23 ms·

> Exactly how the rest of the world feels about this is not necessarily relevant, though. Google owns the world's most popular web browser, the world's largest

by mabbo 3y ago

> Exactly how the rest of the world feels about this is not necessarily relevant, though. Google owns the world's most popular web browser, the world's largest advertising network, the world's biggest search engine, the world's most popular operating system, and some of the world's most popular websites. So really, Google can do whatever it wants. This is the point that company breakups start to make a lot of sense. When Google can do something that every one of it's users hates and none of us can do anything about it, they perhaps have too much market power.

kelnos 3y ago
> When Google can do something that every one of it's users hates I don't think this is remotely the case. Quite a few tech-savvy people I know (some of them software developers) use Chrome and mostly don't care about whatever Google does with it. I mention "manifest v3" and get a blank stare. I talk about advertising and ad blockers, and most people don't care, with some of them not even using ad blockers. We really live in a bubble, here on HN. Most people think of privacy as some abstract thing that they have little control over, and are mostly fine with that. And some are even also fine with government erosion of privacy, in the name of "save the children" style arguments, and of corporate erosion of privacy, in the name of getting free stuff in exchange for their personal information. It's a sad state of affairs. If most people really did care strongly about these sorts of issues, then I think it would be baffling why we haven't seen more change here -- after all, Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use. But the lack of change is no surprise: most people don't care.
- lima 3y ago
  I'm a tech-savvy person and I consider Manifest v3 an improvement (improves security + performance), and Firefox implements it as well as things like declarativeNetRequest[1]. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/declarativeNetRequest https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
  - gruez 3y ago
    Manifest v3 itself is an improvement and is probably non-controversial. I can't see why anyone would think deprecating manifest v2 along with removing webRequest is a good thing. The latter is what everyone is mad about when they talk about "manifest v3". I'm not sure whether you're trying to making a nitpick point about the difference between the two, or you legitimately think the latter is a good thing.
  - hn92726819 3y ago
    Can you expand on the security improvements of v3? This is the first I've heard this. As for performance... That sounds dubious. Declarative blocking surely will be faster than v2, but what is being blocked by v2, I would imagine, is generally way slower than the difference between v2 and v3. At the end of the day, I don't see the performance of my browser negatively impacted by uBlock Origin, I see it saving CPU, bandwidth, memory, privacy, etc. I'd be willing to bet that whatever isn't blocked by v3 is sifnificantly slower than whatever supposed slowness there is with v2 (in general).
    - plorkyeran 3y ago
      Google's PR has claimed that manifest v3 has security and privacy improvements, but it's pretty straightforwardly a lie.
      - j16sdiz 3y ago
        V3 security is like closing a window in a room with fully open door --- it's good if we have someone watching the door , and we don't.
- neilv 3y ago
  > We really live in a bubble, here on HN. Multiple bubbles on HN. Obviously, most of us are complicit in some techbro business conventions today that, 30 years ago, would've gotten us shunned by our peers, and reported to the authorities. (Not that current phenomena weren't foreseen. SF writers had already been all over it. Anecdotally, Internet-savvy techies were often informed by various forward-looking thinking and by world history, and tended to act like stewards rather than exploiters.)
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    Even in 1985, there was the RISKS list... and it's still around. Archive: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ So much of our current hellscape was foretold long ago.
- anderspitman 3y ago
  I don't see a huge difference between Firefox and Chrome these days, as they implement everything Google tells them to (and pays them to)
  - the_third_wave 3y ago
    I can still block content in any way I see fit on Gecko-based applications, not so much on Blink-based things. There are many things about Firefox-the-browser and Mozilla-the-organisation which could do with an overhaul but as it stands it is still my go-to browser. I only use Blink-based things to test and for those (annoying) sites which insist on it in which case I first try Bromite, then Ungoogled Chromium. If it still does not work it is not worth visiting. I do not have Chrome installed on any device and have never felt I was missing out.
  - K0nserv 3y ago
    This just isn't true, have look through https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ and check the authors of some of the proposals Mozilla are negative about. There's even a post on front page right now about Mozilla's position on the very proposal we are discussing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857032
- ineptech 3y ago
  I don't buy this. I'm sure most iphone users don't care when you ask them about privacy or manifest v3 as an abstract concept, but remember what happened when Apple tried to push a U2 album to them? They lost their collective shit. They may not write blog posts about privacy or donate to the EFF, but they have deeply personal relationships with "their" phone and they absolutely hate being reminded that it isn't really theirs. If this weren't true, Apple could just start inserting ads into every iphone's Safari window tomorrow, and Youtube could serve the ad in the same stream as the video to defeat adblockers, and they'd make a bunch of extra money with no downside. The fact that they don't do this suggests that Apple and Google understand this: people only tolerate restricted platforms that do a convincing job of pretending to be unrestricted. In practice, this means that step 1 of Google foisting off user-hostile stuff on us is getting Firefox to include it too, which is presumably why they spend so much money on it.
  - nl 3y ago
    No one I knew really cared much about the U2 album except that it was a bad album and they didn't want it in their collection. From the people I know there no one upset about the power dynamics - everyone who complained would have been 100% happy if Apple had given them an album they liked.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      And also, in a bug I'm not sure was entirely on Apple, when plugged into many car stereos iTunes would start playing the first song in your library, so users were annoyed because everythime they'd plug their phone into their car to charge it would start playing a 3rd tier U2 album.
      - gessha 3y ago
        Ba-ba-Barbara, Santa Barbara Ba-ba-Barbara, Santa Barbara…
      - pjerem 3y ago
        It still happens it’s still The Miracle / Song Of Innocence / U2 and it’s still annoying.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > mostly don't care about whatever Google does This is not support, this is lack of awareness or apathy.
- alex7734 3y ago
  > after all, Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use I don't use Firefox because it's slower than Chrome and because their behavior regarding limiting which extensions are available in phones, requiring signed extensions, Firefox Pocket, ads in new tab page, etc, does not exactly give me confidence that Mozilla truly has my interests in mind. In fact I bet they'll implement the nightmare DRM API once it's done swiftly and without complaint lest their money flow suffer. If Mozilla ever decides to stop screwing around, clearly position themselves as an ally of the consumer, clearly express support for adblockers and put resources into making the browser faster and better and more customizable instead of whatever makes their CEO richer then I'll switch to Firefox even if it is a bit slower or has some flaws. In the meantime uBlock works right now in Chrome which makes it usable, so since Chrome is the fastest right now, Chrome it is.
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    Mozilla just took position against this DRM API: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/852#issuecomment-1648820747 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/852#is... Also, Firefox just passed ahead of Chrome on some JS speed benchmark, so you should get ready to switch back!
    - alex7734 3y ago
      That's nice to know, I'll give it a try soon then!
      - Tingling7497 3y ago
        It's for nightly currently (+2 from prod version), but I'm using dev on my work computer and base prod on my private one, and it's _fast_. Just setup ublock origin to filter annoyances as well, and it actually quite quickens the browsing experience. PS Chrome is faster because it cheats and takes shortcuts in loading CSS. Check it out, it skips some frames when loading, to show the page faster.
  - worrycue 3y ago
- mistrial9 3y ago
  this argument is inadequate because it only examines and explains one side of a multi-part system. The users of consumer electronics as a mass at a point in time is not sufficient, even if well described, to explain important changes of the system over time. When you talk about communications technology adopted at a societal scale, changes in norms and routine have ripple effects. Most certainly one of those is a change in asymmetric power relations by central communications companies, versus the user of their systems who get strictly limited information views of what is happening with their phone calls or emails. When you have asymmetric power relations with market advantage and secondly literal surveillance at stake, a unilateral change in the service agreement is not a small "oh well" matter. This single statement "people do not care" does not show all the players, and most especially does not show the players making decisions, the management of the companies making more money or new revenues with new decisions.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use. The problem is that it isn't. Do you know why Firefox managed to usurp IE6 in the first place? Because it won the adoption and appeal of tech enthusiasts and professionals. Mom and pop (read: the general population) switched to Firefox from IE6 because their tech nerd kids installed it for them, and the enterprise largely moved off of IE6 dependence because the general population moved off. But the Firefox today is not the Firefox that defeated IE6. Mozilla steadily eroded and destroyed every single thing tech enthusiasts and professionals loved about Firefox, to the point it practically became just a Chrome ripoff. At that point, why bother? Chrome's right there, the real deal. Not to mention Mozilla happily takes money from Google with no shame at all so their CEO can get her fat paychecks. Firefox is not a viable alternative, Firefox is literally controlled opposition to pedantically argue Chrome is not a monopoly. Not even the Intel and AMD x86 duopoly is this blatant.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Firefox did not defeat IE6. That was Chrome. Firefox has basically been a fringe browser since Netscape imploded. The original reason Google started the Chrome project was that the stagnation of IE6 was a barrier to implementing the web software they wanted to build. At least that's what they told us.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      No, it was Firefox that defeated IE6. Chrome came and defeated Firefox; Firefox's reign was rather shortlived. It seems this particular moment in history has been either forgotten or rewritten, judging from this thread and another one from yesterday.
      - acomjean 3y ago
        This is true. As someone who had a work time card I could fill out on Solaris using Firefox. This the new time card website came out that was “ie” only and we had to log onto a virtual NT server do our time card. Ugh. It was a nightmare. Then slowly Firefox came back. It was short lived majority but I still use it. I rather like it.
- onethought 3y ago
  If I don't want to be tracked, I won't use chrome. If I don't care then I'll use it. Just like I'll have some conversations on WeChat but if I want to talk about Chinese politics maybe I'll do that on another platform. I don't really see the erosion in the corporate space. The erosion of privacy is happening at the government level. With "forced backdoor" laws and/or just outright forking the internet backbone (ala PRISM). I've never really understood "Corporate erosion of privacy"... It's opposite, Privacy is literally a USP of Apple products. They had to back out changes that hinted at an erosion of that trust with the on-device processing of Photos for cloud-sync. People are more aware than ever.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  "Exactly how the rest of the world feels about this is not necessarily relevant, though." This quote is from page 2 of the article. It is common for certain HN commenters to remind us that HN is a bubble. True. However, the author of this article is not necessarily in this bubble. But, honestly, what difference does it make whether HN is a bubble or not. Google is a bubble. The Register, another entity outside the HN bubble, calls Google "The Chocolate Factory".^1 Does it matter that Google is a bubble. 1. Of course it's also common for certain HN commenters to try to broadly dismiss all journalism, on a news aggregator site no less. Maybe there is a pattern here. Would anyone outside the HN bubble try to discredit the observations about so-called "tech" companies mabe by those inside it. (Besides those with vested interests in so-called "tech" companies.) All evidence I've seen since 2009 points to the contrary.
- ChrisCinelli 3y ago
  The reason HN is a bubble is because people here actually get and interested in real tech news. If a journalist would explain these news to the masses AND the news has a way to reach the masses. These days these kinds of news do not make it to broadcasted news and most people do not watch the old broadcasted news. The news currently get people attention from the news feed on Android and Apples phones. Those feeds recommend only the kind of content you usually interact with. No many people gets tech articles. And you can even argue that there is some extra filters on what news get on the feed in first place.
- darreninthenet 3y ago
  I have to disagree with Firefox... in terms of functionality and configurability it's by far and away my preferred browser but in terms of performance it just crunches to a crawl on my Mac. Load times of pages are absolutely fine but changing tabs crunch , scroll down the webpage judder freeze whereas Edge is just silky smooth. Maybe it's an extension or three I'm running but I just want to use the bloody thing not sit there and figure out what extension is not working nicely (and then potentially find out it's none of them) on one platform but is fine on another. Every so often I go back and have look to see if it's improvised but it hasn't in the last few years for me.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    Using Firefox on a couple of Macs (one of them is >8 years old), and a couple of Linux systems. Setting aside the fact that it's as fast as or faster than Chrome, it doesn't crawl any of my machines with >500 tabs (this has 562 as of now). If you want to dig into your performance numbers there's "about:performance" to see what is using your processor and RAM.
    - darreninthenet 3y ago
      Did that and weirdly nothing seems to be excessive... indeed the Macs own performance monitor doesn't suggest anything is particular excessively using cpu or ram but here it is juddering away especially when scrolling pages. Three year old Mac btw... everything else runs pretty well... if I get a chance I might fire up Firefox in Parallels and see if it's a Mac issue
      - bayindirh 3y ago
        When you write "about:performance" to your address bar, and press enter, you should access to the internal performance monitoring page of Firefox. That should list every tab and extension by RAM use and power impact. Give it a go.
        darreninthenet 3y ago
- jchw 3y ago
  Yeah, because you called it manifest V3, not gimping adblockers, which is what it actually was. How many of Google's users love that they're gimping adblockers? Same for Web Environment Integrity API. Nobody knows what those jargon terms means. That's part of how enshittification works. If everyone knew how badly they were being fucked, this would never work.
  - boppo1 3y ago
    I actually don't understand it well. What does it mean? I can't browse the web from xubuntu any more? I believe it's scary, but can't seem to actually sell myself on that. If it's so bad, why can't we bring a monopoly lawsuit against them over chrome/chromium? This is pretty similar to what Microsoft did, isn't it?
    - jchw 3y ago
      The problem with remote attestation is that there's no bound to exactly how bad it could become. If you can get enough of the internet on browsers that support remote attestation, to the point where it's an acceptable loss to simply reject anyone who does not have a browser that does support remote attestation, you can theoretically assert full control over the end user. What will actually happen? Nobody knows for sure. The most likely outcome is that you will not be able to do banking, watch Twitch streams, etc. on anything other than Chrome, Firefox and Edge, on Windows and macOS. Linux will probably be relegated to the legacy web that does not enforce remote attestation. Alternate browsers like Librewolf, Brave and Mullvad Browser will just disappear as if they never existed. You can not browse Tor on clearnet websites anymore, as if you really could anyways. Etc, etc. > If it's so bad, why can't we bring a monopoly lawsuit against them over chrome/chromium? This is pretty similar to what Microsoft did, isn't it? Microsoft of today is doing things blatantly in the open, that Microsoft of 199x would never dream of doing. The difference now is that all of the major computer manufacturers are basically going the same way, just at different rates. The legal system is not coming to rescue us.
- nintendo1889 3y ago
  'The Four Horsemen of the Info-pocalypse: child pornography, terrorism, money laundering, and The War on Some Drugs.' - Jacob Applebaum - Cypherpunks
gochi 3y ago
But that's the catch, company breakups are extremely hard to perform especially when you're talking about such a giant company being tackled by an organization that only has ~400m in funding. Especially when they can point to the other giant companies as defense against claims of monopolist behavior. See Google using Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon as a reason for why their ad business should not be broken up in the January lawsuit. On top of all this, a lot of users don't care, which is a problem itself, but also leads to an even harder time trying to navigate a company breakup. The convenience is too great for them, and it's too easy for the above noted companies (alongside other giants like Walmart) to shift public opinion.
- kibwen 3y ago
  As hard as it may be, to paraphrase the ancient parable: The best time to break up Google was 10 years ago. The second-best time to break up Google is today.
  - rvz 3y ago
    You'll be very pleased to hear that it is going to happen soon with two antitrust cases against Google, one for search dominance [0] and the other for their ad business [1] with the former going to happen this year in September. So there is a start on that. So get a front row seat and get ready for what is to come in September this year to witness the beginning of the end of a company once adored by hundreds of techies finally getting broken up to pieces. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/20/doj-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/20/doj-antitrust-lawsuit-agains... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/doj-files-second-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/doj-files-second-antitrust-l...
    - post-it 3y ago
      I'll believe it when I see it.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  I think one of the major problems preventing a tech breakup is that every politician has a portfolio in an index fund and they all know how top heavy in the same seven tech companies that portfolio and the SP500 is. You have the people that should be breaking tech up afraid to do so because their own personal finances would suffer. I don’t know how we get around that problem. It involves personal integrity and putting your own gains below the greater good- both things politicians aren’t known for. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/just-7-companies-are-carrying-the-s-p-500-in-2023-75823741 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
judge2020 3y ago
Even if Google were forced to partition off employees and give up control of Chrome, they would still be allowed to be an influential force that gets a seat at the Chrome decision-making table, just the same as Meta, Apple, etc if they were to want it. How would this have changed the existence of the Web Integrity API?
- azemetre 3y ago
  Similar arguments were made about AT&T and I think the country survived. Break them up, then use the precedent to break up every other big tech co. A competitive market is way more important than Google.
  - geysersam 3y ago
    Breaking up big tech would unlock so much value and innovation
tiltowait 3y ago
This line is what makes me roll my eyes whenever I hear someone say "Safari is the new IE". Safari missing a couple of features few websites use is far less of an issue than the dominant browser company can just invent new "standards" that make the web actively worse for everyone. (Sorry, I should say "everyone except for the scummy advertisers".)
- smaudet 3y ago
  Safari is just Apples Opera (before they went Blink and made themselves irrelevant). They aren't great, just another proprietary browser. Every time I've used it has been sub-par. It reminded me a lot of Opera in that it was very opinionated, even if it tried to offer some feature. Apple makes money off of apps, not websites, though, so it makes sense they don't invest much into their browser.
  - sanxiyn 3y ago
    Safari has the fastest JavaScript engine. In many respects, Safari's implementation is top notch. Apple makes money off phones and people use Safari a lot on phones. I don't understand why people think Apple don't invest on Safari.
    - troupo 3y ago
      Because people are in arms about Web Integrity API, but a lot of the same people will crucify Safari (and Firefox) for not implementing a bunch of Chrome-only non-standards (like the plethora of hardware APIs)
    - jeltz 3y ago
      And Opera had the fastest rendering engine. Still did not make it a good browser.
  - xctr94 3y ago
    Subpar on what? That’s the important part. For my non-techie family, it seems to do everything they need WHILST saving a lot of battery life. If that’s the criteria, it’s a great browser. I’d never use it due to lack of uBlock Origin and good dev tools, but it’s hard to argue with the speed and battery efficiency on macOS.
jimbob45 3y ago
Google owns the world's most popular web browser, the world's largest advertising network, the world's biggest search engine, the world's most popular operating system, and some of the world's most popular websites. Their hold on these claims are extremely tenuous. No one would be surprised if Firefox, Bing, or iOS resurged and killed Google’s offering, for example.
- hellotomyrars 3y ago
  I’d be a lot surprised if Firefox dethroned chrome or Bing became the dominant search engine. The only circumstance where I wouldn’t be surprised would involve regulatory action I see as an outside chance.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  Microsoft is way too busy shooting themselves in the foot with Bing and OpenAI along with telemetry and all the tracking/dark pattern crap they do on Windows or any of their offerings. They're quite happy scrambling for the crumbs as it is.
deafpolygon 3y ago
The reason why Google hasn't been and won't be is that everything they make is "obstensibly" open-source. (Minus the advertising network) Google Chrome is "open source". Android is "open source". ChromeOS is "open source". Nevermind the truth being more "open source" with proprietary bits (the bits that matter). So the opening argument often is; well, someone else can enter the market and do what they do. But that's missing the trees for the forest (and the devil's in the details).
- realusername 3y ago
  At this point, the "open-source" parts are just legal arguments that they can throw in courts whenever they are attacked for antitrust behavior, nothing more. They know that making it so tedious means it will only be used by a handful of hobbyist and nothing more significant.
tazjin 3y ago
Doing stuff their customers hate is the default MO of most tech companies. There's very little recourse. For example, when Apple makes a user-hostile hardware change, every major Android vendor will copy it in a matter of months[0]. The only thing you can go to after that is niche Chinese phone makers that will cause you a bunch of other pain. I'm basically completely disconnected from Google at this point. My phone requirements forced me to get a phone without Google Play Services, and I live in a country where Google is not dominant. The only thing that still pops up is YouTube occasionally. (Also it would be nice if I could get my old Google Photos archives exported from Photos, but the export in Takeout keeps erroring! Oh well...) [0]: Back when I worked at Google, there was a mailing list thread on a big internal engineering mailing list, where somebody point-blank asked "Did we remove the headphone port on the Pixel because Apple did?". The answer from the product team was a whole bunch of wishy-washy word soup, amounting essentially to "Yes".
- unaindz 3y ago
  > Google Photos export keeps erroring Did you try different export options? I recently had to do one export and it kept failing but exporting using another option worked. I don't remember which one but it was either email or drive.
  - tazjin 3y ago
    Slowly working through them, but you can only do one try every couple of days ;)
bloppe 3y ago
There are some weird implications of this and I don't think the economics point to a viable futures: 1. Unlike EME (the controversial web DRM backed by Google that was standardized somewhat recently), the Web Integrity API requires a third-party service, which involves maintenance costs, as well as development costs to constantly adjust to the arms race against all the hackers who really want to thwart these tests. 2. In a "functioning attestation industry", many attestation servers would compete on price to validate users, making the network efficient and robust. I struggle to see this becoming reality because decent attestation would require very complicated techniques for each supported browser, and there is only 1 company that does both significant browser development and also wants to run an attestation server. 3. In a monopolized attestation industry, Google would be the single point of failure for all DRM-protected media on the internet. Google's down? So is Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc. because they can no longer validate that their users are running an approved version of Chrome. This also give Google an incredible amount of leverage over other companies, because they can change fees and policies unilaterally and there are no alternative games in town. Companies have an incentive not to put themselves in that position. If the entire media industry coalesces around Google Chrome as the only supported browser for media on the internet, and bestowed this incredible market power and leverage upon Google, then it could work. I find it hard to believe that this will slip past every significant regulatory body on Earth, and any significant gaps in market control would make the scheme unworkable.
tim333 3y ago
Dunno. I've got three browsers on the laptop. I usually use Chrome but if it's annoying I'd switch to one of the others. Likewise search and I don't use their OS. I remember Google+ when they ignored feedback on users hating aspects of it and tried to force it on us using their dominant position and it didn't go very well for them.
nintendo1889 3y ago
They are now Msft, they want to own the web. Thankfully we have brave, Tor, Arc, Opera, GrapheneOS, calyxOS, LineageOS etc.... If you purchase a pixel phone, and put graphene OS onto it Google loses money.

by mabbo 3y ago

kelnos 3y ago

> When Google can do something that every one of it's users hates I don't think this is remotely the case. Quite a few tech-savvy people I know (some of them software developers) use Chrome and mostly don't care about whatever Google does with it. I mention "manifest v3" and get a blank stare. I talk about advertising and ad blockers, and most people don't care, with some of them not even using ad blockers. We really live in a bubble, here on HN. Most people think of privacy as some abstract thing that they have little control over, and are mostly fine with that. And some are even also fine with government erosion of privacy, in the name of "save the children" style arguments, and of corporate erosion of privacy, in the name of getting free stuff in exchange for their personal information. It's a sad state of affairs. If most people really did care strongly about these sorts of issues, then I think it would be baffling why we haven't seen more change here -- after all, Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use. But the lack of change is no surprise: most people don't care.

lima 3y ago
I'm a tech-savvy person and I consider Manifest v3 an improvement (improves security + performance), and Firefox implements it as well as things like declarativeNetRequest[1]. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/declarativeNetRequest https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
- gruez 3y ago
  Manifest v3 itself is an improvement and is probably non-controversial. I can't see why anyone would think deprecating manifest v2 along with removing webRequest is a good thing. The latter is what everyone is mad about when they talk about "manifest v3". I'm not sure whether you're trying to making a nitpick point about the difference between the two, or you legitimately think the latter is a good thing.
- hn92726819 3y ago
  Can you expand on the security improvements of v3? This is the first I've heard this. As for performance... That sounds dubious. Declarative blocking surely will be faster than v2, but what is being blocked by v2, I would imagine, is generally way slower than the difference between v2 and v3. At the end of the day, I don't see the performance of my browser negatively impacted by uBlock Origin, I see it saving CPU, bandwidth, memory, privacy, etc. I'd be willing to bet that whatever isn't blocked by v3 is sifnificantly slower than whatever supposed slowness there is with v2 (in general).
  - plorkyeran 3y ago
    Google's PR has claimed that manifest v3 has security and privacy improvements, but it's pretty straightforwardly a lie.
    - j16sdiz 3y ago
      V3 security is like closing a window in a room with fully open door --- it's good if we have someone watching the door , and we don't.
neilv 3y ago
> We really live in a bubble, here on HN. Multiple bubbles on HN. Obviously, most of us are complicit in some techbro business conventions today that, 30 years ago, would've gotten us shunned by our peers, and reported to the authorities. (Not that current phenomena weren't foreseen. SF writers had already been all over it. Anecdotally, Internet-savvy techies were often informed by various forward-looking thinking and by world history, and tended to act like stewards rather than exploiters.)
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  Even in 1985, there was the RISKS list... and it's still around. Archive: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ So much of our current hellscape was foretold long ago.
anderspitman 3y ago
I don't see a huge difference between Firefox and Chrome these days, as they implement everything Google tells them to (and pays them to)
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  I can still block content in any way I see fit on Gecko-based applications, not so much on Blink-based things. There are many things about Firefox-the-browser and Mozilla-the-organisation which could do with an overhaul but as it stands it is still my go-to browser. I only use Blink-based things to test and for those (annoying) sites which insist on it in which case I first try Bromite, then Ungoogled Chromium. If it still does not work it is not worth visiting. I do not have Chrome installed on any device and have never felt I was missing out.
- K0nserv 3y ago
  This just isn't true, have look through https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ and check the authors of some of the proposals Mozilla are negative about. There's even a post on front page right now about Mozilla's position on the very proposal we are discussing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857032
ineptech 3y ago
I don't buy this. I'm sure most iphone users don't care when you ask them about privacy or manifest v3 as an abstract concept, but remember what happened when Apple tried to push a U2 album to them? They lost their collective shit. They may not write blog posts about privacy or donate to the EFF, but they have deeply personal relationships with "their" phone and they absolutely hate being reminded that it isn't really theirs. If this weren't true, Apple could just start inserting ads into every iphone's Safari window tomorrow, and Youtube could serve the ad in the same stream as the video to defeat adblockers, and they'd make a bunch of extra money with no downside. The fact that they don't do this suggests that Apple and Google understand this: people only tolerate restricted platforms that do a convincing job of pretending to be unrestricted. In practice, this means that step 1 of Google foisting off user-hostile stuff on us is getting Firefox to include it too, which is presumably why they spend so much money on it.
- nl 3y ago
  No one I knew really cared much about the U2 album except that it was a bad album and they didn't want it in their collection. From the people I know there no one upset about the power dynamics - everyone who complained would have been 100% happy if Apple had given them an album they liked.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    And also, in a bug I'm not sure was entirely on Apple, when plugged into many car stereos iTunes would start playing the first song in your library, so users were annoyed because everythime they'd plug their phone into their car to charge it would start playing a 3rd tier U2 album.
    - gessha 3y ago
      Ba-ba-Barbara, Santa Barbara Ba-ba-Barbara, Santa Barbara…
    - pjerem 3y ago
      It still happens it’s still The Miracle / Song Of Innocence / U2 and it’s still annoying.
pessimizer 3y ago
> mostly don't care about whatever Google does This is not support, this is lack of awareness or apathy.
alex7734 3y ago
> after all, Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use I don't use Firefox because it's slower than Chrome and because their behavior regarding limiting which extensions are available in phones, requiring signed extensions, Firefox Pocket, ads in new tab page, etc, does not exactly give me confidence that Mozilla truly has my interests in mind. In fact I bet they'll implement the nightmare DRM API once it's done swiftly and without complaint lest their money flow suffer. If Mozilla ever decides to stop screwing around, clearly position themselves as an ally of the consumer, clearly express support for adblockers and put resources into making the browser faster and better and more customizable instead of whatever makes their CEO richer then I'll switch to Firefox even if it is a bit slower or has some flaws. In the meantime uBlock works right now in Chrome which makes it usable, so since Chrome is the fastest right now, Chrome it is.
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  Mozilla just took position against this DRM API: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/852#issuecomment-1648820747 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/852#is... Also, Firefox just passed ahead of Chrome on some JS speed benchmark, so you should get ready to switch back!
  - alex7734 3y ago
    That's nice to know, I'll give it a try soon then!
    - Tingling7497 3y ago
      It's for nightly currently (+2 from prod version), but I'm using dev on my work computer and base prod on my private one, and it's _fast_. Just setup ublock origin to filter annoyances as well, and it actually quite quickens the browsing experience. PS Chrome is faster because it cheats and takes shortcuts in loading CSS. Check it out, it skips some frames when loading, to show the page faster.
- worrycue 3y ago
mistrial9 3y ago
this argument is inadequate because it only examines and explains one side of a multi-part system. The users of consumer electronics as a mass at a point in time is not sufficient, even if well described, to explain important changes of the system over time. When you talk about communications technology adopted at a societal scale, changes in norms and routine have ripple effects. Most certainly one of those is a change in asymmetric power relations by central communications companies, versus the user of their systems who get strictly limited information views of what is happening with their phone calls or emails. When you have asymmetric power relations with market advantage and secondly literal surveillance at stake, a unilateral change in the service agreement is not a small "oh well" matter. This single statement "people do not care" does not show all the players, and most especially does not show the players making decisions, the management of the companies making more money or new revenues with new decisions.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use. The problem is that it isn't. Do you know why Firefox managed to usurp IE6 in the first place? Because it won the adoption and appeal of tech enthusiasts and professionals. Mom and pop (read: the general population) switched to Firefox from IE6 because their tech nerd kids installed it for them, and the enterprise largely moved off of IE6 dependence because the general population moved off. But the Firefox today is not the Firefox that defeated IE6. Mozilla steadily eroded and destroyed every single thing tech enthusiasts and professionals loved about Firefox, to the point it practically became just a Chrome ripoff. At that point, why bother? Chrome's right there, the real deal. Not to mention Mozilla happily takes money from Google with no shame at all so their CEO can get her fat paychecks. Firefox is not a viable alternative, Firefox is literally controlled opposition to pedantically argue Chrome is not a monopoly. Not even the Intel and AMD x86 duopoly is this blatant.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Firefox did not defeat IE6. That was Chrome. Firefox has basically been a fringe browser since Netscape imploded. The original reason Google started the Chrome project was that the stagnation of IE6 was a barrier to implementing the web software they wanted to build. At least that's what they told us.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    No, it was Firefox that defeated IE6. Chrome came and defeated Firefox; Firefox's reign was rather shortlived. It seems this particular moment in history has been either forgotten or rewritten, judging from this thread and another one from yesterday.
    - acomjean 3y ago
      This is true. As someone who had a work time card I could fill out on Solaris using Firefox. This the new time card website came out that was “ie” only and we had to log onto a virtual NT server do our time card. Ugh. It was a nightmare. Then slowly Firefox came back. It was short lived majority but I still use it. I rather like it.
onethought 3y ago
If I don't want to be tracked, I won't use chrome. If I don't care then I'll use it. Just like I'll have some conversations on WeChat but if I want to talk about Chinese politics maybe I'll do that on another platform. I don't really see the erosion in the corporate space. The erosion of privacy is happening at the government level. With "forced backdoor" laws and/or just outright forking the internet backbone (ala PRISM). I've never really understood "Corporate erosion of privacy"... It's opposite, Privacy is literally a USP of Apple products. They had to back out changes that hinted at an erosion of that trust with the on-device processing of Photos for cloud-sync. People are more aware than ever.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"Exactly how the rest of the world feels about this is not necessarily relevant, though." This quote is from page 2 of the article. It is common for certain HN commenters to remind us that HN is a bubble. True. However, the author of this article is not necessarily in this bubble. But, honestly, what difference does it make whether HN is a bubble or not. Google is a bubble. The Register, another entity outside the HN bubble, calls Google "The Chocolate Factory".^1 Does it matter that Google is a bubble. 1. Of course it's also common for certain HN commenters to try to broadly dismiss all journalism, on a news aggregator site no less. Maybe there is a pattern here. Would anyone outside the HN bubble try to discredit the observations about so-called "tech" companies mabe by those inside it. (Besides those with vested interests in so-called "tech" companies.) All evidence I've seen since 2009 points to the contrary.
ChrisCinelli 3y ago
The reason HN is a bubble is because people here actually get and interested in real tech news. If a journalist would explain these news to the masses AND the news has a way to reach the masses. These days these kinds of news do not make it to broadcasted news and most people do not watch the old broadcasted news. The news currently get people attention from the news feed on Android and Apples phones. Those feeds recommend only the kind of content you usually interact with. No many people gets tech articles. And you can even argue that there is some extra filters on what news get on the feed in first place.
darreninthenet 3y ago
I have to disagree with Firefox... in terms of functionality and configurability it's by far and away my preferred browser but in terms of performance it just crunches to a crawl on my Mac. Load times of pages are absolutely fine but changing tabs crunch , scroll down the webpage judder freeze whereas Edge is just silky smooth. Maybe it's an extension or three I'm running but I just want to use the bloody thing not sit there and figure out what extension is not working nicely (and then potentially find out it's none of them) on one platform but is fine on another. Every so often I go back and have look to see if it's improvised but it hasn't in the last few years for me.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  Using Firefox on a couple of Macs (one of them is >8 years old), and a couple of Linux systems. Setting aside the fact that it's as fast as or faster than Chrome, it doesn't crawl any of my machines with >500 tabs (this has 562 as of now). If you want to dig into your performance numbers there's "about:performance" to see what is using your processor and RAM.
  - darreninthenet 3y ago
    Did that and weirdly nothing seems to be excessive... indeed the Macs own performance monitor doesn't suggest anything is particular excessively using cpu or ram but here it is juddering away especially when scrolling pages. Three year old Mac btw... everything else runs pretty well... if I get a chance I might fire up Firefox in Parallels and see if it's a Mac issue
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      When you write "about:performance" to your address bar, and press enter, you should access to the internal performance monitoring page of Firefox. That should list every tab and extension by RAM use and power impact. Give it a go.
      - darreninthenet 3y ago
jchw 3y ago
Yeah, because you called it manifest V3, not gimping adblockers, which is what it actually was. How many of Google's users love that they're gimping adblockers? Same for Web Environment Integrity API. Nobody knows what those jargon terms means. That's part of how enshittification works. If everyone knew how badly they were being fucked, this would never work.
- boppo1 3y ago
  I actually don't understand it well. What does it mean? I can't browse the web from xubuntu any more? I believe it's scary, but can't seem to actually sell myself on that. If it's so bad, why can't we bring a monopoly lawsuit against them over chrome/chromium? This is pretty similar to what Microsoft did, isn't it?
  - jchw 3y ago
    The problem with remote attestation is that there's no bound to exactly how bad it could become. If you can get enough of the internet on browsers that support remote attestation, to the point where it's an acceptable loss to simply reject anyone who does not have a browser that does support remote attestation, you can theoretically assert full control over the end user. What will actually happen? Nobody knows for sure. The most likely outcome is that you will not be able to do banking, watch Twitch streams, etc. on anything other than Chrome, Firefox and Edge, on Windows and macOS. Linux will probably be relegated to the legacy web that does not enforce remote attestation. Alternate browsers like Librewolf, Brave and Mullvad Browser will just disappear as if they never existed. You can not browse Tor on clearnet websites anymore, as if you really could anyways. Etc, etc. > If it's so bad, why can't we bring a monopoly lawsuit against them over chrome/chromium? This is pretty similar to what Microsoft did, isn't it? Microsoft of today is doing things blatantly in the open, that Microsoft of 199x would never dream of doing. The difference now is that all of the major computer manufacturers are basically going the same way, just at different rates. The legal system is not coming to rescue us.
nintendo1889 3y ago
'The Four Horsemen of the Info-pocalypse: child pornography, terrorism, money laundering, and The War on Some Drugs.' - Jacob Applebaum - Cypherpunks

gochi 3y ago

But that's the catch, company breakups are extremely hard to perform especially when you're talking about such a giant company being tackled by an organization that only has ~400m in funding. Especially when they can point to the other giant companies as defense against claims of monopolist behavior. See Google using Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon as a reason for why their ad business should not be broken up in the January lawsuit. On top of all this, a lot of users don't care, which is a problem itself, but also leads to an even harder time trying to navigate a company breakup. The convenience is too great for them, and it's too easy for the above noted companies (alongside other giants like Walmart) to shift public opinion.

kibwen 3y ago
As hard as it may be, to paraphrase the ancient parable: The best time to break up Google was 10 years ago. The second-best time to break up Google is today.
- rvz 3y ago
  You'll be very pleased to hear that it is going to happen soon with two antitrust cases against Google, one for search dominance [0] and the other for their ad business [1] with the former going to happen this year in September. So there is a start on that. So get a front row seat and get ready for what is to come in September this year to witness the beginning of the end of a company once adored by hundreds of techies finally getting broken up to pieces. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/20/doj-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/20/doj-antitrust-lawsuit-agains... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/doj-files-second-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/doj-files-second-antitrust-l...
  - post-it 3y ago
    I'll believe it when I see it.
Mistletoe 3y ago
I think one of the major problems preventing a tech breakup is that every politician has a portfolio in an index fund and they all know how top heavy in the same seven tech companies that portfolio and the SP500 is. You have the people that should be breaking tech up afraid to do so because their own personal finances would suffer. I don’t know how we get around that problem. It involves personal integrity and putting your own gains below the greater good- both things politicians aren’t known for. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/just-7-companies-are-carrying-the-s-p-500-in-2023-75823741 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

judge2020 3y ago

Even if Google were forced to partition off employees and give up control of Chrome, they would still be allowed to be an influential force that gets a seat at the Chrome decision-making table, just the same as Meta, Apple, etc if they were to want it. How would this have changed the existence of the Web Integrity API?

azemetre 3y ago
Similar arguments were made about AT&T and I think the country survived. Break them up, then use the precedent to break up every other big tech co. A competitive market is way more important than Google.
- geysersam 3y ago
  Breaking up big tech would unlock so much value and innovation

tiltowait 3y ago

This line is what makes me roll my eyes whenever I hear someone say "Safari is the new IE". Safari missing a couple of features few websites use is far less of an issue than the dominant browser company can just invent new "standards" that make the web actively worse for everyone. (Sorry, I should say "everyone except for the scummy advertisers".)

smaudet 3y ago
Safari is just Apples Opera (before they went Blink and made themselves irrelevant). They aren't great, just another proprietary browser. Every time I've used it has been sub-par. It reminded me a lot of Opera in that it was very opinionated, even if it tried to offer some feature. Apple makes money off of apps, not websites, though, so it makes sense they don't invest much into their browser.
- sanxiyn 3y ago
  Safari has the fastest JavaScript engine. In many respects, Safari's implementation is top notch. Apple makes money off phones and people use Safari a lot on phones. I don't understand why people think Apple don't invest on Safari.
  - troupo 3y ago
    Because people are in arms about Web Integrity API, but a lot of the same people will crucify Safari (and Firefox) for not implementing a bunch of Chrome-only non-standards (like the plethora of hardware APIs)
  - jeltz 3y ago
    And Opera had the fastest rendering engine. Still did not make it a good browser.
- xctr94 3y ago
  Subpar on what? That’s the important part. For my non-techie family, it seems to do everything they need WHILST saving a lot of battery life. If that’s the criteria, it’s a great browser. I’d never use it due to lack of uBlock Origin and good dev tools, but it’s hard to argue with the speed and battery efficiency on macOS.

jimbob45 3y ago

Google owns the world's most popular web browser, the world's largest advertising network, the world's biggest search engine, the world's most popular operating system, and some of the world's most popular websites. Their hold on these claims are extremely tenuous. No one would be surprised if Firefox, Bing, or iOS resurged and killed Google’s offering, for example.

hellotomyrars 3y ago
I’d be a lot surprised if Firefox dethroned chrome or Bing became the dominant search engine. The only circumstance where I wouldn’t be surprised would involve regulatory action I see as an outside chance.
deafpolygon 3y ago
Microsoft is way too busy shooting themselves in the foot with Bing and OpenAI along with telemetry and all the tracking/dark pattern crap they do on Windows or any of their offerings. They're quite happy scrambling for the crumbs as it is.

deafpolygon 3y ago

The reason why Google hasn't been and won't be is that everything they make is "obstensibly" open-source. (Minus the advertising network) Google Chrome is "open source". Android is "open source". ChromeOS is "open source". Nevermind the truth being more "open source" with proprietary bits (the bits that matter). So the opening argument often is; well, someone else can enter the market and do what they do. But that's missing the trees for the forest (and the devil's in the details).

realusername 3y ago
At this point, the "open-source" parts are just legal arguments that they can throw in courts whenever they are attacked for antitrust behavior, nothing more. They know that making it so tedious means it will only be used by a handful of hobbyist and nothing more significant.

tazjin 3y ago

Doing stuff their customers hate is the default MO of most tech companies. There's very little recourse. For example, when Apple makes a user-hostile hardware change, every major Android vendor will copy it in a matter of months[0]. The only thing you can go to after that is niche Chinese phone makers that will cause you a bunch of other pain. I'm basically completely disconnected from Google at this point. My phone requirements forced me to get a phone without Google Play Services, and I live in a country where Google is not dominant. The only thing that still pops up is YouTube occasionally. (Also it would be nice if I could get my old Google Photos archives exported from Photos, but the export in Takeout keeps erroring! Oh well...) [0]: Back when I worked at Google, there was a mailing list thread on a big internal engineering mailing list, where somebody point-blank asked "Did we remove the headphone port on the Pixel because Apple did?". The answer from the product team was a whole bunch of wishy-washy word soup, amounting essentially to "Yes".

unaindz 3y ago
> Google Photos export keeps erroring Did you try different export options? I recently had to do one export and it kept failing but exporting using another option worked. I don't remember which one but it was either email or drive.
- tazjin 3y ago
  Slowly working through them, but you can only do one try every couple of days ;)

bloppe 3y ago

There are some weird implications of this and I don't think the economics point to a viable futures: 1. Unlike EME (the controversial web DRM backed by Google that was standardized somewhat recently), the Web Integrity API requires a third-party service, which involves maintenance costs, as well as development costs to constantly adjust to the arms race against all the hackers who really want to thwart these tests. 2. In a "functioning attestation industry", many attestation servers would compete on price to validate users, making the network efficient and robust. I struggle to see this becoming reality because decent attestation would require very complicated techniques for each supported browser, and there is only 1 company that does both significant browser development and also wants to run an attestation server. 3. In a monopolized attestation industry, Google would be the single point of failure for all DRM-protected media on the internet. Google's down? So is Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc. because they can no longer validate that their users are running an approved version of Chrome. This also give Google an incredible amount of leverage over other companies, because they can change fees and policies unilaterally and there are no alternative games in town. Companies have an incentive not to put themselves in that position. If the entire media industry coalesces around Google Chrome as the only supported browser for media on the internet, and bestowed this incredible market power and leverage upon Google, then it could work. I find it hard to believe that this will slip past every significant regulatory body on Earth, and any significant gaps in market control would make the scheme unworkable.

tim333 3y ago

Dunno. I've got three browsers on the laptop. I usually use Chrome but if it's annoying I'd switch to one of the others. Likewise search and I don't use their OS. I remember Google+ when they ignored feedback on users hating aspects of it and tried to force it on us using their dominant position and it didn't go very well for them.

nintendo1889 3y ago

They are now Msft, they want to own the web. Thankfully we have brave, Tor, Arc, Opera, GrapheneOS, calyxOS, LineageOS etc.... If you purchase a pixel phone, and put graphene OS onto it Google loses money.