Agree, in the &quot;Clear browsing data&quot; there&#x27;s a clear message. Fine.However in chrome:&#x2F;&#x2F;settings&#x2F;siteData?search=cookies there&#x27;s just a &quot;Remove all&quot; button which in fact doesn&#x27;t remove all cookies. See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ctavan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1044517442993737729" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ctavan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1044517442993737729</a>

Just to play devils advocate.  There could be some security advantage in using cookies rather than some other mechanism for storing user state information.  It could reduce the attack surface.

If I build a service that needs a cookie to persist in the event of a user purging their cookies I don&#x27;t think Google would accept that and just not delete it. The same is true for Google. If a user purges their cookies there shouldn&#x27;t be any set afterwards.However... what&#x27;s probably happening here is that the cookie is being deleted but then created again immediately afterwards because something in the user&#x27;s browser is connected to a Google server and that makes a new cookie if it detects the old one has gone away. The message in the tweet is informing the user that will happen. Arguably that&#x27;s a reasonably useful notification - it stops the user mistakenly believing purging their cookies will log them out.EDIT: Or, more likely, Google are actually storing the user&#x27;s logged in state in localstorage or something, so clearing cookies won&#x27;t log you out because there isn&#x27;t a cookie.

I really hope not, no way Google can just change the nature of cookies in their browser to suit one of their services, it&#x27;s just too much.

I think this is required for my-activity to work 
 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;myactivity.google.com&#x2F;myactivity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;myactivity.google.com&#x2F;myactivity</a>

Office of 20 here. Now almost everyone&#x27;s in agreement that we&#x27;ll move off Chrome. And we&#x27;ll recommend our families and friends do the same.This is how Firefox (pre-bloat) gained traction at the expense of IE, and this is how chrome gained traction at the expense of Firefox&#x2F;IE.And now this is how chrome&#x27;s market share will decline as tech leaders, journalists and then the public find out how much of a privacy nightmare it really is.

Maybe, but what if this crosses over into mainstream news? Is Google prepared for that battle?

I agree and disagree. They didn’t get to where they are now by playing games and leaving major design decisions to seemingly the intern marketing dept. I think it’s safe to assume that information&#x2F;sentiment moves much more quickly in these modern times. I second the recent HN comment that mentioned why Google chose this particular hill to die on.

Only a small fraction of Chrome&#x27;s user base will notice, and not even all of those will care. There are likely tech-savvy people reading this on Chrome 69 right now.

Yup, same. Switched to ff and bing. Was surprisingly frictionless. Next week I&#x27;ll be off gmail too. Up yours google. The week after, I&#x27;m getting rid of my android phone.I&#x27;m a high school IT teacher and have some influence over hundreds of students each year. I&#x27;ve already started to sprinkle in some discussion about privacy and will be sure to inform my students about the issues. Of course I won&#x27;t brow beat my students, but i will encourage them to make informed decisions.In aggregate, over time this kind of behaviour by google will hurt them. No such thing as too big to fail in tech.

Get the tree style tabs plugin, it&#x27;s an essential.

I really puzzles me how could anyone have ever trusted Chrome.

Can I import my Chrome passwords into FF?

How is the speed now of FF compared to Chrome? A few years ago I switched to Chrome because it was way faster. Has FF improved?

For me the performance was not quite up to the mark and had to switch back to Chrome. I guess someone (big corp ideally) should just take the v8 and the html rendering engine from Chrome and build a wrapper and keep it open sourced.

Same here, switched to Firefox. Honestly, I hope Google realize they should respect their users.

Yeah, same here. Though I was becoming increasingly uneasy over the years, this was the final straw. Thanks, Chrome for making this an easy decision.

Honest question: How can you trust FF when they less than a year ago silently modified installers for a small % of users, to include tracking - which then sent all browsing data to a 3rd party?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;press-uk&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;06&#x2F;testing-cliqz-in-firefox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;press-uk&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;06&#x2F;testing-cliqz-i...</a>Or after they (ab)used systems intended for testing features to inject, what&#x27;s basically an ad? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;lookingglass" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;lookingglass</a>

Worked for me. Switched to FF because I just can&#x27;t trust Chrome anymore. FF feels like a breath of fresh air.

In the the end, it is just a problem of privacy VS features.And to be honest, unfortunately, I think most of the average users just want features.

It&#x27;s hubris. Right now Google know they have the power to shape things the way Google want. That&#x27;s true, but it&#x27;s also true that users are more powerful than Google, becoming increasingly aware of the value of their privacy, and that Chrome is paid for with their data.

I&#x27;m sure Microsoft had the same reasoning about IE.

Possibly.Their gain?- Less of a monopoly status.Their losses?- The privacy concerned.- Ad-blocker users.- Over-opinionated users.Good move, for them.

They don&#x27;t care directly - they care because it&#x27;s still the same old world where techies install and configure the browser for them on their computers.Handhelds are different, but computers are just like back in the ol&#x27; days. This is how IE lost.

IMHO When you&#x27;ve got a company as large as Google that is able to do things like openly use dark patterns to trick users into giving up their location data and 99.99% of people aren&#x27;t aware or use their dominant search page to nag users into using a browser that won&#x27;t respect privacy setting or remove Google&#x27;s tracking cookies that&#x27;s the point you need to start thinking about government intervention.Google is behaving like a malware company.We were in this situation with Microsoft in the late 90s-early 00s. I was glad when they got a slap on the wrist and told to stop taking the piss. I hope the EU will do the same for Google.

Do you think they care that techies get annoyed at Chrome? If you’re browsing google.com - which most people on the internet outside of China are doing - without Chrome, you get an intrusive notice telling you that installing Chrome is the best thing you can do.Approximately 99.99% of those people do not know what cookies are, nor do they care.

Nope, they are just finding the theshold at which 5% of people gets annoyed to the extent that they will switch browsers.

This doesn&#x27;t matter.The people who fix your computers or help you over the phone are the family friends who are geeks&#x2F;programmers. Once the geek herd has moved on to something else, then the mass follows whatever they&#x27;re currently using, because they&#x27;re the ones that advocate the change. It will take a few years, but once Google has lost the geek vote, they will die a slow death like Microsoft did. At this point my money is on Microsoft taking the geek mindshare back.This looks exactly like what happened when Chrome started killing IE.

I&#x27;d say 95% of people are happy that their accounts are all synchronised and follows them around. They pick up any device and carry on where they left off, similar to how Kindle bookmarks are synchronised across your devices.IMHO the vast majority are not interested in understanding in the technology, they just want their stuff to work.80 years ago if you had a car then generally you&#x27;d need some understanding, 30 years ago spark plugs needed changing every 5k miles, points needed cleaning etc etc. Now anyone can hop in a car and without doing anything the first problem you&#x27;d probably have is the tyres wearing out.People don&#x27;t want to know how or why, they just want it to be reliable and easy to use.

90% of people won&#x27;t care &#x2F; aren&#x27;t able to understand the issue.That&#x27;s were google is heading its efforts :)

Their mobile app also has support for extensions such as uBlock Origin, which is lovely.

I switched to FireFox yesterday with zero issues and works like a charm (including 1Password and uBlock Origin integration).

Yup I switched to FF, despite its poorer performance (on Mac, anyway). My personal mail is Fastmail. My search engine is DDG. I do use Chrome for debugging web applications, as I just haven&#x27;t been able to get myself accustomed to the FF dev tools... That&#x27;s probably what I&#x27;ll work on next.

it looks like they are deleted. just immediately recreated.

Unfortunately, the average user (I&#x27;m picturing my mom) doesn&#x27;t give two shits about Chrome not deleting Google cookies when clearing data.

Are they trying to promote Firefox or something? Chrome seems to be trying quite hard to annoy people enough to actually uninstall it.

We’re not talking about the case of individual users. If you have a monopoly position in one market, you cannot unfairly use it to give you an advantage in another market.Imagine if Google started delisting sites with Facebook Partner Network ads on them...The ease of switching is completely irrelevant.

sorry, disagree. very very easy to switch browsers.

It’s time for antitrust action. This is just too excessive.

Probably because the site you linked sucks. Also the &#x27;discussion&#x27; was pretty disappointing, some whining about the site and some inflammatory trolling. By one and the same person.

I find the behavior of HN’s community as a whole, and its effect on submissions and comment scores interesting. I wish there was a way to discuss it, in like a meta-HN.A few days ago I posted an article about how the EU proposes a new law that could give up to 6 years in jail for social media posts. A discussion got started but for some readon the post was immediately “flagged” and that put an end to all discussions and upvotes on it. Yours, I notice, was “dead” so probably flagged as well?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18051432" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18051432</a>

I guess it’s a matter of timing. And simple, clear messages as a source.

The submission is marked as [dead] you need to change your settings to see it (enable showdead).

That link leads to me an empty page, is the URL correct?

I posted about this last month here and also in Google Chrome forums but no one seemed to care. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17853092" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17853092</a>

Wow, that is pretty shitty.  Given the number of times over the years that I&#x27;ve had to wipe all Google cookies and site data to fix issues with offline mode in Google Docs, this does not bode well for being able to use Chrome successfully to access even Google&#x27;s own services in future.

Nope, Even if you go to Settings -&gt; cookies then delete the cookies one by one. The cookies just come back magically. I completely stopped using Chrome for this reason.

They can: You have to sign out of your Google account. Afterwards you can delete the cookies in Chrome and they will actually be gone.

You can clean out ~&#x2F;.config&#x2F;chromium&#x2F; in a cron job or in a wrapper script around the chrom{e,ium} binary.

Can Google cookies be deleted ? This seems to have gone too far

I recommend this read: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.lukaszolejnik.com&#x2F;am-i-logged-in-or-not-gdpr-case-study" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.lukaszolejnik.com&#x2F;am-i-logged-in-or-not-gdpr-ca...</a>

GDPR can apply to personal data on a piece of paper. What matters is the data, and what is done with it.Does that cookie get read by Google? Of course, or there would be no point. Does it enhance their tracking? Most likely. Is there a GDPR compliant opt-out without loss of features? At first glance it seems not.

They&#x27;re tampering with the expected operation of the browser so that even after the user explicitly told them not to it still sends personally identifiable tracking information to their servers.I&#x27;m glad the GDPR is in effect, so instead of &quot;this should be illegal&quot; we can say &quot;of course this is blatantly illegal&quot;.I hope they get a fine for this, with multipliers for how deliberate it is, and for keeping on defending the behaviour even after being called out.

How can GDPR apply to processes running locally on your machine?At best, you can claim misleading advertising (which, is often handled by the fair trade commission or something similar, and often has to show damages before they can award anything).

I&#x27;d recommend supporting <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noyb.eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noyb.eu&#x2F;</a> though.

No it doesn&#x27;t. Press Ctrl+Shift+Del and it takes you directly to a screen that lets you &quot;delete cookies&quot;, which it apparently doesn&#x27;t. What&#x27;s surprising about that being illegal? They are literally lying to their users about their  privacy.

I don&#x27;t understand why something like that would be illegal under the GDPR. You are told when you wipe your cookies that Google cookies won&#x27;t be deleted. Also your browser letting you wipe your cookies is not some kind of human right.

Not just that but also risk a big fine; &quot;regular&quot; GDPR violations (when warnings are ignored) can be tens of millions, anti-trust fines can be half a billion easily. The EU compensates for tax loopholes via big fines.

I&#x27;d recommend not using chrom{e,ium} instead. They might be &#x27;forced&#x27; by a court to apply bandaids, but they&#x27;ll just find some new area to exploit.

You can do it here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;policies&#x2F;troubleshooter&#x2F;7575787" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;policies&#x2F;troubleshooter&#x2F;7575787</a>

I recommend that anyone that has a problem with this in Europe file a GDPR complaint, and if you&#x27;re in the US file a complaint with your attorney general. Some states&#x27; attornies general are looking for new ways to come down on Google, and this is a good start. If you have a setting to delete all cookies and it doesn&#x27;t do that, that&#x27;s against the law in some places.

That was it for me. I hit the uninstall button. Enough!

I agree, but running Chrome on a Chromebook is not so easy to avoid :(

i found that on my machines Chrome 69 is one of the fastest and consumes the least amount of ram of all Chrome releases so far.
on mac the difference between firefox and chrome is night and day for both speed and memory consumption, unfortunately. even safari 12 fares better than firefox in this regard.

Sounds like Chrome 69 really sucks. Would kick out of laptop for not deleting cookies.

Ha, this does not affect me personally, because of the way I do not use Chromium. Instead of calling it, I don&#x27;t.

Ha, this does not affect me personally, because of the way I use Chromium. Instead of calling it directly, I call a script which copies white-listed files and directories from the main Chromium data directory to a new data directory in &#x2F;tmp, and then starts Chromium with the new data directory as data directory. After the directory in &#x2F;tmp is deleted, there are sure to be no more cookies from that session.

This sounds like a bug. Could you please file it at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crbug.com&#x2F;new" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crbug.com&#x2F;new</a>?

No IT staff in my shop. And the last 3 version upgrades have removed all my extensions, while trying to force the Google Drive extension on my installation. So the thing is, I’m heavily reliant on 1Password, and force uninstalling that extension has made Chrome useless to me. I refuse to reinstall my extensions again and I refuse to log in to Chrome to have my extensions synced. If they want to break my browser on autopilot, they can fuck off.

Happened to me as well (with no corporate IT around)

I updated Chromium to version 69 on a personal debian 9.5, but it didn&#x27;t touch any of my settings nor removed any installed extensions.I don&#x27;t (and never did) log into Chromium with my Google account however, so no syncing is happening.

Sync is disabled by Corporate IT by default. Not suggesting any malevolence, just wanted to check whether anyone else experienced a similar suspicious event as well.

This can happen if somehow sync got enabled when you signed in.Sync kicked in, noticed a mismatch between your current setup and the one you had set up many years ago while testing the “sign into chrome” process and set your setting to the one in the cloud.It’s caught me out a couple of times too.

Just got the update at work, and miraculously my uBlock adblocking extension was removed and DuckDuckGo as the default search engine replaced with Google. Looks like all my customizations were replaced by defaults. Now I&#x27;m wondering whether it was our IT&#x27;s fault or due to Google actions.

The list of what&#x27;s left after you &quot;Clear all cookies&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ctavan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1044286636991877120" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ctavan&#x2F;status&#x2F;1044286636991877120</a>Even YouTube&#x27;s stuff are left, that&#x27;s crazy.

I tried looking for config options but couldn&#x27;t find any. I am just a version behind. Will resume auto updates when they fix this annoying behaviour.

Disabling updates is really bad idea. Maybe it is still possible to switch back to old functionality using chrome:&#x2F;&#x2F;flags ?

wow that is super annoying, makes full screen unusable.

Browsers run remote code locally.Disabling any browser&#x27;s auto-update is one of the worst computer security ideas in 2018.Be a good netizen and reactivate those auto-updates or simply uninstall Chrome.

Chrome 69 on Mac puts Close&#x2F;Minimise&#x2F;Maximise buttons in an additional bar when in fullscreen mode. It&#x27;s super irritating to see an additional bar when you move mouse to top of screen.I have downgraded to Chrome 68 and disabled auto updates.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;productforums.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!topic&#x2F;chrome&#x2F;D0dB6jJ_Lwo;context-place=topicsearchin&#x2F;chrome&#x2F;category$3Agive-feature-feedback-and-suggestions%7Csort:relevance%7Cspell:false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;productforums.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!topic&#x2F;chrome&#x2F;D0dB6j...</a>

There are really very few things Chrome is better at than Firefox these days.

It shows just how much better Chrome is on every other aspect.

That’s pretty much the reason Google has a browser in the first place. Most normal users don’t really grok the difference between ”browser” and ”Google” anyway.

if you want to use a web browser - use Brave browser.

If I remember correctly, that&#x27;s what Google said when Chrome was introduced. Browsers at that time did not adequately support their services, so they made their own browser.

Yep. Google Chrome is not a web browser anymore. It is a portal to Google&#x27;s services.If you want to use a web browser, then use Firefox.

You should be good if you&#x27;re using Android without Google services, I think.

I&#x27;m stuck on deciding what my primary mail provider will be. I do not mind paying a few bucks a month, would anyone have a suggestion? Regarding drive replacement, I will probably host a nextcloud instance.

Honestly I don’t think I even do that many actual searches any more, maybe I work too much, or am just odd?The most frequent services I use, after thinking about it, are:- local business&#x2F;food&#x2F;bars (hours, reviews)
- driving directions
- accessing email to confirm a signup&#x2F;lookup a receipt&#x2F;license etc
- events, theater showtimes
- flight prices
- pay bills etc
- check reviews&#x2F;HN&#x2F; random articles.Most of these I access directly or could be provided by any basic app&#x2F;search engine.After reviewing this list, you are left with a few extremely low margin services and a dismal grouping of actual usage, at least seemingly from Google’s point of view.I’m not saying I’m better than a non power user (mom etc), but are they really worth more? Does clicking on Pinterest links half of the day, or forwarding political&#x2F;funny emails really have value to 3rd party companies? (Google etc)Maybe in the short term, there is a circular, ad revenue generation model, but is it really sustainable?

Qwant is worse then Google, but better then Bing or DDG. Try it.

Bing is nowhere near &quot;(Just as good as G)&quot;. If it was, a lot more people would have already switched. As of now, it&#x27;s surprisingly behind Google in almost all but the most basic searches.

For analytics, we had one here just this week:
Simple Analytics<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18024277" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18024277</a>

If you have your own server somewhere or access to such managed by someone you trust may I suggest using a meta-search engine like Searx [1] instead? That way you get to swat a whole cloud of flies in one fell swoop:1: no personal tracking or profiling data for the search providers2: no &#x27;personalised&#x27; search3: search results from several providers condensed into one list, i.e. more results for the same queryYou can also use one of the public Searx instances [2] if you trust them enough not to do their own profiling. By default Searx does not use cookies but there are other ways of tracking individual browsers so that is not a guarantee for tracking-free browsing.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;asciimoo&#x2F;searx&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;asciimoo&#x2F;searx&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;asciimoo&#x2F;searx&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Searx-instances" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;asciimoo&#x2F;searx&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Searx-instances</a>

But Bing is Microsoft. Aren&#x27;t they evil ? :)

Im a longtime ios user thinking of switching to android soon - can you elaborate on android spying? All android devices? How do they spy and what do they gather? I hadnt come across this in my research so far

Drop Android to... What?It seems the only option is iOS and I don&#x27;t want that...

What&#x27;s the alternative to Android though? Apple has its own well-documented issues, as well as a rather large price-tag. I just use my phone for maps and some chat services, don&#x27;t need a very fancy phone. Even the iPhone 7 is listed at £449, which is already £150 more than I paid for my Sony Xperia.I wish stuff like HP WebOS or Meego was still alive, but as far as I know, Apple and Google are the only serious players in town at the moment :-(

It would be nice also for websites to have an alternative to recaptcha. I hate to have to train google&#x27;s models for free just to access a website. I&#x27;d prefer to do some work for data that can be openly accessed (OpenStreetMap for example).

Analytics =&gt; Matomo <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matomo.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matomo.org&#x2F;</a>

Is there a good alternative for google photos? I remember I looked for one few months ago after I got a little freaked out by google facial recognition, but didn&#x27;t find any good alternative.

&gt; Then ditch android which is the spy in your pocket.To what? iOS spies even more by default (no way to disable AGPS vs. opt in on Android) and doesn&#x27;t allow using privacy-enabling apps by default (system-wide ad&#x2F;tracker blocker, real Firefox, Signal, local maps, etc.) unless you hack your phone. Worse, it doesn&#x27;t let you develop for your own phone without rebuilding weekly or paying a yearly fee for the privilege. Between the two evils of Google and Apple, Google remains the lesser evil by a long stretch.

You might want to take a look at AT Internet, they&#x27;re GDPR compliant and have been in the business for a long time. It&#x27;s more of a B2B company though. They have big companies as clients, mostly in France and Europe (BBC)

&gt;switch to bingI can&#x27;t believe that this needs to be said here, but don&#x27;t use Microsoft products if your goal is to avoid dark patterns and user monetization. Microsoft is at least 10 times more corrupt than google.

Bing? Smh. No, no and hell no. DuckDuckGo all the way.

&gt; Switch to bingI&#x27;ve found Startpage and its sister site IxQuick to be a good alternative to Google. Same search results with a lot of detritus filtered out, keeps you out of Google&#x27;s search bubble, and it has built in proxy features.Instead of Bing, which tracks you for monetization on Microsoft&#x27;s behalf (though I trust Microsoft with my information more than Google), try DuckDuckGo. It uses Bing as a back end but, like Startpage, proxies the query so your information and identity never hits Microsoft&#x27;s servers. It&#x27;s also a much cleaner page code-wise than any other search engine I&#x27;ve seen. It often comes up with more relevant results than Startpage; I find myself often searching both for the same subject so I don&#x27;t miss what I&#x27;m looking for.

Google-less AOSP is as bad to Google ad-efforts as completely adblocked iOS, isn&#x27;t it?+1 for open source I guess.

Piwik is fairly good these days as replacement for GA

Dropping chrome is not enough. Switch to bing (Just as good as G), or ddg if you really want. Then ditch android which is the spy in your pocket. If you&#x27;re installing G analytics for clients then choose an alternative (I&#x27;m open to suggestions here).It&#x27;s really time to disentangle ourselves from google. They&#x27;ve quietly and effectively insinuated themselves across the web. Enough is enough.

IIRC, Firefox did that once, and then apologized. Unlike Google, who keeps doing the same thing all the time.

It&#x27;s sad to see people jumping between the same browsers, when the amount of change between each jump is getting smaller and smaller. All of them are becoming more hostile, just at different rates.The outlier is (was?) IE, it kept the same interface and configurability while others continued dumbing down (although things are changing with Edge too) and it seems the massively anti-user decisions the other browsers made never really took hold at MSFT until most recently when they began sticking telemetry up the wazoo.If you care more about user control than web standards compatibility then perhaps IE is the best choice... for now. At least it is more compatible than the &quot;fringe&quot; browsers like Dillo and NetSurf, or even the text-based ones. Opera, before it became another WebKit-shell, might be another good one.(Disclaimer: No affiliation with MSFT, just someone who has watched these browser wars for a long time and saw this gradual &quot;illusion of choice&quot; take hold. I use various browsers depending on which site it is.)

The firefox that keeps doing experiements and jokes on their users by installing random extensions without asking?Until some weeks ago I was less unhappy with Google Chrome than with firefox, but now I am kind of almost equal unhappy with both...

On Post-GDPR world I find this very surprising.  And then again, not.

Shows how powerful Google&#x27;s brand still is with the software industry. Company was built on it, and now for at least a decade it&#x27;s been exploiting that brand power to subvert any&#x2F;all expectations of control over our data. And frankly we&#x27;re all to blame for having the wool pulled over us.

I’d be curious to see the daily evolution of the user agent stats of hacker news over the last three weeks to the next three weeks.

Firefox is a lot faster on startup and browsing than it used to be. It&#x27;s now damn usable.I&#x27;ll keep Chrome around, like Opera, for browser testing.

But they are NOT any old ad-tech company.They were built and grew out of their initial &#x27;don&#x27;t be evil&#x27; culture.

Seriously don&#x27;t know why anyone is surprised that a browser built by an ad-tech company pushes the user tracking tech of that company.Just use Firefox and have done with it - there&#x27;s been a series of these kinds of posts over the last couple of days with people suggesting insane workaround hacks instead of just changing their browser.P.S. if you keep chrome because some websites only work properly there, maybe y&#x27;all should follow standards at work instead of targeting a proprietary browser like its 2001&#x2F;IE6 again.

&quot;The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.&quot;<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infolab.stanford.edu&#x2F;~backrub&#x2F;google.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infolab.stanford.edu&#x2F;~backrub&#x2F;google.html</a>

You are getting it backwards. Google regards its end-users interests alright. You are just misunderstanding who the end-users are.

Not evil, just less intelligent.In a small company every manager can weight more factors. As it gets bigger and specialization grows a manager must reduce what it considers to focus on more specific tasks.In a small company, a development manager can weight privacy concerns and use it judgment to change features. In a bigger company the development manager must delivery whatever it reaches him as a request, only the privacy department can make decisions regarding that.

If an organisation gets to a certain size, is it inevitable that it will eventually turn bad and disregard it&#x27;s end-users&#x27; interests?Is this just the nature of the beast?

Everyone developing for the web platform should keep in mind if their business actually supports their competitor.Every time a user clears their cookies your site will be at a disadvantage if your business depends on ads or account login, not Google.

It still does a lot of callbacks to Google. the solution here is definitely switch to Firefox, but if you&#x27;re really stuck on Chrome you could try Ungoogled chrome [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium</a>

Yes, it does. Same behaviour on Chromium.

What about chromium? Can anybody confirm if it has the same problem? (I know it shouldn&#x27;t, but come on, who trusts google?)

It&#x27;s really weird, it happens on my &quot;new&quot; 2016 MBP and a work machine. But I can&#x27;t tell why I&#x27;m getting slowdowns.

Closing or moving tabs is sometimes laggy

&gt; laggy firefox ui on macReally? I&#x27;ve been using it for years and I haven&#x27;t felt a problem. But this could be a bug, and it&#x27;d be a good idea to report it.

yup. content blocking model is superior, third party cookie handling is superior (and leading the charge), sharing of tabs between devices is superior, reading list is awesome, yada yada.personally i’m still on chrome. i stay signed in all the time anyway. not deleting google cookies is a feature from my POV. when google throws up an anti ad blocker, that’s when i’ll defect.

Are you against using Safari? It really is great on Mac.

Coincidentaly I switched from Google services a week before this Chrome fiasco.  I am happy with the switch for services, but was hard to accept laggy firefox ui on mac or safari without some plugins. This made it 100% easier.

It&#x27;s not a simple blame game. Whomever controls the product definition rules the roost.E.g. good luck trying to be a developer at Microsoft 10 years ago in Balmer&#x27;s &#x27;embrace, extend, extinguish&#x27; modelThat is to say, it&#x27;s organisational dna that dictates who defines the product. Once the &#x27;specs&#x27; have been written, hands are tied.

They disagree with the direction the company is going so they ... quit? They apply at some other company comparable to Google, uproot their family, move across country, and get a job somewhere else?I don&#x27;t blame the engineers one bit. I certainly don&#x27;t expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it.

Exactly, there are plenty of other companies to go working for. People working for Google at best accept a compromise, at worst are actively working against their customers (should I say users?)That said, as a customer I&#x27;m using an Android phone because IMHO anything else is a worse choice for a number of reasons. At least I&#x27;m signed out of any Google service except Play.

Engineers losing control to money types and bureaucrats is a gradual process. It is not that one day Google strikes out the second word from its unofficial motto (&quot;do not be evil&quot;). Engineers might dislike each small step in that direction, but it is not enough to make them pack up and move (house, family, kids, etc.). Pretty quickly they are tamed by both money people and the bureaucrats -- still appreciated and paid, but as brains to be tasked, with no ability to influence company policy.People accept a LOT with gradual changes over a few years that they would never accept as an upfront bulk package. This is not just in engineering. But there is a flip side to this -- once bureaucrats are in control and engineers who stay accept &quot;that is the way we do it&quot; as a justification they often lose energy and become set in their ways. This is more dangerous to a company than a rotting executive class. My 2c.

Yes we do. Just like Tesla employees get to critizise Musk for his Twitter market manipulation while still working their day job and drawing a sallery, and Americans can criticize Trump whithout moving out of the country.Just because you are a benefitting part of an organization, it doesn’t mean you cannot disagree with management and if you disagree it doesn’t mean you have to quit or stop being critical.

But are there any moral corporations left? It feels like you can just keep running.

It&#x27;s not their pockets. We need to ditch this notion that marketing&#x2F;business people provide our salary.

That just feels like Stallman-esque &quot;lifestyleism&quot;. It&#x27;s okay to be critical of a system while living in and part of it.

Yeah, they do. That&#x27;s exactly how it works with real (certified, legally-enforced labeling of) engineering. That is, civil engineers push back against (excessive) safety-cutting to save money while drawing a salary from the same companies that want to implement such design changes.  They only differ in how effectively they have organized to prevent being overruled.

I agree to some extent, but at the same time I think it would be silly for somebody to take a stand over this.In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty small issue compared to all the other tracking they do and things like &quot;Project Dragonfly&quot;.

That feels like whitewashing part of the blame that applies to engineers and product developers. We don&#x27;t get to say &quot;oh it&#x27;s those pesky money people, how dare they&quot;, while drawing a salary from the same pockets.

&gt;&gt;A decision has been made at the CEO level to aggressively use Google’s grip on the browser and search engine markets in any wayNow it&#x27;s obvious to everyone but I am almost certain that Google did this already with search at least since 2008. The low hanging fruit was picked with Matt Cutts being their PR mouthpiece, and what&#x27;s left to do now stinks. They can&#x27;t hide behind the &quot;search&quot; and ads are separated lie. Special mention to his pal, Danny Sullivan, the &quot;fair and balanced&quot; search expert.Edited to ad: If they claim that SERPS are unbiased and not connected to ad revenue, doing otherwise would fraud. Tens of $billion worth.

Only market forces can alter the course now. A decision has been made at the CEO level to aggressively use Google’s grip on the browser and search engine markets in any way that helps their bottom line and has been calculated to not trigger a massive PR backlash among the general public. The rank-and-file Googlers tasked with enabling these misdeeds have a simple choice: remain complicit or refuse to work on these products and accept the potential consequences.

Why? Don’t like Google, don’t use it. Pretty simple.

Something I wonder is: would we have anywhere near as much of a problem with a handful of companies monopolising the information technology industry, if we didn&#x27;t have Intellectual Property laws?People often forget that patents, copyright, etc. are just an arbitrary social construct with little real justification for their existence. Yet the overall effect they have is to make it considerably harder to start a new company to compete with a tech giant.It may be that the problem is that we have too much regulation rather than too little.

Yes! We&#x27;ll just write our problems away.

This is simply too naive. We need regulation to stop global tech monopolities shamelessly exploiting their dominant position, be it Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Samsung and so on. I doubt this can be done properly on any other level than national.

&gt;Another confirmation that engineers and product developers are no longer in control at Google.The engineers not being in charged happened a long time ago.To wit: the current CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, was never an actual engineer.He actually learnt the ropes of his job at McKinsey.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sundar_Pichai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sundar_Pichai</a>

I don&#x27;t think anyone is seriously promoting that idea. The implication, rather, is a more modest proposal: That, of a company&#x27;s staff, the bean counters and executives are at least on average more bottom-line-motivated and hence more likely to push for changes that will pull in cash at the expense of honesty, privacy or consistency with user expectations, when compared with the technical types.

The idea that technical people are all impeccably ethical is not very plausible. Consider the scientists who promoted the claim that smoking was harmless long after it clearly was not, the engineers who concocted VW&#x27;s diesel-emissions fraud, and the developers who produced Madoff&#x27;s fake accounting. And, of course, this particular deception is hardly the first fall from grace on the internet.

Maybe an antitrust break up of Google will be a good thing.

&gt;&gt;Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering.If its just one person, it often easy to fix the problem by eliminating that one person(like Microsoft).But if an entire cartel is at work in the top layers. Like the political brotherhood, to say. It will be impossible to solve the problem until an eventual IBM like corporation will come to happen. Basically you fire one exec, and the brotherhood will bring one from their golf buddies to replace them, and this process will go on. No one know what&#x27;s to be done to fix the problem, because whatever new boss you will get will be the same as the old boss.I&#x27;m also fairly sure by now that the 20% spare time project culture&#x2F;process is fairly dead by now.No political exec will let some programmer create a project leading to creation of a new threat to their fiefdom.I&#x27;m guessing most of Google&#x27;s growth will now come only from Acquisitions.

Isn&#x27;t it native to assume all the Engineer oppose to this ? Some, maybe many will be happy to work on this. This is not an illegal thing that is enforced and has severe punishment.

I don’t think there’s reasonable hope.Mainstream people dont need and dont value products being great in every detail.I don’t know what they need. But as google is still successful with a search engine that used to be great a decade ago because it delivered results for exactly what i was looking for and nothing else, and now is more a „whatever you search, we‘ll serve you some results no matter if words you search really appear there, they seem to be happy being served anything wether it’s what they ordered or not...For the minority with high demands on products his is difficult because we have to look for new providers again and again after the logic of growth makes companies shift to cater there products to the mainstream... after using us as beta testers and advertisers.

You are right. But in the end some engineer built that feature.

&gt; Even in the early days they sold BASIC and DOS before they&#x27;d even written a line of codeMicrosoft didn&#x27;t create DOS

&gt; Microsoft already went through this engineering&#x2F;product growth to bizdev&#x2F;marketing control to stagnation and is already in the return to engineering&#x2F;product first phase.Microsoft were always a marketing first company. Even in the early days they sold BASIC and DOS before they&#x27;d even written a line of code. And Windows certainly didn&#x27;t become the dominant desktop OS through being the best at engineering (in the 80s and 90s they were usually amongst the worst in terms of performance and stability).Having good engineering and being product focused doesnt mean you&#x27;ll have a successful product. In fact all too often it takes underhanded stunts to get your neck in front simply because most people are not like us, they&#x27;re not engineers. So you&#x27;d be amazed at how little most people would care about what&#x27;s happening here (assuming they even understand it in the first place)

Google is an advertising company, Are we just now finally realizing &quot;you get what you pay for?&quot;?

Mozilla are winding down their efforts to make Firefox competitive. They are not planning to make a full servo browser anytime soon and they are transfering resources to VR and other things. This is disapointing.You can&#x27;t blame them, their user base is in free fall.

Perhaps the (you won&#x27;t be signed out of your Google account) language was something an engineer or product developer insisted on. Perhaps they figured that was their part, and that it&#x27;s up to the rest of us to take 10 minutes and switch to Firefox so data-driven Google knows this was a bad idea.

I am not sure if it is possible to generalize to the whole of Google.

Engineers like money too. 85%+ of their revenue is from ads.

&gt; Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering.It was not just Ballmer. When Gates was in charge, the technology was never the priority. Gates understands the tech, but MS never worked trough technology towards their goals. They used their monopoly power and bought tech, almost never build it.MS products started to gradually improve after Gates stopped being the chief technology officer of the company.

Hackernews needs it’s own version of infowars where people can declare and believe in their most absurd and cynical conspiracy theories regarding tech.

Everybody at Google, for anything they do, should ask a simple question on any proposal ... how does this impact user privacy for those that care?Given Google&#x27;s size and power it&#x27;s irresponsible for them to not do so.And given that there are really smart people working for Google, including a whole department working on analyzing the threats and preserving user privacy, I won&#x27;t believe for a second that nobody thought of this. Which may mean that they don&#x27;t care, even if they did once. And again, given their size, their power, their potential for harm, that&#x27;s not OK. With great power comes great responsibility, bla, bla.So I&#x27;m not buying that.Also, now that the shit has hit the fan, lets see what they do in response. Probably nothing ;-)

If that is the case, I recommend some basic privacy and security training for every engineer. I believe the root cause at Google is elsewhere though, its goal is to make money, lots of it.

Don&#x27;t they have anybody from the legal department to oversee the decisions of developers? A wrong decision could cost them millions in fines in these days.

Yet, it coincidentally has the properties to keep your ad tracking identity in tact, so Google can serve you ads based on your online profile. What a wonderful side effect. I&#x27;m sure they had no idea that would be the case, just pure luck.

Maybe for something small? But also an “engineer at work” might stand up for not doing the lazy thing on principle.

Furthermore, I see all this anger about this technical decision affecting peoples privacy, but have not yet seen someone provide a good engineering solution to the problem it was trying to solve.Example Use Case: I was contacted by my poor old mother recently who said that she was logged into &quot;The Google&quot; but was seeing the wrong emails! She was horribly confused.What had happened was that my sister had checked her email on my mothers computer and forgot to log out. My mother was logged into Chrome (as it correctly said on the top right of the browser) but didn&#x27;t understand that logging in&#x2F;out of Gmail was a different thing.To blame non technical users for being confused here is unfair at the least. And I&#x27;m sure there are millions of them with the same problem.A technical user who cares about privacy can:- not log into Google and use an external email client for Gmail- use Gmail in incognito- disable Chrome auto log in via the preferences (although I haven&#x27;t tried this myself some people say it works, although I&#x27;ve seen conflicting info about if this works in future versions of Chrome).- use Firefox (but if you are still using Gmail I&#x27;m rolling my eyes here)I personally don&#x27;t think it is too evil that Google cares more about people like my mother than advanced privacy conscious technical users.Also I can&#x27;t see how auto syncing ones account with Chrome really damages privacy any more than what is there now? If you are logged into Gmail they have your cookies while you browse the web anyway. If you privacy conscious enough that you log out of Gmail every time you are done, fair enough, but I would suggest not using Gmail at all in that case.But most importantly I&#x27;d like to hear a better engineering solution for people like my mother?

I assume this is the engineering at work.&quot;Okay, users are confused by how they&#x27;re logged into Google but not Chrome, or Chrome but not Google - let&#x27;s make them one and the same&quot;.&quot;Okay, but once you&#x27;re logged into Chrome now, every post we check to see if we have the Google cookies to keep that sync... so that means when you clear the cookies the Google ones will automagically reappear&quot;&quot;Ugh, let&#x27;s just notify the user that clearing the cookies won&#x27;t clear the Google ones&quot;&quot;Yeah, that works&quot;.Come on, we&#x27;re all developers here, we all know how these conversations work.

&gt; very easy to forget that when the money rolls in massivelyI agree with the problem but not the cause. I don&#x27;t feel that this has anything to do with being complacent. If anything, this is the downside of being a publicly traded company that has the pressure to meet Wall Street&#x27;s myopic expectations of growth every quarter.

Another confirmation that engineers and product developers are no longer in control at Google.Engineering and product first is how Google won the game initially, very easy to forget that when the money rolls in massively and the power structures move away from those driving forces.Microsoft already went through this engineering&#x2F;product growth to bizdev&#x2F;marketing control to stagnation and is already in the return to engineering&#x2F;product first phase. Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering.Bizdev + marketing are hugely important, but the products and engineering need to be the focus. It is much easier to bizdev and market a product and engineering led system&#x2F;focus, though success through this is always forgotten when massive success comes around because engineering&#x2F;research and development are hard to quantify and put metrics to which the power structures move away from.Let&#x27;s hope there are factions of engineering&#x2F;product focused people in Google that can gain back control.

Somehow this reminds me of the time when Google started to unify their login experience (one login for all Google services).That was the time I started actively avoiding Google services, and I still do. This incident is a good reminder of why I do so.

That actually sounds alright to me. But then I have everything in Google Drive, use G-Suitr for everything, buy Pixel phones and Chromebooks.

Well, I think you’re paying for the better speed in chrome by sacrificing your privacy. Isn’t that how this all works?You consent to being tracked -&gt; google gets money off of tracking you -&gt; google can pay more engineers to work on chrome and make it faster -&gt; you get more tied into chrome’s performance quirks and ecosystem -&gt; google gets more money by tracking you -&gt; and so on...If that sounds fair to you, then none of google’s actions should bother you (probably). But for me personally, I switched over to Firefox a long time ago when I noticed that chrome was becoming increasingly user-hostile in design.

Chrome highlights page keyword search result locations on the scroll bar, making the process of going through them very convenient. Firefox doesn&#x27;t, and I couldn&#x27;t find an extension that replicates the feature without extra manual effort.Also, I find Firefox UI sluggish to use, relative to Chrome UI.

I think Incognito tabs have always been this way in Chrome for as long as I remember (all currently open ones share a session). If you close all of them, the next one you open will be a clean slate.

I don&#x27;t use Chrome&#x2F;Firefox but this surprises me, as well. The presence of a private browser window (anywhere) will prevent it from deleting cookies when you close this private browser window? That seems completely counterintuitive to me. When else, in any application, does the mere existence of an open, empty window completely change the behavior of a different window?Safari&#x27;s private tabs are each completely independent.

&gt; it remained logged in across private tabs.If you mean &quot;Incognito mode&quot;, then that&#x27;s always happened. You need to close all tabs.Exactly the same for FireFox&#x27;s private browsing.

Was using private browsing to log in to work gmail last night and found it really creepy how it remained logged in across private tabs.Thought the whole point of a private tab was to completely isolate a browsing session, now you can never be certain your Google credentials are not being shared in these private sessions or even contaminate my non-private sessions.Going to have to use another browser for my work sessions from now on.

There are already a number of media outlets picking up these stories, including gizmoto and business insider. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Just takes time to propagate outward.

You will see that there will be exactly zero backlash outside of hacker news.They do not need their first adopters anymore.

This is when Google starts to underestimate users and treat them as dumb zombies.It is their new game theory play:1&#x2F; Start making people think you are super ethical (don&#x27;t be evil)2&#x2F; Gain traction3&#x2F; Change rules and take advantage of inertia. People are lazy to change browsers.

Yeah, its interesting to see these companies move in this direction, must tell you that their profit margins are tightening and therefore must provide more value by increasing their surveillance levels.

Like Microsoft did with their windows 10 technical preview?Or like Microsoft still does with machines with handwriting &#x2F; touchscreens?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;windows-touch-security-waitlist.dat,37828.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;windows-touch-security-wai...</a>

How long until version has the feature that when you install it loads a kernal driver such that when you close it, it runs in the background copying keystrokes and screen shots and uploading them? I&#x27;d love to hear how they&#x27;d sell that, maybe offering to pay for your internet connection?

I suspect that they use metrics for making decisions and the total number of users is growing. Those who understand and care for privacy are only a small portion of the user base and don&#x27;t play a role in metrics. And if they play a role in metrics, they are probably accounted as leeches because they use google products but don&#x27;t pay back because they block ads. Therefore a totally useless user base... maybe.

I really want the Note 9 but am afraid to switch away from the iPhone because of Apple’s stance on privacy.If you had told me a few years ago that Google was the reason I wasn’t buying an Android phone I wouldn’t have believed you.

I&#x27;m in the same boat. Just switched away from Gmail and Chrome. Love my Pixel 2 XL for its astonishing camera, but very seriously considering a switch to the iPhone.

I switched to FF ~1 year ago because I found the performance to be better. But Google&#x27;s trend is making me consider switching back to an iPhone...

I&#x27;ve been using Mapbox for maps and their geocoding api.

Yesterday I started moving to FastMail, today switched to Firefox, what tomorrow will bring?Btw, can someone recommend a good alternative to Google Maps API?

Stoped trusting google years ago, I switched from chrome to firefox and from google to duckduckgo.

Even for someone who likes Google, this is insane.

Edge needs to add display: contents support before I’d consider suggesting it to anyone.

If only would Edge add support for installing PWA&#x27;s directly from chrome, like me prompting users to install, it would be great.

No idea what GP&#x27;s role is, but given corporate environments, installing a PDF printer driver isn&#x27;t always a quick process. This is particularly true if they&#x27;re working with customers from many different companies, each with their own IT considerations.Recommending Chrome is an easy enough way to get that functionality.

the ability to print to PDFAll browser have had the ability to do that, for many years now, if you install a PDF printer driver. Adobe was the first with a commercial one, but I&#x27;m sure there are free ones now.

Thats’s the reason? So trivial to install pdfwriter, whatever it’s called.

I just switched to Edge and it looks great. One of the reasons I had used Chrome and had recommended all my customers to use Chrome was the ability to print to PDF, which Firefox did not have (not sure if it does now). Edge does and will be recommending all my clients to try out Egde.

Chrome 69 will keep Google Cookies when you tell it to delete all cookies