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Imagine working at Google on this nonsense and thinking you're actually doing something good for the world.

by hparadiz 4y ago

refulgentis 4y ago
- hailwren 4y ago
  One of these companies profits by the proliferation of ads and the other does not.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    Which one doesn't have any ads?
    - hailwren 4y ago
      I was factually incorrect Apple generates about 1% of their annual revenue from ads [1]. Google generates 81% of their annual revenue from ads [2]. 1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-revenue-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-revenue... 2 - https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/google-ad-revenue https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/google-ad-revenue
      - DannyBee 4y ago
        "I was factually incorrect Apple generates about 1% of their annual revenue from ads" Why play silly games to make 4 billion dollars seem small? I could play this game in the other direction and say "Apple generates more money from ads now than 99% of the companies ever make over their entire existence" In truth, 4 billion dollars is a lot of money. More to the point of this discussion, when you ask them, they want it to be a very significant part of their business. They talk about it on earnings calls all the time! It's not like they are hiding it! Which sort of totally blows up the idea that they don't care.
        hailwren 4y ago
        TIL percentages are “silly games” and not a common way to measure how much a portion of something contributes to the whole.
        DannyBee 4y ago
        We're talking about whether they profit, and whether it matters to them and the business. You said they do not. "One of these companies profits by the proliferation of ads and the other does not." That was wrong. They make a lot of money from it and they have said it is an important part of their future. Rather than just say you were wrong, you instead try to paint it as not mattering by using percentages, when again, it is a lot of money and apple themselves say it matters a lot Just accept that what you said was mistaken, and do better next time. What you are doing now just makes you look bad and unable to learn and grow.
        hailwren 4y ago
        I admitted that my original comment was factually incorrect. It was wrong. I said that. However, the point has always been about the comparison between Google and Apple. Given that their total revenues are of different size, how can we reasonably compare them? What if we add a 3rd competitor to the arena? Let’s look at Outbrain. They’re a digital advertising marketplace w/ $256M annual revenue. By your argument, $256M << $1B — therefore we should take Apple to care more about their advertising business than Outbrain do about theirs?
        HWR_14 4y ago
        Percentages are important because a company is less likely to risk 99% of their business to double 1% of their business than to risk 33% of their business to double the other 66%
      - LordDragonfang 4y ago
        While the orders of magnitude here are evocative, it's worth noting that Apple has a pervasive culture of "we deserve our cut of any transaction that goes through any of our platforms, and we will (mis)use our power to enforce that" stemming from when Jobs had to bring the company back from the brink of bankruptcy. See current battles on allowing alternative payment processors in iOS apps (to the point that even when ordered by courts to allow them, they added a 27% commission on alternate payment processors) Apple is rapidly running out of growth room in new physical people to sell phones to, and is starting to significantly switch focus to new ways of extracting rent from existing customers through "services" and similar.
      - endisneigh 4y ago
        Both companies profit from ads when you claim one did not. If you’re looking at the percentage revenue projections from ads Apple’s has been growing faster than Google’s.
  - deadmutex 4y ago
    > One of these companies profits by the proliferation of ads and the other does not. Umm... IIUC, Apple already makes billions from Ads. I'll just leave this here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-aapl-set-to-expand-advertising-bringing-ads-to-maps-tv-and-books-apps-l6tdqqmg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
    - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
      Apple's revenue is mostly iPhone. Google's revenue is 80% advertising. Stark difference.
  - AYoung010 4y ago
    There’s a big “yet” attached to Apple not profiting from the proliferation of ads - from what I’ve read, since they pushed the “ask app not to track” change, Apple has been pushing hard for more widespread adoption of their own advertising platform. Make no mistake, Apple does not care about your privacy — only about moving the ad money out of Google’s pocket into their own.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - curt15 4y ago
    Does that make Safari's MV3 implementation better than Chrome's? I can't use ublock origin on either.
  - EnKopVand 4y ago
    I sort of see it the other way around. To me Google is an advertisement company first, and if you use Google products then you know your privacy data is how you pay for those products. With Apple and Microsoft you're paying for the product, but you're now also getting your privacy data sucked into their growing advertisement business. I personally think the use of privacy data is a waste of resources, and that companies like duckduckgo have the longer end of the stick. Because it makes more sense to me, that I get advertisements for a robot vacuum cleaner when I'm searching for one, and not the 3 months after I buy one, but then there is a trillion dollar advertisement industry to prove me wrong. So who knows. But what pisses me off is that companies sell you a product, and then also include advertisement and privacy data harvesting in it, like that Samsung TV article that was on here recently. Or how Windows "home or whatever the non-enterprise edition is called" now sometimes installs pre-installers for things like candy crush or Minecraft without asking you to do so... Like what the hell? I don't want you to read this as a defence for google, but at least they are sort of honest about the evil they do. I'm not sure any of these sleazy moves will have the desired outcomes for these companies. I don't want to use linux, I did once, but I like my technology to work right out of the box with no effort to make it so or to maintain it, which is why I'm in the Apple ecosystem these days, but the ways things are heading, I think the only future will be linux, and trying to find appliances that aren't add-infested.
- hparadiz 4y ago
  Not sure why you decided to bring up Apple. People decide to buy into the Apple ecosystem. I didn't decide to buy into the Chrome ecosystem. I just have to use it because of the marketshare. And I'm on Gentoo running a personal build of Chromium. Manifest v3 is pure evil. Don't get it twisted. There's no ambiguity here. It's just a cash grab. Anyone working on it on the Chrome team should feel shame.
  - staticassertion 4y ago
    I think it's pretty absurd that this is the level of discourse on this subject. "pure evil" and "just a cash grab" aren't substantive criticisms, nothing in your post is actually informational. The reality is that ad blockers will continue to work to a significant extent that they do today. Engage with that, put some information with merit into your posts.
    - zarzavat 4y ago
      It makes the adblockers fight with one hand behind their back, tilting the balance in the cat and mouse game towards the attackers. Google is an empire built on advertising: scams and malware, so their evil has always been present. But right now we have an easy way to protect ourselves. Manifest v3 is exposing that evil to technologically-minded people. I will have to switch my parents over to Firefox or Brave to keep them safe online.
      - staticassertion 4y ago
        Again, the entire post is just axiomatic moral judgments with no information.
        zarzavat 4y ago
        I’m curious what parts of the internet you visit that you do not see all the ads for scams, shock ads, and other malicious things. There’s a reason that “one weird trick, doctors hate it!” is a meme. It’s utterly rampant. If I open YouTube without an adblocker there’s often some kind of snake oil salesman that pops up. Or a cult. Now, I use private browsing, so I get the “default” experience. Perhaps you don’t use private browsing and so your targeting is really honed in. Perhaps you only see sensible ads for sensible people, a sensible wallet or a sensible car. If that is the case then fine, but if the only way to use the internet is logged in to Google and with everything tracked, then that is unacceptable to me.
- loxias 4y ago
  It seems Google (or maybe just some of the employees?) derive pleasure from taking things that were working just fine and then breaking them so my life is harder. It's almost a yearly occurrence at this point -- some thing that, once upon a time in the past I spent effort on configuring so that I could have a happy experience with my computer, will now be announced deprecated forcing me to comply with some new edict from on high with absolutely no benefit for me. Please stop doing this. Stop "fixing" things. I'm an engineer too, I know building new things is fun, but there is also honor in maintaining well functioning things and not making other people's lives unnecessarily hard. I bet that, now that I finally have mutt working again with Google's newest incarnation of authentication, there's a team within Google excited about breaking it in 2 years.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    The problem is (as always) a lack of regulation in the tech industry. We've taught Big Tech that the only way to 'innovate' is to perform profane moneymaking rituals at the expense of the end user, and the shareholders are always asking for more. The average Google engineer's job is no different from anyone else working in a sufficiently large company. Their job isn't 'press the big evil switch on MV3', but rather 'MV3's staging branch is failing tests, go fix it'. The evil comes from perverse bureaucratic incentive, so it leaves me kinda ruffled to see people blaming the engineers on HN of all places. I can imagine some pinstriped upper-management prick at FAANG reading this thread in their penthouse and laughing their ass off.
    - loxias 4y ago
      > We've taught Big Tech that the only way to 'innovate' is to perform profane moneymaking rituals at the expense of the end user, and the shareholders are always asking for more. > The evil comes from perverse bureaucratic incentive.. I think you're entirely right. I have nothing else to add, other than that I've always thought this, it's not a new change of opinion. I guess I don't see any conflict between my comment and yours? Yes, I know that "Their job isn't 'press the big evil switch on MV3', but rather 'MV3's staging branch is failing tests, go fix it" -- I've worked in software my whole career too. :) > so it leaves me kinda ruffled to see people blaming the engineers on HN of all places. I also know that it isn't some nebulous cloud above which is where designs come from, but other employees. I also know, from experience, that if you're a valuable enough engineer within an org or a project, and you significantly oppose a proposed feature or change coming from the suits, it's not gonna happen. What are they gonna do, code it themselves? > I can imagine some pinstriped upper-management prick at FAANG reading this thread in their penthouse and laughing their ass off. Agree.
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  I'm still bitter that Google permanently removed my @gmail.com with your dark pattern migration to business email. With no option to move back? You guys lost half of my Google Drive, Photos history. But it's cool. That's life. And then you moved me to legacy workspace to appease me. And then months before you tried again to migrate my legacy workspace email to paid, which another Google employee said it's free forever. I'm willing to pay anything on your valuable service but those dark patterns is what really pisses me.
- btown 4y ago
  > people call it privacy If you think of privacy solely as reducing the risk of an extension going rogue and leaking data - then sure, MV3 is a win. But if you include the issue of sites sharing data, then reducing the ability of extensions to use advanced heuristics to block advertising and tracking may cause more harm than good. There are plenty of users who understand that extensions are extremely powerful, thoroughly vet the organizations that have the capacity to update those extensions, and are also required to visit numerous less-trusted websites (and in a modern age of advertising technology, that's practically all of them) whose data sharing practices they cannot vet. MV3 will be a net negative for the privacy of those users. Now, it may be reductive to say that those users, and that privacy threat model, matter more than others. But it is equally reductive to pretend that MV3 is a universal good.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    Where MV3 happily still allows you to inject arbitrary javascript into pages, it's not about privacy.
    - btown 4y ago
      “It’s not arbitrary JS, it needs to be reviewed by the Chrome Web Store team, unless it’s a userscript or we miss it in our review process!” https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/ZUZqOgwqkBg https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensio... It’s the equivalent of an airport security policy - as I mentioned before, to reduce risk. Which, both in that analogy and here, can indeed be part of a defense-in-depth. But such a policy is not without tradeoffs, and it cannot be evaluated in a vacuum.
      - xani_ 4y ago
        I bet far more people got scammed by malicious ads than people deciding to install malicious extension.
        hombre_fatal 4y ago
- howinteresting 4y ago
  Yeah, well, Apple is very bad for doing this too. One reason I don't trust iOS or Apple in general.
- invisible 4y ago
  It's as though nobody realizes extensions can be created or purchased by sketchy actors and that this is a huge security risk when the extensions request "all access to all sites." OK, so when setting up an account's username and password and are provided 2FA codes or recovery codes -- those can all be compromised. How can you know an extension is compromised? It's almost impossible to tell with certainty. Things like "The Great Suspender" incident get ignored and folks assume no other extensions have the same problems.
  - RedShift1 4y ago
    And what in MV3 solved all of that? It still allows enough to do a lot of damage. Regardless of that, at some point you have to trust software. You can't expect everyone to read every line of code and compile all the software by themselves.
    - invisible 4y ago
      Yes, I trust plenty of software and I'm not suggesting that extensions are bad in theory. Extensions being able to silently inject code and ownership to change at any time is a pretty bad security model. We can agree that there are _bad_ security models, right? It's the sum of the parts in changes from manifest V2: - no arbitrary code injection via executeScript, must be a file now - no more remote code - no more arbitrarily getting selected text or highlighted text on a tab - declarativeNetRequest instead of intercepting requests - explicit listeners on the page to help detect bad actors (vs just arbitrary JS running on the page)
      - linkgoron 4y ago
        Even ignoring ad blocking - with those rules stuff like Tampermonkey which is totally legit can no longer work with execute script. You also lost a lot of functionality by losing DOM, having to rely on the broken lifetime of a Service Worker instead of persistent background page . It took Google three to four years to acknowledge that the community is completely correct with its criticisms, and that MV3 is garbage designed by people who have no knowledge on how people write extensions and which abilities they actually use. They're finally adding features that should have been there years ago. The new scripting API which brings back arbitrary scripts, in a new form, the offscreen documents API, and hopefully they'll eventually implement limited event pages which are somewhat solving the background page lifetime and DOM issues (which are already implemented by Mozilla and Safari I believe). Obviously, everything was decided hastily in the last second so all of the features are supposed to be completed by "around" October 2022, just two months before the original MV2 cutoff. I've also read some of the extension working group transcripts, it's pretty sad how Google/Chrome has no accountability and almost zero transparency.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  I give Apple (and MSFT in the Gates/Ballmer days) money, and in return they don't try to spy on me. Google, current MSFT and Meta all want to give me free stuff and then make up the difference with ads. It's not complex as to why I am more likely to believe Apple when they say something is privacy enhancing and distrust Google.
- trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  Calling for objectivity is probably not the first thing people want to do when discussing a company building a giant world-wide spying machine. In addition to logic, humans employ sentiment, emotions, and feelings and there isn't anything wrong with doing that.
- MBCook 4y ago
  The same people screamed when Apple did it. “This ruins ad blockers”, “this is so they don’t have to make REAL ad blockers work”, “they want a 30% cut of VPN money instead”, “this will cause cancer”. OK, not the last one. But people literally posted here on HN that Apple was killing people by not letting Flux on the iPhone. Considering how much information “normal“ ad blockers can see, I’m not against this. I like Apple’s approach (and understand this to be similar). But obviously I’m in the minority.
- bogomipz 4y ago
  It's very bizarre that your response is nothing more than a complete deflection - "what about Apple?!", but then you go on to accuse others of being reductionist and lacking honesty.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  Funny how Mozilla manages to vet the code of some of the more popular extensions for their "recommended" extensions program with far fewer financial resources. >curated extensions that meet the highest standards of security, functionality, and user experience. Firefox staff thoroughly evaluate each extension before it receives Recommended status. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-program https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    Opera browser was vetting every extension manually.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  That's because while Apple has monetary incentive to keep up the walled garden it really does have provide value to apple customers. I know google is selling everything and the farm about me when I use thier services. If apple wants my business they'll keep on doing what they're doing, I don't see ads on their platform and haven't seen any credible reports they're selling everything they know about me to the government and anyone who will pay $$ for that. I hastled myself for years keeping a rooted phone with trimmed down Android OS in various forms, but it was a lot of work. With apple I just buy a phone and use it and don't have to worry them selling me out every step I make or allow apps to rifle through my files and photos.
hailwren 4y ago
> Imagine working at Google and thinking you're actually doing something good for the world.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  The term is called "cognitive dissonance".
bambax 4y ago
The wording of the blog is pure doublespeak: > as we shift our focus to Manifest V3. This change will give Chrome users increased safety and peace of mind while browsing and installing extensions by providing more transparency and control over permissions, adding stricter protocols for accessing resources outside the extension’s context, and ensuring that extensions work well on all devices It sounds like government gobbledygook, with even more lies (there are no extensions on Chrome on mobile, so what "all devices" means is anyone's guess). I often wonder what goes on in the mind of people writing this. Are they happy? Why did they choose to work in tech instead of some administration, if BS is their thing? Is it just for the money?

Imagine working at Google on this nonsense and thinking you're actually doing something good for the world.

refulgentis 4y ago

hailwren 4y ago
One of these companies profits by the proliferation of ads and the other does not.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Which one doesn't have any ads?
  - hailwren 4y ago
    I was factually incorrect Apple generates about 1% of their annual revenue from ads [1]. Google generates 81% of their annual revenue from ads [2]. 1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-revenue-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-revenue... 2 - https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/google-ad-revenue https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/google-ad-revenue
    - DannyBee 4y ago
      "I was factually incorrect Apple generates about 1% of their annual revenue from ads" Why play silly games to make 4 billion dollars seem small? I could play this game in the other direction and say "Apple generates more money from ads now than 99% of the companies ever make over their entire existence" In truth, 4 billion dollars is a lot of money. More to the point of this discussion, when you ask them, they want it to be a very significant part of their business. They talk about it on earnings calls all the time! It's not like they are hiding it! Which sort of totally blows up the idea that they don't care.
      - hailwren 4y ago
        TIL percentages are “silly games” and not a common way to measure how much a portion of something contributes to the whole.
        DannyBee 4y ago
        We're talking about whether they profit, and whether it matters to them and the business. You said they do not. "One of these companies profits by the proliferation of ads and the other does not." That was wrong. They make a lot of money from it and they have said it is an important part of their future. Rather than just say you were wrong, you instead try to paint it as not mattering by using percentages, when again, it is a lot of money and apple themselves say it matters a lot Just accept that what you said was mistaken, and do better next time. What you are doing now just makes you look bad and unable to learn and grow.
        hailwren 4y ago
        I admitted that my original comment was factually incorrect. It was wrong. I said that. However, the point has always been about the comparison between Google and Apple. Given that their total revenues are of different size, how can we reasonably compare them? What if we add a 3rd competitor to the arena? Let’s look at Outbrain. They’re a digital advertising marketplace w/ $256M annual revenue. By your argument, $256M << $1B — therefore we should take Apple to care more about their advertising business than Outbrain do about theirs?
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        Percentages are important because a company is less likely to risk 99% of their business to double 1% of their business than to risk 33% of their business to double the other 66%
    - LordDragonfang 4y ago
      While the orders of magnitude here are evocative, it's worth noting that Apple has a pervasive culture of "we deserve our cut of any transaction that goes through any of our platforms, and we will (mis)use our power to enforce that" stemming from when Jobs had to bring the company back from the brink of bankruptcy. See current battles on allowing alternative payment processors in iOS apps (to the point that even when ordered by courts to allow them, they added a 27% commission on alternate payment processors) Apple is rapidly running out of growth room in new physical people to sell phones to, and is starting to significantly switch focus to new ways of extracting rent from existing customers through "services" and similar.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      Both companies profit from ads when you claim one did not. If you’re looking at the percentage revenue projections from ads Apple’s has been growing faster than Google’s.
- deadmutex 4y ago
  > One of these companies profits by the proliferation of ads and the other does not. Umm... IIUC, Apple already makes billions from Ads. I'll just leave this here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-aapl-set-to-expand-advertising-bringing-ads-to-maps-tv-and-books-apps-l6tdqqmg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    Apple's revenue is mostly iPhone. Google's revenue is 80% advertising. Stark difference.
- AYoung010 4y ago
  There’s a big “yet” attached to Apple not profiting from the proliferation of ads - from what I’ve read, since they pushed the “ask app not to track” change, Apple has been pushing hard for more widespread adoption of their own advertising platform. Make no mistake, Apple does not care about your privacy — only about moving the ad money out of Google’s pocket into their own.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- curt15 4y ago
  Does that make Safari's MV3 implementation better than Chrome's? I can't use ublock origin on either.
- EnKopVand 4y ago
  I sort of see it the other way around. To me Google is an advertisement company first, and if you use Google products then you know your privacy data is how you pay for those products. With Apple and Microsoft you're paying for the product, but you're now also getting your privacy data sucked into their growing advertisement business. I personally think the use of privacy data is a waste of resources, and that companies like duckduckgo have the longer end of the stick. Because it makes more sense to me, that I get advertisements for a robot vacuum cleaner when I'm searching for one, and not the 3 months after I buy one, but then there is a trillion dollar advertisement industry to prove me wrong. So who knows. But what pisses me off is that companies sell you a product, and then also include advertisement and privacy data harvesting in it, like that Samsung TV article that was on here recently. Or how Windows "home or whatever the non-enterprise edition is called" now sometimes installs pre-installers for things like candy crush or Minecraft without asking you to do so... Like what the hell? I don't want you to read this as a defence for google, but at least they are sort of honest about the evil they do. I'm not sure any of these sleazy moves will have the desired outcomes for these companies. I don't want to use linux, I did once, but I like my technology to work right out of the box with no effort to make it so or to maintain it, which is why I'm in the Apple ecosystem these days, but the ways things are heading, I think the only future will be linux, and trying to find appliances that aren't add-infested.
hparadiz 4y ago
Not sure why you decided to bring up Apple. People decide to buy into the Apple ecosystem. I didn't decide to buy into the Chrome ecosystem. I just have to use it because of the marketshare. And I'm on Gentoo running a personal build of Chromium. Manifest v3 is pure evil. Don't get it twisted. There's no ambiguity here. It's just a cash grab. Anyone working on it on the Chrome team should feel shame.
- staticassertion 4y ago
  I think it's pretty absurd that this is the level of discourse on this subject. "pure evil" and "just a cash grab" aren't substantive criticisms, nothing in your post is actually informational. The reality is that ad blockers will continue to work to a significant extent that they do today. Engage with that, put some information with merit into your posts.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    It makes the adblockers fight with one hand behind their back, tilting the balance in the cat and mouse game towards the attackers. Google is an empire built on advertising: scams and malware, so their evil has always been present. But right now we have an easy way to protect ourselves. Manifest v3 is exposing that evil to technologically-minded people. I will have to switch my parents over to Firefox or Brave to keep them safe online.
    - staticassertion 4y ago
      Again, the entire post is just axiomatic moral judgments with no information.
      - zarzavat 4y ago
        I’m curious what parts of the internet you visit that you do not see all the ads for scams, shock ads, and other malicious things. There’s a reason that “one weird trick, doctors hate it!” is a meme. It’s utterly rampant. If I open YouTube without an adblocker there’s often some kind of snake oil salesman that pops up. Or a cult. Now, I use private browsing, so I get the “default” experience. Perhaps you don’t use private browsing and so your targeting is really honed in. Perhaps you only see sensible ads for sensible people, a sensible wallet or a sensible car. If that is the case then fine, but if the only way to use the internet is logged in to Google and with everything tracked, then that is unacceptable to me.
loxias 4y ago
It seems Google (or maybe just some of the employees?) derive pleasure from taking things that were working just fine and then breaking them so my life is harder. It's almost a yearly occurrence at this point -- some thing that, once upon a time in the past I spent effort on configuring so that I could have a happy experience with my computer, will now be announced deprecated forcing me to comply with some new edict from on high with absolutely no benefit for me. Please stop doing this. Stop "fixing" things. I'm an engineer too, I know building new things is fun, but there is also honor in maintaining well functioning things and not making other people's lives unnecessarily hard. I bet that, now that I finally have mutt working again with Google's newest incarnation of authentication, there's a team within Google excited about breaking it in 2 years.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  The problem is (as always) a lack of regulation in the tech industry. We've taught Big Tech that the only way to 'innovate' is to perform profane moneymaking rituals at the expense of the end user, and the shareholders are always asking for more. The average Google engineer's job is no different from anyone else working in a sufficiently large company. Their job isn't 'press the big evil switch on MV3', but rather 'MV3's staging branch is failing tests, go fix it'. The evil comes from perverse bureaucratic incentive, so it leaves me kinda ruffled to see people blaming the engineers on HN of all places. I can imagine some pinstriped upper-management prick at FAANG reading this thread in their penthouse and laughing their ass off.
  - loxias 4y ago
    > We've taught Big Tech that the only way to 'innovate' is to perform profane moneymaking rituals at the expense of the end user, and the shareholders are always asking for more. > The evil comes from perverse bureaucratic incentive.. I think you're entirely right. I have nothing else to add, other than that I've always thought this, it's not a new change of opinion. I guess I don't see any conflict between my comment and yours? Yes, I know that "Their job isn't 'press the big evil switch on MV3', but rather 'MV3's staging branch is failing tests, go fix it" -- I've worked in software my whole career too. :) > so it leaves me kinda ruffled to see people blaming the engineers on HN of all places. I also know that it isn't some nebulous cloud above which is where designs come from, but other employees. I also know, from experience, that if you're a valuable enough engineer within an org or a project, and you significantly oppose a proposed feature or change coming from the suits, it's not gonna happen. What are they gonna do, code it themselves? > I can imagine some pinstriped upper-management prick at FAANG reading this thread in their penthouse and laughing their ass off. Agree.
lawgimenez 4y ago
I'm still bitter that Google permanently removed my @gmail.com with your dark pattern migration to business email. With no option to move back? You guys lost half of my Google Drive, Photos history. But it's cool. That's life. And then you moved me to legacy workspace to appease me. And then months before you tried again to migrate my legacy workspace email to paid, which another Google employee said it's free forever. I'm willing to pay anything on your valuable service but those dark patterns is what really pisses me.
btown 4y ago
> people call it privacy If you think of privacy solely as reducing the risk of an extension going rogue and leaking data - then sure, MV3 is a win. But if you include the issue of sites sharing data, then reducing the ability of extensions to use advanced heuristics to block advertising and tracking may cause more harm than good. There are plenty of users who understand that extensions are extremely powerful, thoroughly vet the organizations that have the capacity to update those extensions, and are also required to visit numerous less-trusted websites (and in a modern age of advertising technology, that's practically all of them) whose data sharing practices they cannot vet. MV3 will be a net negative for the privacy of those users. Now, it may be reductive to say that those users, and that privacy threat model, matter more than others. But it is equally reductive to pretend that MV3 is a universal good.
- tyingq 4y ago
  Where MV3 happily still allows you to inject arbitrary javascript into pages, it's not about privacy.
  - btown 4y ago
    “It’s not arbitrary JS, it needs to be reviewed by the Chrome Web Store team, unless it’s a userscript or we miss it in our review process!” https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/ZUZqOgwqkBg https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensio... It’s the equivalent of an airport security policy - as I mentioned before, to reduce risk. Which, both in that analogy and here, can indeed be part of a defense-in-depth. But such a policy is not without tradeoffs, and it cannot be evaluated in a vacuum.
    - xani_ 4y ago
      I bet far more people got scammed by malicious ads than people deciding to install malicious extension.
      - hombre_fatal 4y ago
howinteresting 4y ago
Yeah, well, Apple is very bad for doing this too. One reason I don't trust iOS or Apple in general.
invisible 4y ago
It's as though nobody realizes extensions can be created or purchased by sketchy actors and that this is a huge security risk when the extensions request "all access to all sites." OK, so when setting up an account's username and password and are provided 2FA codes or recovery codes -- those can all be compromised. How can you know an extension is compromised? It's almost impossible to tell with certainty. Things like "The Great Suspender" incident get ignored and folks assume no other extensions have the same problems.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  And what in MV3 solved all of that? It still allows enough to do a lot of damage. Regardless of that, at some point you have to trust software. You can't expect everyone to read every line of code and compile all the software by themselves.
  - invisible 4y ago
    Yes, I trust plenty of software and I'm not suggesting that extensions are bad in theory. Extensions being able to silently inject code and ownership to change at any time is a pretty bad security model. We can agree that there are _bad_ security models, right? It's the sum of the parts in changes from manifest V2: - no arbitrary code injection via executeScript, must be a file now - no more remote code - no more arbitrarily getting selected text or highlighted text on a tab - declarativeNetRequest instead of intercepting requests - explicit listeners on the page to help detect bad actors (vs just arbitrary JS running on the page)
    - linkgoron 4y ago
      Even ignoring ad blocking - with those rules stuff like Tampermonkey which is totally legit can no longer work with execute script. You also lost a lot of functionality by losing DOM, having to rely on the broken lifetime of a Service Worker instead of persistent background page . It took Google three to four years to acknowledge that the community is completely correct with its criticisms, and that MV3 is garbage designed by people who have no knowledge on how people write extensions and which abilities they actually use. They're finally adding features that should have been there years ago. The new scripting API which brings back arbitrary scripts, in a new form, the offscreen documents API, and hopefully they'll eventually implement limited event pages which are somewhat solving the background page lifetime and DOM issues (which are already implemented by Mozilla and Safari I believe). Obviously, everything was decided hastily in the last second so all of the features are supposed to be completed by "around" October 2022, just two months before the original MV2 cutoff. I've also read some of the extension working group transcripts, it's pretty sad how Google/Chrome has no accountability and almost zero transparency.
HWR_14 4y ago
I give Apple (and MSFT in the Gates/Ballmer days) money, and in return they don't try to spy on me. Google, current MSFT and Meta all want to give me free stuff and then make up the difference with ads. It's not complex as to why I am more likely to believe Apple when they say something is privacy enhancing and distrust Google.
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
Calling for objectivity is probably not the first thing people want to do when discussing a company building a giant world-wide spying machine. In addition to logic, humans employ sentiment, emotions, and feelings and there isn't anything wrong with doing that.
MBCook 4y ago
The same people screamed when Apple did it. “This ruins ad blockers”, “this is so they don’t have to make REAL ad blockers work”, “they want a 30% cut of VPN money instead”, “this will cause cancer”. OK, not the last one. But people literally posted here on HN that Apple was killing people by not letting Flux on the iPhone. Considering how much information “normal“ ad blockers can see, I’m not against this. I like Apple’s approach (and understand this to be similar). But obviously I’m in the minority.
bogomipz 4y ago
It's very bizarre that your response is nothing more than a complete deflection - "what about Apple?!", but then you go on to accuse others of being reductionist and lacking honesty.
GeekyBear 4y ago
Funny how Mozilla manages to vet the code of some of the more popular extensions for their "recommended" extensions program with far fewer financial resources. >curated extensions that meet the highest standards of security, functionality, and user experience. Firefox staff thoroughly evaluate each extension before it receives Recommended status. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-program https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
- LtWorf 4y ago
  Opera browser was vetting every extension manually.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stjohnswarts 4y ago
That's because while Apple has monetary incentive to keep up the walled garden it really does have provide value to apple customers. I know google is selling everything and the farm about me when I use thier services. If apple wants my business they'll keep on doing what they're doing, I don't see ads on their platform and haven't seen any credible reports they're selling everything they know about me to the government and anyone who will pay $$ for that. I hastled myself for years keeping a rooted phone with trimmed down Android OS in various forms, but it was a lot of work. With apple I just buy a phone and use it and don't have to worry them selling me out every step I make or allow apps to rifle through my files and photos.

hailwren 4y ago

> Imagine working at Google and thinking you're actually doing something good for the world.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
The term is called "cognitive dissonance".

bambax 4y ago

The wording of the blog is pure doublespeak: > as we shift our focus to Manifest V3. This change will give Chrome users increased safety and peace of mind while browsing and installing extensions by providing more transparency and control over permissions, adding stricter protocols for accessing resources outside the extension’s context, and ensuring that extensions work well on all devices It sounds like government gobbledygook, with even more lies (there are no extensions on Chrome on mobile, so what "all devices" means is anyone's guess). I often wonder what goes on in the mind of people writing this. Are they happy? Why did they choose to work in tech instead of some administration, if BS is their thing? Is it just for the money?