7 ms·

Whether it's AMP or manifest 3 or android source shenanigan or attempts to replace cookies with their FLOC nonsense or this...Google is rapidly turning into a m

• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• xenophonf 6mo ago
  I'm amused at how thoroughly Google adopted Microsoft's playbook. Chrome supplanted Internet Explorer by embracing the open web. But then Google immediately started on extensions, and now they're trying to extinguish the open web with nonsense like Cloud Fraud Defense. All very smoothly done. I mean, people are actually _asking_ for this junk. I'm impressed.
  • olyjohn 6mo ago
    No they didn't. Firefox unseated Internet Explorer. Chrome then got big by putting its installer right on the Google homepage and harassing users to install it. And they had it bundled with other software, and would install as a user so that locked down computers could still run it. They absolutely did not win by embracing open standards.
    • lotsofpulp 6mo ago
      I recall Chrome being a superior browser in the early days, prompting many to switch and evangelizing it.
      • traderj0e 6mo ago
        It was the first to do a separate process per tab, which had security and stability benefits. But it also used like 2x the RAM from the start.
    • homebrewer 6mo ago
      Lots of supposedly technically advanced users switched to Chrome en masse and promoted it on every occasion they could, because it was so much faster, simpler, safer, etc etc. Don't excuse useful idiots from their share of the blame. People warned about dangers of Chrome's growing domination for about as long as I can remember, back to at least 2012, only to be dismissed as paranoid.
    • ocdtrekkie 6mo ago
      People forget that Sundar Pichai's entire claim to success at Google was injecting the Google Toolbar into the Adobe Reader installer which would hijack your search and browsing data on IE, and the launch of Chrome, which was then also injected into the Adobe Reader installer, occurred because Google was concerned IE might block or limit their toolbar. People absolutely did like Google at the time, but the majority of its growth is actually shoveling hijackers into other software installs just like BonzaiBuddy.
      • lotsofpulp 6mo ago
        I recommended everyone to use Chrome simply because Microsoft couldn't be bothered to provide built in PDF viewing and creation. There was a good, long period where Microsoft just decided to let the market run amok with malware for critical software, instead of providing something like Preview on macOS. As a result, the safest option for most lay people was to use Chrome, where they could quickly and easily view, and most important, save pdfs of websites, receipts, etc. Then, once MacBook Airs were solidified + iPhone, I started recommending people use macOS simply because Preview could edit PDFs and easily allow signing them. I haven't used Windows in a very long time, so I assume it's still the same situation.
        • traderj0e 6mo ago
          Yeah I remember when Windows lacked every basic utility that Mac OS had. The most common malware was PDF readers, because a very common search was "how to open pdf." Same with zip.
    • traderj0e 6mo ago
      Chrome has gone off doing their own standards to some extent, but you're forgetting what it was like when Internet Explorer dominated. You basically couldn't use the web without IE because they broke so many standards and implemented them in closed source. Then there was ActiveX on top, straight up Windows binaries in web. And besides there being a dominant engine, only one browser could use that engine. Trading that for Chrome dominance was at least a step up. I use Firefox right now. Occasionally I need to open a site in Chrome instead, but it's rare.
      • ndriscoll 6mo ago
        Chrome didn't solve that though. Quoth Wikipedia: > Firefox usage share grew to a peak of 32.21% in November 2009, with Firefox 3.5 overtaking Internet Explorer 7, although not all versions of Internet Explorer as a whole; Firefox was the browser that embraced open standards and was unseating IE. And ActiveX was used for corporate stuff, not general web sites, so the main reason it died was that Microsoft gave up.
        • traderj0e 6mo ago
          Eh, it was brief and never majority. Chrome was the first to truly usurp IE.
      • generalpf 6mo ago
        I just got a Docusign and it didn't work in Firefox, I had to use Chrome. That's a huge blow right there. (I sent negative feedback about this to Docusign.)
        • traderj0e 6mo ago
          I vaguely remember running into that too a few times, strangely not on every doc. Also one particular part of the Chase mortgage website.
    • vel0city 6mo ago
      Chrome and v8 was just stupidly faster than any other browser and JS stack at the time when I first adoped it. It was a lot buggier in many other ways and many sites just didn't work quite right at the time, but the tradeoff on performance in the early days was very much worth it.
  • narrator 6mo ago
    If I may tie this into other things going on, The California wealth tax as written would force Larry and Sergei, if they didn't move out of California, to basically sell almost their entire stake in Google, and it would probably wind up owned by State Street and Vanguard who outsource their proxy votes to ESG consultants, who will probably vote for more surveillance.
• ocdtrekkie 6mo ago
  > rapidly becoming Always has been. Google was creating cartels like the "Open Handset Alliance" literally decades ago. Via their control of Chrome and Search which are both monopolies, Google holds absolute authority on how websites are rendered and if websites can be found.
  • parineum 6mo ago
    > Chrome and Search which are both monopolies I'm on Firefox and use DuckDuckGo.
    • ToValueFunfetti 6mo ago
      You'd be better off mentioning Safari (17% of users vs. Chrome's 68% and Firefox's 2.2%) and Bing (10% vs Google's 85% and DDG's 1.7%). But nice to know there are two of us!
  • newphone733 6mo ago
    They lost their search monopoly when LLMs came.
    • imglorp 6mo ago
      Lost? No, they shoveled search into the furnace day after day as they prioritized sewage like paid results, link farms, and blog spam while burying the actual result far below, if returned at all. LLM showed up and gave you the direct answer you wanted in <1s; you don't even have to read the shitty troll result page.
  • vel0city 6mo ago
    It cracks me up when people say Chrome is a monopoly, because a massive amount of computing devices do not even ship with Chrome. Windows computers, Macbooks, and iPhones require users go search out and install Chrome on their own out of their own volition, shipping with entirely functional and decent browsers out of the box that they have lots of patterns to push. Even many Android phones ship with browsers other than Chrome as a default still from what I understand. How is Chrome, of all things, a monopoly? Have words just entirely lost all meaning and now monopoly just means "things which are popular that I dislike"?
• phpnode 6mo ago
  Last time this happened we got a bunch of Google employees downplaying the impact of WEI and calling it a nothingburger, that people were being hysterical. I just checked, and everyone I saw defending it has since left the company. I'm sure another wave of Google managers, keen to appeal to the higher-ups, will be here to defend this new initiative any minute now.
  • gessha 6mo ago
    This makes me curious, where did they go?
    • phpnode 6mo ago
      at least one went to Shopify, I'm not sure about the rest
• xiaoyu2006 6mo ago
  Turns out RMS has always been right. How surprising.
  • Aloha 6mo ago
    Indeed, occasionally hammers do find nails to hit.
    • stronglikedan 6mo ago
      Strange analogy considering that RMS got to where he is precisely by finding nails to hit much, much more than occasionally, and much, much more than most hammers.
      • behringer 6mo ago
        The analogy works if you think of RMS as a nailgun.
        • smallnix 6mo ago
          A nailgun hitting nails? This is going nowhere..
          • behringer 6mo ago
            well it drives nails, we've lost the plot!
          • CalRobert 6mo ago
            Much as a hammer tacker hits tacks internally, so a nailgun strikes the nails within itself.
      • Supermancho 6mo ago
        I think it hits perfectly. He espouses that almost every vendor everywhere is doing something immoral and it will inevitably be used against you. Eventually, some of these predictions come true enough for some part of his audiences. I don't think you've made a point about his abilities. I do think you've restated his proclivities, which reinforces the basis for the quip.
• EGreg 6mo ago
  Don't you see it closing all around you? It's not just Google. It's governments, corporations, all around the world, simultaneously. The noose is being tightened gradually, then all at once. And it's coming for all of us: https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillance-from-all-sides-around-the-world/804 https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc... The threats above interlock by design or convergence: Identity layer (1-5) creates the prerequisite for the others. Once identity is established at SIM/account/device level, the carve-outs that make surveillance politically viable become possible (powerful users get exemptions; ordinary users get watched). Device layer (10-12, 16-19) creates the surveillance endpoint. Once content is scanned on the device before encryption, the cryptographic protections at the communications layer become irrelevant. Communications layer (6-9) is the most-defended. Mass scanning has been defeated repeatedly. This is the layer where the resistance has the best track record. Reporting layer (13-15) is nascent. Direct OS-to-government reporting hooks haven't been built yet at scale. The UK's December 2025 proposal is the leading edge. Platform control (20-24) determines whether alternatives can exist. Browser diversity, app distribution diversity, and engine diversity are the structural protections. All three are narrowing. A society with all five layers complete has the technical infrastructure for total surveillance with elite carve-outs. We are roughly 40% of the way there. Whether that infrastructure becomes a dystopia depends on political choices, not technical ones. HN as a whole is surprisingly oblivious to the noose tightening, because many here are super against decentralized distributed things, if they involve any sort of token. You can complain all you want, but downvoting and burying the decentralized alternatives just for groupthink makes you somewhat complicit in the erosion of our privacy and liberties. Even if you might disagree with a project, all the work that goes into it might be a good reason to upvote it instead, considering that without this work, we're basically doomed.
  • kogasa240p 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    • EGreg 6mo ago
      I refer you to all my own comments about decentralized solutions, which you can see in my history. And the posts that have been flagged after amassing too many upvotes. I think that's sufficient.
• deleted 6mo ago
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• doctorpangloss 6mo ago
  what alternative to WEI do you propose? it solves a bajillion Internet-existential problems. it is definitely a crisis. the bot problem is at least as serious as facebook, gmail serving without https. the fact that this kind of comment gets downvoted proves my point. so what if you personally don't like WEI? it doesn't mean the problems aren't real... that aside, i don't know how people say stuff like "malicious force" and then you go and use a bajillion Google-authored, completely free as in beer and often free as in freedom technologies that nobody obligates you to use at all. It's not like Apple, where their software is so shitty (Messages, Apple Photos, etc.) that the only reason people use it is because it is locked down and forced upon you. it's interesting to me that @dang worries about the tenor of conversation changing - he longs for that 2009 world of university-level math people hanging out and writing comments about LISP or whatever - when the real deficit is not intelligence about math but, at the very least, seeing that things are nuanced, to see more sides to a problem besides the most emotionally powerful and the most mathematically neutral ones.
  • idle_zealot 6mo ago
    Bombing every AI data center on Earth would also solve the Internet-existential problems we're facing. But that solution is beyond the pale of course, instead it's incumbent on me to prove to you that panopticon surveillance of every living human being from now until the Sun consumes us is not a reasonable solution to "bots use the Internet".
    • traderj0e 6mo ago
      Ok so what's your solution to the bot problem? I don't have one, unless you count the option of websites not being free-as-in-beer anymore.
      • idle_zealot 6mo ago
        First, I would sooner support the criminalization of misrepresentation of web traffic as human when it is actually a bot than I would allow companies to de-facto require bio-authentication on approved hardware+software stacks to participate in online life. Let the courts sort it out from there. Second, it's not my problem if some website's business model doesn't work anymore, and I resent them trying to make it my problem. If a website is offering a vital service then it is access to that service that needs to be preserved, not whatever company happens to be offering it, especially not if the cost of keeping them solvent is giving up entirely on privacy rights.
• willio58 6mo ago
  > AMP My god AMP was such an annoying thing ~4-5 years ago when I was working in a marketing-forward web dev shop. "Google really likes when you pipe your words into their shitty UI because it saves some time for the user" We were all like, cool so on one hand we're being given complex designs for sites to differentiate them, and on the other hand we're bowing to a megacorp who actually wants to skip the whole web design part entirely and pipe our content through their pre-defined UI. So glad it died. Should have known it would die in a matter of a couple of years with that being the track record for Google in general.
  • xnx 6mo ago
    > skip the whole web design part entirely and pipe our content through their pre-defined UI It's a shame this part didn't stick. I use reading mode every chance I get be cause the more design a page has, the worse it is. For some reason orgs agreed that it is ok to let medium or substack own their content, but hated Google's high speed CDN.