Google will keep locking down Chrome and using corporate talk to hand wave it away, only recourse is to leave.
First it’s “sign in” with obtuse ways to turn it off. Then block Adblocking, once again with obtuse ways to disable... the end goal is pretty obvious, get the majority of Chrome users to turn on ads and tie their real names to their Chrome browser.
Of course let “power users” (who’ll turn that crap off anyways) have their switches to do so. It gives Google plausible deniability.
——
To those who say just fork Chrome adfm had a good article explaining why that doesn’t work:
> And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart's content, your new browser won't work with most internet video unless you license a proprietary DRM component called Widevine from Google. The API that connects to Widevine was standardized in 2017 by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose members narrowly voted down a proposal to change the membership rules for the W3C to require members not to abuse the DMCA to prevent DRM from becoming a tool to undermine competition.
You know what's horrifying about the idea of "just fork Chrome"? Google can still hurt you by blocking your browser's access to their prime properties (YouTube, Gmail, Maps, etc). Just look at YouTube denying Chromium-based Edge the new redesigned experience for absolutely zero reason.
The referenced comment rehashes the evils of Ballmer's Microsoft which Nadella has mostly corrected. Satya Nadella has embraced (but not extended!) Open Source. Their Azure strategy puts all platforms on a level playing field - yet has also made Azure an incredible place to make Windows/Microsoft technologies shine. It's a great place for all apps.
Yes, they control Office and are the defacto office document standard. What they do with Office now is affordable and ubiquitous. No other office document suite can do this. They are a for-profit company, and Office serves their customers very well. Yes, in Ballmer's days this wan't the case, but today you can run Office (365/Cloud) on a Chromebook and on Android and iPhone as supported apps.
Meh, he lost me when he tried to say Microsoft success in cloud is due to Office. Microsoft's success in cloud is due to having a good enough cloud platform and being better at selling to enterprises than Amazon or Google. IBM and Oracle can sell to enterprises but lost because their cloud platforms suck.
Linux and Open Source tech is a huge part of Azure now. They profit from people using Linux on Azure. They don't have a reason to chase customers away when they are making money from them.
Every large player has been wilfully degrading user experience in any browser they don't approve of for a few years now. This is a ship that has sailed - from the lack of antitrust suits we can deduce that there are in fact very few legal ramifications, if any.
Yeah, sure, the government spent millions to break up AT&T and the Baby Bells, then let AT&T get back into the local phone and Internet business by buying up companies left and right. Now AT&T is part of a nationwide duopoly with cable companies, and most US consumers have exactly 2 choices: either AT&T for non-cable or some other company for cable.
It's government's responsibility to foster competition to push back against companies wanting to limit it. Govt is doing a shitty job and gets an F.
It seems like Google just treats fines due to antitrust lawsuits as the cost of doing business, and they're potentially making more money with such behavior than they are losing due to legal costs.
> Just look at YouTube denying Chromium-based Edge the new redesigned experience for absolutely zero reason.
The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn't expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube.
I don't have time to test this, but I'm willing to bet that you'd get the same result by using any indie browser that happens to send a user agent that YouTube doesn't recognize.
Do you remember when almost all sites worked fine without internet explorer but refused to work without it unless you faked the user agent? Why are you defending round 2 of best with IE?
The web is a standard. Auto failing based on user agent is a sign of developer incompetence.
I wouldn't be defending them if YouTube refused to work with a "strange" user agent, but that's not what happened. Judging by the screenshots, YouTube still worked, it just refused to use a new design. The old design is still perfectly functional.
Chromium-based Edge is not stable. It's a new thing that I don't expect website owners to test against. The error message showed that the new design is tested against the latest version of Edge. Complete rewrite of Edge still hasn't replaced the old Edge.
Also, no, the web is not a standard. There's no fixed set of things that a browser should implement and call it a day. It's constantly-evolving depending on the needs of the owners of the website. It's why nobody dares to create a browser from scratch nowadays.
> The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn't expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube
Why almost certainly? We're seeing antagonistic, self-preserving and dare I say abusive monopolistic behavior from Google with Chrome's anti-adblocking. Why the benefit of doubt when blocking a competitor's browser?
More pointedly, would an independent YouTube have behaved similarly for as long?
Your company's customers aren't going to care when you tell them this. They're going to complain to your support department that your app doesn't work.
It depends on what you choose as your choice of technology, if you choose web components then you really can only really offer that same experience to users that have a browser that supports that API natively (without polyfills) which old Edge did not do.
My understanding of this situation with yt was that our server side detection code was wrong based on an update in edge (or our UA management), and we don't do feature detection in the client because it is too slow... So we send people to the older version.
Interpreting user agent strings is what amateur programmers do. I don't generally expect high standards from Google engineers (a whole other argument I won't entertain here) but that's still pretty tragic for a top-five website.
And besides, your claim is doubtful at best since Chromium Edge doesn't share any User Agent string elements with previous EdgeHTML versions. Your YT developers would have needed to be intentionally malicious to match "Edg/" as a trigger to downgrade the user experience.
You appear to have somehow missed the extremely loud chorus of "we hate it, change it back" that happen every time any web app gets a new design. See also the saga of Instagram on Android.
yeah but blacklisting or at least conscious degradation is necessary. hit that with a game I built, had to degrade the experience on chrome/iOS because of the non-accelerated canvas element
First of all, we have no evidence that your Edge example was intentional. In fact, we have evidence to the contrary as they fixed it within hours of it being reported [1]
Now as far as your hypothetical, sure they can, but I use all of those services, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, ... on Chromium every day and they do not block nor have they ever blocked any of them.
> And it may even be a quick ‘n dirty deliberate hack to exclude Chredge this way, just so it doesn’t pollute their telemetry / testing of new website features.
That test proves nothing without seeing the Google's code. Feature detection is incredibly slow, requiring JS and multiple round trips. Whereas user agent strings are instantaneous.
Chredge worked for many weeks, then it didn't for a day or so, then it worked again.
Turning the block on was intentional, and turning it off was intentional.
We can only guess at their motivation, and I can guarantee you it was not benevolent given what Mozilla said recently about their interactions with Google.
>How's this polluting their telemetry? Also, how is some random UA NOT polluting their telemetry? It's a horrible excuse, that's all it is. It was fine and then suddenly it became "an issue". It's singling out them, SPECIFICALLY. Nice try.
The day the Web sold its soul. Such a disappointment when TBL came out in support of that. People who knew better tried to warn us, but they all got shouted down and told there "was no other choice" b/c content creators were going to try an lock down with extensions and it would somehow be worse.
TBL? Can you extrapolate? I google it and its "The Basketball League". I just think your comment had the opportunity to continue to educate me on something I have never heard of or about and to throw in an acronym without having used the the 3 words before is confusing.
I can't tell if there is humor tied to this response, but either way it's a brilliantly written reply to my comment. Gave me a chuckle, and got my upvote.
Not with extensions, with plug-ins, and they were already doing it. Flash and Silverlight came with DRM for any publisher that wanted to use it. Many did.
Plugins would be fine; you could always point out, that they are non-standard. Now, if you fail to support the right EME plugin, it is the browsers fault.
I know, but that's not the point. The point is, that the pain for the non-standard support had to be taken by the proponents of DRM. Now, it is up to the foss crowd.
IOW, it was not about tech issue, but about social issue / blame-shifting.
I used to have Firefox and Vivaldi ...but honestly I used Vivaldi mainly...when I heard that even Microsoft was going to use chromium I realized...Firefox is literally the last front ! I installed Firefox and started using it as my main browser! What I miss the most is Vivaldi speed dial and bookmarks. Add-ons aren't always a solution ! I miss Netscape days...internet wasn't a megacorp business playground :( !
> I miss Netscape days...internet wasn't a megacorp business playground :( !
You mean "this website is optimized for Internet Explorer 6" days? Or the earlier "this website is optimized for Netscape 2.0" days?
I think the nearest the web ever came to not being any megacorp's playground was when Firefox was at around 30% market share, and IE6 which had 60%+ market share had stopped moving. IOW, when MS still had the playground mostly to themselves, but chose to ignore it. And even then, the web / Firefox couldn't really innovate without breaking IE6 compatibility, so everyone was stuck.
I looked up Vivaldi Speed Dial. It looks like the same sort of thing Firefox, Chrome, and Safari have where a new tab has a pinned list of favorite or most visited sites. What does Vivaldi do that I'm not seeing?
Having switched from Vivaldi back to Firefox about a year ago, the Vivaldi speed dial is similar to the pinned lists of favorites, but it's much more user friendly. You can customize how many sites you see, how many are in each column, number of columns, etc. You can also change the icon to be anything you like. It certainly wasn't a dealbreaker for me personally, and as you said, pinned favorites serve the same purpose, but it does feel more restrictive on FF.
It used to be more customisable but FF wanted to dictate what users saw, for some reason, partially advertising ("recommended by pocket"). They really like to imitate the worst of commercial enterprise sometimes.
It has become a little more customisable now, thankfully.
they don't let you run in browser contexts normally but they definitely let you set your own new tab page(with webextension privileges) as part of the extension which lets an extension do whatever they want.
Sounds kinda similar to what you are looking. It does No. of sites, custom columns, custom pictures, and custom backgrounds. It really gives you a lot of control compared to all the other extensions I tried.
It's way more than just pinning ! I organize my YouTube subscription in folders with themes like tutorials recipes and subfolders...you can do that on Firefox with the bookmark toolbar but in a less user friendly way and less visually pleasing way toi. what makes it worse is that it used to be possible on Firefox! It's not a deal breaker or anything ! But I miss that XD ! I had a hundreds of bookmarks organized on Vivaldi ! I still don't know how to "transition" that to firefox :/
"Most internet videos" probably is overstatement. I'm watching youtube, pornhub and twitch and I don't think that it requires any DRM. The only service with DRM I'm aware of is Netflix and it's terrible anyway.
> I'm watching youtube, pornhub and twitch and I don't think that it requires any DRM.
Depends on the content, If you are watching paid for content on YT it is most likely DRM'ed. [0] An "stats for nerds" example from such a piece of content (Notice the protected line, this line isn't present on DRM free YT Content.). But the vast majority of content on YT is DRM free.
Twitch has some DRM'ed content, things like when they streamed Thursday Night Football. But that was played via the Amazon Video player not twitches normal video player. I remember because the player threw a fit if you didn't have HDCP configured correctly, which most streamers don't. Not that they were trying to re-stream the game, but have it playing on another one of their monitors to see how it was doing. Personally I liked the idea of having a chat alongside the game :-)
> The only service with DRM I'm aware of is Netflix and it's terrible anyway.
Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
More seriously, using a browser without DRM would be a deal-breaker to many users like myself solely because of Netflix, unfortunately. That said, if you're serious about using a DRM-free browser, there are other ways to watch Netflix (iOS/Android, smart TVs, etc).
> > The only service with DRM I'm aware of is Netflix and it's terrible anyway.
> Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
I'm not sure that a large number of subscribers is a convincing argument of the non-terribleness of a service. A quick Google search suggests that Comcast, excuse me, Xfinity, has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 million subscribers. I don't think that you will find any argument telling them how terrible Xfinity is.
Sure, but many of those Xfinity customers don't have any reasonable alternatives, whereas there are now a handful of players in the video streaming space. If someone doesn't like Netflix, they can easily cancel their subscription and switch to another service. So even though you're partially right, the subscriber count in this case is a pretty good proxy of how good the service is.
The services used to have more or less the same catalog, but it’s become more and more broken up.
To get everything you need to subscribe to 4+ services, and if you drop Netflix, you lose a hefty part of their catalog because it’s on none of the others.
I guess when someone says "it's terrible", I assume that includes the catalog and we're not just talking about the UI or something like that. You can't say Netflix is terrible, and then in the same breath praise their selection. The catalog is part of the product, especially with each service making originals now.
While Comcast the company is evil, I loved their internet service. It was blazing fast and to this day was the most rock-solid ISP I've had for uptime. YMMV of course but for people in my area Comcast was the best (tho sometimes only) choice. (I did get really tired of playing the stupid intro/promo rate game with them tho).
Once they turned on their 250GB data cap tho it became far less useful since my wife/kids would stream several gigs a day or more of TV.
Sure but those 150 million people choose to subscribe to Netflix. Presumably they like it, otherwise why would they spend money on it every month? The people who use Comcast have no choice, because for nearly all of them, the alternative is no Internet access at home other than via cellular.
The original statement was like saying, "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
Don't they have a desktop client that works just fine? Also, Chrome's "advantage" may be having built-in DRM, but it's not much of one: Netflix limits Chrome users to 720p video. So for all practical purposes you need a different browser or client for Netflix anyway if your main browser is Chromium based.
| Can we define "most internet video" as Amazon Video, BBC, Hulu, Netflix and Spotify?
Maybe you could in terms of unique videos, but in terms of the volume of watched video, not at all. Netflix itself is responsible for something in the range of 15% of the worlds bandwidth usage.
Either way, it not going to win an end users to have something like that.
I remember of projects that failed because Widevine explicitly didn't work in their Chromium. I assume that Widevine builds nicely but requires a Google-issued key to work.
This is fine for power users who care enough to do it. But for the general public, as well as companies which would need to do this if they wanted to support DRM in their own kind of browser, it is not going to fly with Google and probably isn't legal.
You don't "build" Widevine. Google distributes a binary (libwidevinecdm.so) which implements a standard API that works with both Chrome and Chromium. The "master" DRM secret key is obfuscated and distributed in libwidevinecdm.so itself.
>your new browser won't work with most internet video
"most internet video"... by what metric? Hours watched? Catalog size? I find it unlikely that DRM videos outnumber non-DRM videos by any reasonable metric.
I wonder if that might backfire. I've been using Chromium for a while now, but whenever I need to see video, I copy paste the url over to Firefox. At some point, I'm going to be bothered enough to just switch permanently to Firefox.
Yes. And on top of the video codec issue, there is also the issue of getting Chrome to build, and integrating code changes from every upstream Chromium release, which is quite frequent. The build setup process is very manual for an outsider, and changes often.
Luckily for us, there's antitrust law. This isn't really possible:
Reproduction steps:
1. Check that Google search is working by opening Chrome, navigating to www.google.com, and searching for any term (such as the name of a newspaper and clicking the link to verify that search works as expected.)
2. Open firefox.com and navigate to www.google.com
You will receive a message:
"It looks like you have Chrome installed! For the most secure experience, please visit this page using the Chrome browser or wait and try again later.."
If you have not used Chrome in the past 1 hour from your same IP address, you receive the page as expected.
The above repro steps should be pretty much impossible under antitrust law. (Due to search monopoly.) Which is a very good thing.
Electron apps' Chrome stores its cookies separately from the user's installation of it, correct? That, plus the lack of a logged-in account within Electron's Chrome might help to mitigate user cookie correlation and the like, right?
But Electron app has full access to your system unlike normal web page. So it makes sense to run Electron apps from separate user account so that they cannot read your browser history, cookies, install you an extension etc.
I wish someone with a lot more knowledge than me on this replies. You raise a very valid, practical and useful question, would love to hear the answer :-)
If we're saying fire up Chrome just to watch Netflix, I'm suggesting saving some effort and/or isolate the rest of your browser by wrapping it in a very basic Electron app.
At the very least, you wouldn't get auto-logged into your "browser" or anything like that.
It's usually going to be around any studio produced content Broadcast or Movie. YouTube TV uses it for live broadcasts. The Studios require DRM as part of their content licensing. PlayReady is the other primary DRM competitor.
That's only if you are making a browser and want to distribute it. There's no way that Google is going to mail howlers to end-users who use widevine with chromium forks.
Because you would need to get a widevine license from google. Mozilla was able to do that, but I know at least one chromium fork had it's application for a license rejected. It technically is possible to copy the widevine library from a chrome install to use with chromium, but non technical people won't know how to do that.
Widevine works with chromium just fine - by which I mean that like with everything chromium it gets broken without apparent reason every now and then, but after some time they fix it.
Apparently someone has, because I was using Chromium on Linux to watch Netflix several years ago without any trouble (this was before Firefox got it working).
It's a shame Microsoft didn't want to use Firefox's codebase instead of Chromium for its new Edge browser. I don't know what Microsoft thinks it gained by doing this, but I'm almost certain they'll regret it in the long run, because it's a trap by Google.
Google, Microsoft new "bestie" in this collaboration, will screw them over once it's clear that Microsoft "can't turn back" from using Chromium or even fork it.
That would be declaring a full on browser war with Google. I expect MS don't want to do that yet. It remains an option in the future I suppose.
As I understand it Chromium is a lot easier to wrap your own GUI around than Gecko. XUL is still not completely decoupled, separating them completely is an ongoing effort I think.
Maybe when the embedded Gecko/Servo engine is production ready would be the time for MS to reconsider.
I’ve quit chrome for a while now but... I’m pretty sure they have your real name as long as you signed in once from the same hw and browser footprint. Is real name that important for them? I think everyone’s digital signature is already out there
As a developer and power user, it's difficult for me to switch to Firefox.
However for most average Joe's it's fine and won't make a difference, so I always install and recommend Firefox when I play IT guy for family/friends. Time to start doing this again like we did in 2005!! It worked then and it can now!
As a power user, I prefer Firefox to Chrome, due to its configurability and to the power of certain add-ons. One simple example: multi-row tab bar, thanks to custom CSS for the UI. It used to be even better before the mass murder of the now-called "legacy" extensions, but today we must settle for the less restricted offer.
As a developer, I don't typically use browsers as debuggers or programming environments, so I never experienced game-breaking differences.
> It used to be even better before the mass murder of the now-called "legacy" extensions,
I can't even switch because one of the vital extensions for my workflow do not exist any more and the author of the Chrome equivalent doesn't want to port it. (I even offered a little money, I probably can't pay enough for an experienced developer to do the full port.)
No, I am running Chrome for a long time now. I use an extension there which doesn't exist for Firefox. An equivalent existed in the old Firefox. I made an attempt at porting it but my JS skills are super meagre.
What many others have already said - it's slower and many popular sites don't work properly on it. I don't feel like randomly having websites break when I am trying to get things done.
Even on a newer computer Firefox feels jagged and hangs. Memory leaks still happening years later. It is so frustrating to see Firefox using 1.5GB of RAM when only 2 tabs remain.
Quantum helped a lot, but it's still not enough for me and many others.
Really? Do you have examples? I haven’t faced this issue. Some websites breaks somehow if you block 3rd party tracking (by breaking I mean that some pictures or video embedded into the page won’t load), but that’s an opt-in feature so I don’t think that’s what you mean.
I've had a terrible time using Firefox since Tab Mix Plus was killed. Dev is working on a replacement but many of the necessary APIs were also killed in the great add-on death of 2017 (Firefox 57), and have yet to be rewritten (and may never be).
What is the equivalent for one tab? It is technically simple enough that I could develop one one my own, except I remember firefox extensions to be an unbelievable pain to install back in the day.
I consider myself the same. I quit using Chrome & started using Brave about a year ago. I haven't looked back or missed Chrome. What would you be missing?
Edge & Firefox have also been useful in the same way I once used Opera (special tasks where their features really shine). I really liked Edge's reading mode & for just browsing websites it was great.
First, you are being overly critical. Automatic (forced) sign-in is actually useful. Second, why do you call leaving the "only" recourse? As if it's something completely horrid that you would never ever do freely. Leaving is a completely fine path to take.
With webRequest, Google is "just" testing the waters. Just like with the forced sign-in, they will back down when they see the backlash.
Based only on Google's description, they seem to have a valid reason to remove (even though they say "deprecate", they mean remove) the offending API. However, there's zero chance they can get away with this. For what reason I'm not sure, market share of Chrome is very important to them. So they'll have to keep it or implement some new, acceptable method.
First it’s “sign in” with obtuse ways to turn it off. Then block Adblocking, once again with obtuse ways to disable... the end goal is pretty obvious, get the majority of Chrome users to turn on ads and tie their real names to their Chrome browser.
Of course let “power users” (who’ll turn that crap off anyways) have their switches to do so. It gives Google plausible deniability.
——
To those who say just fork Chrome adfm had a good article explaining why that doesn’t work:
> And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart's content, your new browser won't work with most internet video unless you license a proprietary DRM component called Widevine from Google. The API that connects to Widevine was standardized in 2017 by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose members narrowly voted down a proposal to change the membership rules for the W3C to require members not to abuse the DMCA to prevent DRM from becoming a tool to undermine competition.
https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom....