assume clearing Cookies to be as simple as cookieStore.clear() - I can imagine it's due to some legacy remainder of times when they did do everything to track without consent.
- merricksb 6y agoOriginal story discussed two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24817304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24817304 (1293 points/2 days ago/483 comments)
- junon 6y agoGoogle acting like this is a programming error. Any programmer would know this would have to be an edge case, perfect-storm type of bug for it to just magically decide google.com and youtube.com are not included in the wipe. I call bullshit. Google is an evil company, this is nothing new.
- ashtonkem 6y agoHonestly, it’s an insultingly bad lie on Google’s part.
- burnerfi5724 6y agoAs someone who works on Chrome at google and know people working on fixing it.... it really is kinda a perfect storm bug but you obviously don't have to believe me.
- junon 6y agoFeel free to explain. We'd love to know.
- burnerfi5724 6y agohttps://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f800edbd1b50ecc13a0d3391f5f45ba9c84625be https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f800edb... Best context I can give is the actual CL for the fix.
- dingaling 6y agoThat doesn't explain how the original change made it through testing without the bug being flagged. Test clearing all private data -> not all private data cleared.
- ashtonkem 6y agoI could be convinced, but given Google's behavior they've lost the presumption of good faith, and the bar of evidence required to convince me that this is an accident is much higher than it would be normally.
- toyg 6y agoWe will need laws to forbid providers of web-based commercial services from making browsers. Google has made it abundantly obvious that control over both sectors is a net negative for the market. In the same way, browser makers should be decoupled from hardware and OS manufacturers, which have a similar monopoly problem.
- lima 6y agoSo who's going to pay for browser development, then? Google bankrolled both Chrome and Firefox.
- toyg 6y agoSlowing down development of the browser will actually turn out to be a Good Thing. The breakneck speed that has seen Google pushing more and more features has effectively destroyed the ecosystem of alternatives, since nobody could keep up. And after all this, is the web so massively better than it was in 2005? Not really. We just download more and more bloated polyfill libraries. KHTML was the basis for the original webkit, and that was built basically for free.
- shadowgovt 6y ago> And after all this, is the web so massively better than it was in 2005? Not really. [citation needed], as I switch from playing arcade games in my browser on archive.org to experimenting with a WebXR-driven VR experience.
- toyg 6y agoNot “massively” better. Plus, you are paying for those videogames with your behavioral data and your non-tech relatives getting radicalised by algos.
- shadowgovt 6y agoIf you've heard news of archive.org radicalizing my non-tech relatives, let me know.
- kspacewalk2 6y agoI'll use this as an opportunity to ask: What am I missing, having ditched Chrome ~3 years ago and switched to Firefox? I am very happy with Firefox, and it fulfills 100% of my requirements for a modern browser (must have sane browser dev panel, must perform with >50 tabs open, must be extensible with a huge extension ecosystem). On my Android phone, I'll just go ahead and claim I'm not missing anything and it's not even close - Firefox is so much better just for being able to run extensions like uBlock Origin. But on a workstation (macOS) - I'll keep an open mind.
- jimbob45 6y agoDev Tools Even my most ardent anti-Google coworkers reluctantly switch back to Chrome when it comes time to debug.
- leeoniya 6y agomy primary is Firefox, but i definitely prefer Chrome's devtools - especially for performance profiling, which i do a lot of. chrome also renders UI interactions faster. maybe it's skia vs cairo? e.g. try mouse-dragging the ranging slider and compare the lag between chrome and ff: https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/demos/zoom-ranger-grips.html https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/demos/zoom-ranger-grips.htm...
- josalhor 6y agoIn my experience on desktop Firefox has more compatbility issues than Chrome. On mobile, on top of that, it is way slower on most websites.
- marcan_42 6y agoI still use Chrome by default on mobile, but when Chrome has performance issues, I switch to Firefox and it works fine. I've been considering a switch to Firefox on mobile (I already switched on my main workstation). Try it with a long page, something thousands of lines long. Mobile Chrome on Android chokes badly, stops responding for seconds or minutes, and page search is hideously slow. Firefox handles it fine. It's really obvious on long lists or tables, e.g. this page: https://reitaisai.com/arts7/?p=165 https://reitaisai.com/arts7/?p=165
- stephenhuey 6y agoChrome was awesome once upon a time, but so far I've managed to avoid installing it on my 2020 MacBook Pro. I use a lot of Google services but it still scared me a bit when Chrome started offering the option (on by default) to log into the browser rather than just into a website. Colleagues at my last corporate employer rolled their eyes at me when I told them I tried to avoid it and suggested there was no serious alternative to Chrome DevTools for any serious developer.
- anonunivgrad 6y agoYou can disable it with SyncDisabled and BrowserSignin Chrome policies. On Windows, you just have to set the registry values. I believe there is a config file you edit for Linux and Mac OS. It’s all documented in the Chrome docs. You don’t need to pay for any Chrome enterprise nonsense. I’m not saying this remedies this morally or, for most people, practically. But it is a practical solution for you and me and any machines we deploy.
- mnd999 6y agoI've taken to using Chrome purely as an IDE for it's devtools. I do all my browsing in Firefox and my webdev in Chrome.
- bichiliad 6y agoIf you haven’t tried them lately, FireFox’s dev tools are pretty solid these days.
- ffpip 6y agoAren't Chrome dev tools part of Chromium? Just use Brave, or maybe even edge.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoYes, I switched to Edge a couple months back, and honestly love it. All Chrome extensions work on it (afaik, and I've tried a lot). And the dev tools are the same as the Chrome ones, which is a must for me. Sure, it sucks that it's Microsoft. But Microsoft is less evil than Google, imo. I recommend anyone on the fence with Chrome to give it a shot. You won't even realize you left Chrome after about 30 minutes of using it. Even though Brave and Edge are similar, for some reason I was never able to stick with Brave.
- nathanyz 6y agoDon't forget the part where the most recent release of Pagespeed conveniently ignores the speed impact of YouTube embeds when it didn't in prior versions. https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/issues/10874 https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/issues/10874
- alimbada 6y agoI switched back to Firefox about 2 years ago when their Quantum efforts finally started coming to fruition. I haven't looked back since.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mrweasel 6y agoAt this point I don’t think to many people are genuinely suprised. I don’t really understand it though, would it hurt Google to just delete data for their own domains? Do they really need it that badly?
- wmeredith 6y agoA lot of interesting things happen, incentive-wise, when operating at massive scale. Doing something obviously unethical but "mostly-harmless" might only be worth fractions of a cent. But spread across billions of interactions the the benefit (and the harm) adds up quickly. This is the core issue of the problem with modern day mega-corporations.
- shadowgovt 6y agoDepending on the nature of the underlying bug, it would probably cause users that have their Chrome browser logged in (for configuration, history, password vault, and bookmark sharing) to be unexpectedly logged out of the browser when the cookie and local-store clearing logic fired, which is a bad UX. Much worse UX if we're talking ChromeOS and it turns out the bug is that the logic that manages cookies and local state overlaps the logic that manages being logged into the browser-as-OS. "Navigate away from Chrome and I'm logged out of my whole computer" is no good.
- mszcz 6y agoWhat's so sad about this is that no one will ever get slapped for this. Not rank-and-file people that coded this, not the people who green-lit this, not the asshole claiming this is a "programming error", not anyone. I know it's easy for those people to claim that they didn't know what they were doing or that they were told that it's fine. But maybe slapping a few would cause others to finally fucking think for a moment "do I wanna go to jail over this?". If you're making decisions that affect the privacy of literally millions of people then, well, maybe you need a little accountability.
- shadowgovt 6y agoWhy do you assume it isn't a programming error?
- mszcz 6y ago1. It's next to impossible to make a mistake like that. 2. The mistake works out in Google's favour. 3. Difficult to give Google the benefit of a doubt anymore regarding anything. 4. Does anyone believe what PR dept. of a large corporation says anymore?
- burnerfi5724 6y agoOne benefit of this being chrome.... is the changes are public. Here is the fix and the link the cl for the fix with a link to the cl that created the issue as well: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f800edbd1b50ecc13a0d3391f5f45ba9c84625be%5E%21/#F0 https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f800edb... I'll let you judge for yourself, but this is not coming from PR.
- _qulr 6y agoThanks for the link!
- shadowgovt 6y ago> It's next to impossible to make a mistake like that It would appear that the root of this error is that Chrome is also an operating system. So in small, focused apps, yes, that's a hard mistake to make. In apps that some people are using as the main shell for their entire laptop, there's a lot of nooks and crannies for complexity to hide.
- shadowgovt 6y agoThe original blog post, which describes the situation better than the Guardian's breathless reporting: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/chrome-google.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/chrome-google.html