Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome

Yay for Firefox

Please, everyone, stop using Chrome. This is an easy vote with your wallet that doesn't even require your wallet.

Complacency means the internet gets worse, ads get worse, nickel and diming gets worse. It's the easiest chance to take a stand you'll ever have.

Firefox is the way to go.

Firefox gets like 90% of its revenue from Google.

Keep Firefox independent and donate: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?form=donate

Firefox has been my go-to, but I've left Chrome installed just to have on hand incase some website fuckiness could be solved with a browser change.

Naw. It's not worthy of staying around even for that. Time to completely scrub my devices of google.

The site you've linked to literally uses Facebook and Google browser trackers. Pretty hypocritical of them if you ask me.

So my takeaway from this is to never use Chrome again? Gotcha.

For people who roll their eyes when someone mentions Linux and all of the free and open source projects adjacent to it (including Firefox!), this is exactly why many people value those things. We actually can have freedom in computing and it's worth pushing for. We don't have to roll over simply accept what Google, Microsoft and Apple want.

We have firefox, iceweasel, fennec (android). Anything else not firefox based is chrome based. Don't get tricked by opera and similars.

You can still change browser.

You guys are way to late to quit chrome, and you probably won't at this point. This is what happens when you don't swap, you enable this anti-consumer monopoly behavior.

Lol nice. People using chrome be like

I change from Chrome to Firefox recently on all devices and it was a pretty easy transition.

Back in the old days when a software contains these crap, considered as adware/malware and people get their pitchforks.

Now: its normal.

Every single thing about Google sucks nowadays. Great job Sundar, you successfully turned one of the former most exciting companies on the planet into one of the absolute lamest.

Switched back to Firefox. Easy transition. Fuck Google.

Time to uninstall chrome. Can I move my passwords, bookmarks and saved data there? How do I do it?

getfirefox.com

Now that Firefox is getting in-page translation capability, Chrome does not offer any features I am missing anymore. As long as they don't start performance wars, like the shit that happened with Youtube a while ago, I'll be fine

I tried to preach why Google sharing your browsing history with ad partners is bad, but most of my friends don't seem to care. :(

So as far as i know, firefox is the only mayor browser not based on chromium. Also, firefox is dependent on google's funding because of a search engine exclisivity deal. So my understanding is that, if google decides to kill firefox, they could easily do that. Well, what then? Is there any other browser left wich similar features that would be untouchable by google?

Honestly, I was already using FF for my home. Made the switch on Mobile after seeing this on the news yesterday. I'm just one person though.

Not used anything but Firefox for the last 10 years or so. Can't remember how long I've used DDG for. Fuck Google and all who fail in her.

It's lucky I haven't used Chrome in years. Firefox is much appreciated these days.

I'm more concerned by the update my android just did. Got a notification that they are now enabling more ad tracking. I use Firefox on my phone but looks like that doesn't matter

I should have never left Firefox when chrome came out. Its good to be back. Especially before any of this happened.

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.

Google says it will block third-party cookies in the second half of 2024—presumably after it makes sure the "Privacy Sandbox" will allow it to keep its profits up.

The original article contains 588 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Librewolf

That was completely expected. You give any company monopoly over anything and they will abuse it. This was Chrome dominating browser market. Microsoft did it with IE back in the day. Now Google is doing it again.

Finally un-installed chrome on Windows.

Is this enough to remove traces?

2. Go to this location: C:\Users\YOUNAME\AppData\Local\Google
   C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\
3. And delete that "Chrome" folder (for both location, if there is a Chrome folder)

https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/29816481/how-do-i-fully-uninstall-chrome?hl=en

Does disabling this as described in the article truly disable it, meaning if you do, after Chrome blocks 3rd party cookies late next year (assuming they follow through on that), you won't be tracked by either?

Who could have possibly have forseen that a company that makes nearly all of its revenue from data mining and advertising would one day use a popular software tool as a means of data mining and advertising. This is like wheels-within-wherls thinking right here.

Do no evil

bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome

It has always been a user-tracking platform but it is getting worse

nuked that shit from my machine.

only going to use it inside a VM now for testing purposes

Chrome is for the surveillance state

I already use Firefox for everything that's not literally for my D&D stuff. Because some relevant fan sites don't display properly on Firefox for some stupid reason. That's it. So even if they manage to get past my blockers, they literally are telling me nothing I will ever care about because I already have/know where to get any relevant thing those ads might be shilling, and the rest is all irrelevant noise.

In regards to the argument that google pays firefox and could easily kill it off I doubt it. Even if they were so bold as to cut funding completely (which they are not) you will find that Mozilla will have at some point have to cut loose their CEO or cut their huge pays down and make some changes there followed by some clever moves to find another source of income. If worse comes to worse the community will come to its aid and it will go back into the hands of the community which is likely a very good thing but Google has another approach to all of this and are incrementally trying to lock firefox or any non compliant browser or competitor out of the internet. Google has been doing it for years now. They hijacked web standards also along the way.

I think people are either forgetting the roots of chrome or how it came about as being PUP and foistware bundled along with popular freeware software or anyone they could pay to bundle their software with but earlier than that it was a toolbar that piggybacked onto IE (for its marketshare) and than I believe even Firefox too. People also seem to have this belief that when Chrome came out it was absolutely revolutionary and brilliant but the truth is that it was garbage but people fell for it like a shark to a bucket of chum. To me Chrome was pretty much your Bonzi Buddy of browsers. And google a complete scourge on the internet.

As for webkit that old chestnut. The only reason why that is popular at all is because Apple makes sure that you cannot use any other browser or makes it as difficult as possible not to mention the largest part of their user base comes from their iphone without that they're pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel. IMO Yes, Google is just as bad if not worse in many cases as they leverage their android phone market, run ads on TV specifically designed to push chrome and also built an entire laptop (all be it a terrible one) and called it a chromebook to make sure they keep their dominance but lets not also forget they bought youtube also to stack the odds in their favor. Same ol' Google really.

The browser wars are dead! We just settle for the lesser evil these days.

Saying that this is better for your privacy is like saying I only get punched in the face every second day rather than every day now.

Taking all of the above away and if there is one reason fewer people should be using chrome or chromium based browsers and using something else such as Firefox or a fork is to maintain a balance and take away some of the power and influence they (Google) do have over the web so they will not be able to force things such as WEI and take away many of the freedoms from the net in which we grew up on as too did the internet. The Freedom of exchange of information was never meant to be conditional or the internet held to ransom by one company but this is where we are at so its time for a change of hands or a the balance of power to be restored. Bringing balance will also force sloppy and lazy web developers to stop build dirt poor websites and deliberately blocking out other browsers. Web standards need to be restored and be completely independent from one entity or another, be it google, Mozilla, Apple or any one else in between.

Permanently Deleted

I cant get Google drive links to stream in Firefox, thus I still keep Google Chrome around. Am I doing something wrong or is there a work around?

You can just disable it when it pops up. I hope it continues to warn new users when first setting it up.

this probably still won't make people switch to Firefox.

As a seamonkey user - aka mozilla, the flagship product that Mozilla deemed was too hard to maintain - I'm just surprised Firefox is still going. We joked at the time that Mozilla would find a browser too hard, then a rendering suite, then a library, then an algorithm, and finally a line of code.

(tribalists - I'm not picking on Firefox, so calm your knickers. I'm still just picking on Mozilla)

Is this just for chrome,or is it on all chromium browsers? Im running bromite,but considering going back to Firefox.

Is Mullvad chromium based?

At least it's opt-in?

Anyone know a good Google Chrome replacement on Android that is chromium based? Wanna a basic browser that I'll use when Firefox does not work correctly

I hate how rage baity article headlines have become. This isn't even true. The new "ad platform" integrated into Chrome is better for your privacy than what existed before. It's a revision of the previous system. If you think Google didn't track anything in Chrome before, you're wrong.

As long as the tracking is purely local, this seems like a good solution to me.

I use brave which is a chromium browser with all the tracking stuff turned off and a few ad blockers baked in. It also has some vpn and crypto wallet stuff built in but it’s not in your face so you can just ignore it.

This ad platform shouldn’t affect brave right? Should just be another thing the brave team are able to automatically switch off when the browser updates?