If you can, use Firefox.

  • Jaysyn@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    Chrome got blacklisted by our IT dept because of this.

    “Ads are attack vectors.”

    • BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
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      9 months ago

      And mine is making the switch from Firefox to Chrome next year. I’m so fucking mad about it.

      • roertel@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Ditto. The security department made the push because too many people were installing unapproved addons like ublock. They are mandating chrome, “for security”. LMAO

        The irony is that people are signing into chrome with personal gmail and leaking stuff.

        • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          You can lockdown user addons in both chrome and firefox via GPO. You can also auto install them with the same policies if you like. Both browsers have enterpise admx files available.

          Your security department sounds like they are bad at their jobs.

            • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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              9 months ago

              Nah. I work in the field.

              Im well aware of bad security teams. Looks like they got one.

          • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
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            9 months ago

            Came here to say the exact same thing. It really is amazing to me just how many IT professionals are bad at their jobs.

            • FrostyTrichs@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              Tech is a boogie man to many executypes. I’ve seen plenty of IT pros that were in over their head but smooth enough con men. If they keep coming up with things to throw money at/trim money out of convincingly they have long and successful careers.

              • thecrotch@sh.itjust.works
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                9 months ago

                When I lost my job over the summer I put my resume on dice and immediately had 3-4 guys with Indian accents calling me every day. I found a new job within a week. I still get emails and texts though, can’t put the genie back in the bottle

        • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
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          9 months ago

          uBlock Origin is pretty much approved by Mozilla and ads are a big attack vector while Chrome is spyware.

          If they use Windows, you can use Firefox Portable of PortableApps.

      • OfficerBribe@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Switch to Edge would make sense due to how well it integrates with things like your Entra ID account, choosing Chrome now is bizarre. We also had Chrome as primary browser for years, but now we are pushing Edge as primary browser. Firefox was and still is an option for us as well.

        • BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
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          9 months ago

          Not sure, it’s a big corpo so the decision is far from me. Probably bribes or a C level exec that likes Chrome on his home laptop.

    • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      9 months ago

      Chrome hasn’t worked for months on our network due to this and was removed recently with the latest updates last week

    • JustARegularNerd@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Meanwhile my work mandates that we must use Edge. It’s fine from a usability perspective but I would much prefer my beloved Firefox at work, especially with the tab groups they have where you can have multiple different sessions

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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        9 months ago

        I’ve been using Edge at work. I literally made the decision as “this is a Microsoft heavy shop, Microsoft is pushing Edge hard, and Bing is kinda good now, so let’s see how this goes” and I haven’t had a need to switch back.

        I use Edge’s different profiles for testing, work stuff and personal stuff to keep them nicely separated and prevent any from bleeding too hard into eachother

    • FenrirIII@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Waiting to hear if my company follows suit. Most of our internal tools are built with Chrome in mind, so it would be a big effort to standardize on something else.

      • RedFox@infosec.pub
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        9 months ago

        Chrome is pretty much the defacto standard for web. If it works with chrome, you’re probably safe.

  • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Switching away from Chrome is something that is always worth repeating, but just FYI this happened last September and isn’t “new”. If you’re on Chrome and are only just now realizing this, it’s been your reality for the last 5 months.

      • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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        9 months ago

        Yeah Google has cleverly re-defined privacy as “give all your data to us and we will protect it from prying eyes”.

        People love it though. So private and easy and awesome for scrolling.

  • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    It’s getting harder to remain compassionate towards people who keep using chrome.

    • Victor@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Are you serious? You can’t be compassionate toward people who use a certain browser? It’s probably because they don’t understand/know/care. 🤷‍♂️ Educate them.

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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      9 months ago

      People who care make the switch so not sure what there is to feel compassionate about.

      Its kinda nice they slowed YouTube down first, that got at least 3 people i know into using firefox, though if i still want to annoy them i could tell them to run a invidius docker instead.

    • T156@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      In some ways, it is unavoidable, because chrome is also embedded in Windows, and the electron framework. You can’t blame someone for using it that way.

  • strawberry@kbin.run
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    9 months ago

    The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an “alternative” tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can’t just not be spied on.

    lmao what the fuck kind of dystopia are we living in

    • zurohki@aussie.zone
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      9 months ago

      It’d make the world a better place, but a big company would make slightly less money, therefore it’s unthinkable to even attempt it.

      See also: vehicle emissions standards

      • Poplar?@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        In the case of Google, the effect on advertising bringing in “slightly less money” is an understatement :)

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      So this means that the internet could have always worked fine without invasive cookies and everything they told us about it being impossible was just a lie.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        Cookies serve important purposes for doing things like keeping you signed in as you navigate through multiple pages on a site.

        The issue is that most parts of the internet were developed by people more interested in all the cool stuff you could do with it, and not at all concerned about the potential misuse by large multi billion dollar corporations.

        • Poplar?@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          You defend cookies in general. But the person youre replying to might have meant third-party cookies by “invasive cookies” ?

          • jaybone@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Cookies are a part of the http protocol and the server side design of the websites themselves. You can’t just replace them with a password manager on your individual client.

            • squid_slime@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              no a password manager can’t replace cookies, Like a JPEG can’t replace a 2 hour long film.

              I have however forgone cookies for the most part. Great for privacy.

              I’d recommend keepassxc, bookmarking and some addons like ublock, no script, libredirect. Most sites still work and the few that don’t aren’t worth my time

              • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                Cookies are literally how a website keeps track of you having logged with a username and password into that site on your browser, for all other pages after you leave the log-in page.

                The reason for this is because the Web protocols were designed for the web server to get a request from a browser, send the page to the browser and after that close the connection (though since HTTP version 1.1 connections might stay up for things like sending the pictures linked to a page, a mechanism known as Keep-Alive).

                For performance by default the web server doesn’t really care which browser has asked it for a given page or what it has asked for before unless some kind of tracking is added to the pages your receive so that in subsequent requests you’re identified.

                So the only way for a website to keep track of a specific browser so that it can do different things for that browser (i.e. know a user has logged-in via that browser so send to that browser pages that user has access to rather than sending “You are not logged-in” errors) is by sending some kind of token to the browser which the browser will then present along with each subesequent request to that site.

                Cookies are by far the easiest way to do this.

                The problem with cookies is that their ability to track a browser has be abused for things far beyond their original purpose (mainly things like track the browser were a user logged-in, to know to which browsers it can send certain protected pages and information).

                There are some sites that can track a user in that site after log-in with a different method (basically all the links you get in pages on that website have a tiny bit of extra information that identifies each request as coming from a specific browser, but for example if you come into the website again from a bookmark all that is lost), but those are pretty rare nowadays because it can be quite complex to get it work whilst cookies are pretty straightforward to get to work reliably.

    • Marin_Rider@aussie.zone
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      9 months ago

      I used to use the good browser. But then they changed what the good browser was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me.

      ITLL HAPPEN TO YOU

    • Victor@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Mozilla Phoenix user here. Good old times. Then Firebird came along. Then Firefox… What an odd name change that was, IMO. Firefox. Huh.

      Then Chrome came and I jumped on that ship for years until the new revamped Firefox came in 2018, and as it looks nowadays, I won’t ever leave Firefox until it dies of death.

      Chrome has a pretty sleek design these days, but my conscience tells me I can’t use it.

      I use Chromium for web development (testing purposes only), but I’m not sure if Chromium is any better. At least I’m not signed in to it.

      • Twitches@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        They ditched Phoenix because the bios manufacturer had that copy right. There’s a whole story behind it.

        Firefox in China is also known as a red panda

        • Victor@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Ah, so that’s the reason. I never bothered to find out. Thanks! Only 20 years later or so 😅

          • Twitches@lemm.ee
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            8 months ago

            Lol I only found out about a month ago. So I’m in the same boat.

  • Rufus Q. Bodine III@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    “Did any user in the world want a user-tracking and ad platform baked directly into their browser? Probably not, but this is Google, and they control Chrome, and this probably still won’t make people switch to Firefox.”

    • RedFox@infosec.pub
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      9 months ago

      Their idea is that is hides all the user info from advertising companies. Downside is your browser is an ad slot machine.

      Which is best?

      Tracked or ad machine?

      I’m more surprised people aren’t talking about the fact that since it’s running on the client side, someone would just figure out a way to hack and block all the ads even easier.

      • jollyrogue@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        It hides user information from companies which aren’t Google. The best is not using anything Chromium based.

        Extensions require APIs from the browser to work, and Google is going to nerf the APIs which allow for ad blocking. Extensions don’t have unfettered access to the DOM. FF used to be like that, but Chrome never allowed that.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        This also further consolidates Google’s advertising power. Block all their competitors from gathering the information and give them a neutered “topics list”. Google still maintains every ability to allow their own products and ad platform to bypass and use the full information.

      • ysjet@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Because the entire design of it is to mathematically prevent you from having the option to hack or block the ads. THe way to get around it is to… not use chrome.

    • Neato@ttrpg.network
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      9 months ago

      You’re thinking about it the wrong way. How does this directly and noticably harm the user experience of the average user of chrome? If it doesn’t then there’s no incentive for them to switch.

      Not everyone knows about this kind of thing or cares. Firefox has to be significantly better in obvious ways and market that to grow their market share.

    • thelasttoot@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I wish I could stick to Firefox but I’ve been having trouble with looping captchas on there. 90% of the time Firefox works fine but there’s still a handful of websites that just refuse to work unless I’m using chrome.

      • finalarbiter@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Some websites intentionally change behavior based on your user agent. There are plenty of extensions for Firefox that let you change it so sites think you’re using chrome instead. It’s wild to me that’s even a thing, but ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

  • cum@lemmy.cafe
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    9 months ago

    It’s also already built into Google Play Services. Remember this when they claim a monopoly is good for “security” reasons.

    • zaphod@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      Amazing how Google and Apple differ on so much, but in this respect they are in total agreement…

        • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Indeed it is. Unfortunately though it’s also important enough that it means people will go along with fascist stuff if the “security” excuse is used, and people who stand up to it will be mocked and ridiculed at best, or be accused of being cyber attackers at worst.

  • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    next up: every page requires shitty chrome or login with google.

    then the big shrug and all continue using chrome, iphone, amazon and the other evils.

    if you are using any of the above YOU are the problem.

    thoughts and prayers. wasch mich, aber mach mich nicht nass.

      • nevemsenki@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        For sure. I more mean it happens a lot, so probably that’s the kind of crowd that is/was attracted here? Or we have a lot of bots.

    • Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 months ago

      I would ask “Whats with Lemmy and telling people what software to use?”. I am all in favour of being aware of the pros and cons but let people decide for themselves once they are aware.

    • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      I’m gonna spin up a Windows VM and see how many porn sites and open chrome sessions i can spawn

      • adONis@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        don’t need a VM for that… it’s basically my daily challenge 🤪

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page.

    The blog post says the ad platform is hitting “general availability” today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users.

    This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.

    Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an “ad privacy” feature has been rolled out to them and enabled.

    That’s actually what started this whole process: Apple dealt a giant blow to Google’s core revenue stream when it blocked third-party cookies in Safari in 2020.

    Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads."


    The original article contains 587 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • Teon@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    All google products are spyware. Although technically they should be called “trackingware”.