Is it excellent? It feels more to me that the competition does not really exist - or just sucks. And then people largely gave up, letting the adMoney take over everything.
I abandoned firefox when a mozilla dev claimed Linux users can only listen to audio via systemd+pulseaudio (unless you recompile firefox but who in his sane mind wants to use mozconfig in 2026 - https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...). On adChromium, audio on youtube videos (also owned by Google) works fine, without me having to change anything. And older firefox versions also worked fine. At that moment in time I realised that firefox was no longer about the people. I stopped using it and I seem to not have been the only one who got frustrated with mozilla.
Pipewire just works without needing the awfulness of pulseaudio, but there's also "apulse" to shim directly to alsa if you want more like the older behavior. But Pipewire is far more compatible and modern.
What sane person use non systemd Linux? I kid, of course and thank you for your service in keeping the linux ecosystem honest in terms of reducing systemd’s hegemony and everything but this cannot be a problem you are not used to running into.
But it also feels to me their point was clear, despite their more… mathematically poetic way of putting it.
I believe their argument is something like: “As time goes on, Chrome keeps adding more and more user-hostile features. At some point (perhaps now) we should consider if those outweigh its positives.”
Its clear to me that Chrome is a key logger, they bundle it with random software, it spies on the user and collects data on the user, among many other things.
Google and the rest of the billionaire class thank you for ensuring everyone is too divided by red/blue tribalism to ever have enough unity to mount a fight against them. Well done!
Allow me to be anal for a moment, but what is the point of doing “if I remember correctly” for something like this?
You can very easily look up exactly when Lina Khan was appointed and get answer very quickly. Is it not worth the effort checking these things before commenting?
Ok rant over. Sorry to be an asshole. This is not your fault as much a standard which should be changed.
I’m 100% with you on the spirit of this comment. I don’t understand it either. I fear the standard you mentioned has been set at far too low of a level.
It seems to be very popular on this site to condemn surveillance capitalism and billionaires. But who built and still maintains the basis for their power, misusing it and the billions. So-called smart engineers like many of HN readers. If they rated morale higher than their personal 100Ks we would not need to wait for a government to stop the misery (in vain).
Yes, I have worked for 400,000 employees corp, then for a 70,000. For the last 15 years I have staid under 100. The pay is less, but it's easier to look into the mirror each morning.
The point is that no matter which party rules, they are bribed by big business to represent the interest of big business. Criticism without change does not really work well.
This administration has done nothing to end or undermine the antitrust cases against Google. In both cases the judges found Google in violation of antitrust law, but both handed down fairly mild remedies, despite the administration (prosecutor) pushing for much stronger changes. The judges were appointed by Clinton (Leonie Brinkema) and Obama (Amit Mehta).
Perhaps not US cases, but those aren't the only antitrust cases against Google.
What about Trump's threats after Google was hit with a 2.95 billion Euro fine from the European Commission's antitrust investigation?
From last year: "EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič on Monday made an 11th-hour intervention to stop the European Commission from issuing a penalty against American tech giant Google for its search advertising practices, amid continued trade threats from U.S. President Donald Trump." https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-google-antitrust-decision...
Or from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/google-meta-big-tech-6-billi... "In February, Trump signed a memorandum stating the U.S. would consider tariffs to “combat digital service taxes (DSTs), fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”"
Here's a link in case it's needed (I suspect most people that assume all of their problems are because of the administration don't actually read links but maybe if it's from their court?)
> In both cases the judges found Google in violation of antitrust law
Exactly. They have been determined to be a monopoly, but have been allowed to continue to be a monopoly because not being a monopoly could damage their business.
Why wouldn't they do anything that they felt like doing if they had been assured immunity to any government intervention. Every company in the country, tech or not, heard this loud and clear. Thanks, Obama. Thanks, Clinton.
The administration is serving private business only. They don't care about the people.
It is not a democracy nor a republic state. It is an oligarchy. Thankfully more and more people realise how corrupt the orange mafia is. Recent polls show that - people learn slowly, but they learn.
This blog calls this a "cheat code". One could also call it a keylogger as that's what it feels like when using it; there's no display of the characters being typed
Using a local TLS forward proxy is a more effective way to control cookies than using Chrome settings. Of course, Google tries to make this more difficult with the requirement for the "cheat code" but typing into the keyloagger is not always necessary, not every site requires the "cheat code"
When you log into Google, you also log into Chrome. This means that you'll have a lot of exceptions for Google websites or else a "clear history" would log you out of Chrome.
Not justifying it (I don't use chrome) but that's likely what's happening here.
I feel like the obvious thing to check here is that all chrome processes have terminated between tests. If it's still running some zombie process of course the data would persist.
At least on windows, closing chrome doesn't close the system tray process which keeps Chrome and Gemini prestaged and cached. Wonder if OP is experiencing a version of that on his Mac?
Why would that cause only Google’s info to be preserved across sessions, though? Somewhere, Google are privileging their own data and preventing it from being deleted when other data are deleted and the browser is configured so everything should be gone.
Coincidently, I ran into this same situation last week. Spent way too much time trying to delete some accidental search query from pasting something in the url bar. Tried a bunch of things without luck. Had to manually delete records in a couple of SQLite files under the Chrome profile to make it go away.
While I absolutely believe this, the author should include a control. Go to a different website that sets data, and show that it is deleted when Google data is not.
I did: "As far as I can tell, www.google.com is the only site exempted by Chrome."
My screenshots do not show this, but my screenshots were not intended as proof, merely as explanation. Chrome is available to everyone and used by millions of people, so anyone who wants proof can reproduce the issue themselves, and I hope that they do.
The fact that the first screenshot is a totally empty browser window (just to show the address bar) made me lose faith about reading the rest of your writing...
Huh? I can't make sense of this criticism. What "faith" do you need?
Every screenshot in the blog post is the same size, which made it easier to do the <img> tags. (I write my blog in raw HTML.) Also, the first screenshot shows that my start page in Chrome is not Google Search, which is in fact quite relevant to the content of the blog post.
For the same reason, I showed a screenshot of Chrome sign-in disabled. Nonetheless, another commenter (who doesn't even use Chrome!) claimed that Chrome sign-in was the cause: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582989 To be honest, these comments depress me.
About half of all comments are completely tangential and/or from people who only read the headline. Another 25% are contrarian bickering. You just have to ignore all that if you want to stay sane.
Faith that the blog poster chose carefully to convey meaning, including with images. A huge image, 95% of it white, just for "I want to show you the address bar" is incoherent communication. Technical issues like "It's because I write the HTML myself" make it even worse, because you hide behind that and can't even see why it's disrespectful to the readers.
I just said that there was another reason: "Also, the first screenshot shows that my start page in Chrome is not Google Search, which is in fact quite relevant to the content of the blog post." So contrary to your claim, I did in fact choose carefully to convey meaning with images.
> you hide behind that
I'm not hiding anything.
> can't even see why it's disrespectful to the readers.
You're right, I can't see why it's disrespectful to the readers. But you speak only for yourself, singular reader, not other readers, plural. I suspect that if we took a poll, we might find that you're the only person on Earth who thinks my first screenshot was "disrespectful". It's such a bizarre cause for offense, I'm truly baffled by that.
Moreover, the HN guidelines say, "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Thus, your comments are disrespectful to HN readers.
Perhaps the sibling comment was correct: I have to ignore your comment if I want to stay sane.
Just another reason to stop using chrome and it's related browsers.
If you don't want to hand the biggest ad company a monopoly over web-browsing, start using a gecko based browser like librewolf, zen, mullvad or firefox.
Google/Alphabet is a bunch of useful good intentioned services wrapped around an nonuseful evil analytics core/monopoly. The people who work with good intentions that “just want to build cool things”, protect the monopoly and the people with bad intentions, who work to empower Google’s monopoly.
Google is playing a dangerous game here and I think it's going to bite them in the butt. First, some history.
One thing that made Microsoft successful was a strategy called embrace, extend and extinguish ("EEE"). This is what they tried to do to Java back when it was believed that Java was a threat to Microsoft's platform monopoly since the Java mantra was "write once, run anywhere". Microsoft added all these proprietary extensions after licensing Java.
Well, Microsoft basically did the same thing to knock Netscape off its throne. It was the whole basis for the antitrust suit. This was aimed at Java too because Java introduced applets. MS added ActiveX controls. MS did succeed at killing Netscape but the antitrust suit (and probably the victory over Java and Netscape) led us to more than a decade of hell with IE6 compatibility as MS basically abandoned their browser.
Google did something in the mid-2000s that nobody thought was possible: they created a browser and got mass adoption without having a platform. People willingly downloaded it. And when it was first released, it was magical. They pioneered one process per tab. At the time, Netscape had faded into Fireforx and it was pretty bad. Your entire browser could hang since it was one thread per tab and it absolutely did hang.
At this time and really through the mid-2010s, Google was a good actor with Chrome (IMHO). Chrome was secure, stable and a pretty open platform. Unfortunately for Google, this became a problem as use of ad blockers became more widespread. Where Chrome once became a posterchild for standards support, other parts of Google weren't so... open. Youtube at this time started playing games when people were using non-Chrome browsers.
Anyone who uses Chrome knows that the anti-ad blocking really stepped up. Changes to what extensions are allowed to do killed uBlock Origin. Google has risked regulatory wrath by special-casing their own user-tracking and ad cookies while blocking other third-party cookies. They also tried to phase out third-party cookies in favor of what sounded like a first-party only tracking (FLoC? I think it was called?).
Another issue is that Google always wanted people to be logged in with search and for the longest time they weren't. Well, people basically opted in to this by using Chrome and using a Google account. I used to really like the Google account syncing with Chrome. A lot of that for me has been replaced by using a password manager.
My point is I once was a huge Chrome fan and now I really want there to be an alternative. I trust Apple with Safari/iOS more than Google with Chrome/Android at this point. YMMV. I find myself using Firefox a lot (again).
Anyway, this whole messing with user tracking and ads I think could be Chrome's downfall and might invite regulatory scrutiny.
Microsoft did attempt the EEE strategy against Java with Visual J++, but Sun slapped that attempt down and Visual J++ was always a pretty minor footnote. The end result of this effort was C#. I should note that the much more successful EEE strategy against Java was Google's Android.
MS was successful at killing Netscape largely because paid software is difficult to compete against free software. The ActiveX controls weren't a feature with a lot of use--I can probably count all the sites I usedwith ActiveX controls on one hand. More common were the four big plugins: Java (for applets), Flash (counting Shockwave as part of Flash), Adobe Acrobot Reader, and Silverlight.
Netscape famously rewrote its codebase to try to implement the new web standards (like CSS2) more quickly, which contributed greatly to its ultimate collapse. After Netscape collapsed, MS laid off most of its browser development team, which let IE6 languish for years without improvements, going from the most standards-compliant browser on the market to the least standards-compliant. The rise of Firefox caused MS to pay attention again to web browsers, eventually restarting development and leading to IE7 being finally released. Only subsequent to that (and Firefox taking a large chunk of the browser market) did Google Chrome come out.
> Google did something in the mid-2000s that nobody thought was possible: they created a browser and got mass adoption without having a platform. People willingly downloaded it
I have to say that things weren't so bright. You were correct that Google had no platform, but Google never had any qualms about doing illegal things. To start with, the average person had no idea what a browser is, they had 'the internet' installed on their computer. Someday 'the internet' had changed on their computer.
How? Well, remember that Windows had (or: has) no equivalent of Linux software repositories. People browsed the internet and downloaded software (including malware) from big download sites. Google sponsored those sites and had google chrome injected in every installer. Think about that when Google talks about 'sideloading Android apps'. People just had no idea, but all of a sudden their internet had changed.
Secondly, Google hijacked other browsers by urging people on the Google homepage to install Google Toolbar (if I remember the name correctly) This provided a different way to spy on user's browsing activity, plus it provided a springboard toward a full chrome install.
Thirdly, Google pushed users aggressively to download Chrome across all of their products. I remember Google telling me on every page that my browser was not Chrome.
Chrome was never an offer from a benevolent party, on the contrary. I have been talking against many a deaf ear that it isn't that smart to install an ad viewer from an ad company, even if the first page load feels more flashy in Chrome. I am glad that people finally are starting to wise up, better late than never. Especially the stupid excuses I heard from tech people that insisted Chrome is the only way has learnt me that tech people aren't as smart as we think they are. Don't take that personally.
We now have to free the internet for the average Joe. That won't be easy if we can't evade consequences from crime as Google can.
> Google has risked regulatory wrath by special-casing their own user-tracking and ad cookies while blocking other third-party cookies.
Google is too big a company to let something this essential slip through. Therefore the only reasonable position is to assume it's intentional, unless somehow proven that it was just incompetence.
If intentional, that would count as a repeat offense. I hope EU regulators throw a crack team of coders/researchers at this, disassemble every last bit of binaries involved, check history of changes, turn Google offices upside down for relevant internal docs/memo's etc. The works.
Then -unless proven to be an honest mistake- fire up another anti-trust case. But this time tripling or x5 the fine.
A company of Google's size & influence, pulling this kind of shenanigans repeatedly, should either be forced out of business or become unprofitable. Oh and have the responsible leaders up top (CEO?) serve actual jail time.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I suppose this allows google to better persist browser identifiers in order to facilitate advertising?
I'm not surprised they do this since advertising represents almost 3/4 of Google 's revenue. If anything, why should anyone expect something else? Company in the ads business modifies monopolistic browser to make money with ads and more news at 11. If it's not this, it's going to be another thing in the future.
Being surprised or not, and being pissed about it or not are orthogonal.
I'm also not surprised and do fault Google for it. We shouldn't give them a pass just because they're regular offenders, it should be the opposite IMHO.
What I am surprised about is that even with all of this effort that is put into tracking us, the majority of ads that I see don't even fit my demographic.
I think it's due to the lack of proper ads at a price point worth it. For instance your local fishing shop won't win the ad auction for your eyeballs against Binance or Tinder, even if you have absolutely no interest in the latter.
No one says structure doesn't influence behavior. Intended behavior is not the same thing as actual behavior, and groups of people don't behave like individual people. Metaphors to organisms are just: metaphors. We've known for a very long time that mobs of people will do nasty, destructive things that individuals in the mob wouldn't otherwise do. Corporations will also do nasty destructive things that individuals in the corporation wouldn't otherwise do.
Did you read the comment I was responding to? They said corporations don't exist and the individual humans deserve all of the blame. I fully agree with everything you said except for "No one says structure doesn't influence behavior"; I think that's pretty much exactly what the comment I responded to argued.
I don't have access to that commenter's state of mind, but I take it to mean that the "corporation" as a singular entity only exists on paper and in fact acts as a group of individual humans. I don't think that's the same thing as saying the structure having _no influence_, especially since that structure pays people and money influences the behavior of individuals. No influence is a much stronger claim than what was made. But I could also just be projecting my thoughts on the matter onto others when I say "no one says structure doesn't influence behavior".
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree then. The context of their comment was whether the corporation or humans are to blame, and the comment I responded to reads to me like saying that the corporation has no blame and the humans have all of it.
Your opinion honestly does seem mostly aligned with mine (there's potentially blame for both the corporation and the individuals, with the corporation's portion of the blame being from influence on the individuals), and personally I find it kind of hard to determine how much the individual deserves since it depends a lot on circumstances we might never know (e.g. if the individual had a really sick family member, I genuinely might find it understandable that taking a job from Google that pays well even if it's doing some weird stuff with browsers; that's an extreme example, but my point is that I don't think whether it's blameworthy or not is a binary). I just don't read the comment I responded to as agreeing with any sort of nuance like that; my reading is that they're asserting that the individuals are fully and solely blameworthy and that the fact that they were operating under the behalf of a corporation is insignificant.
Fully agree. Humans are social animals who behave differently in different contexts, and the corporate context statistically ensures that the humans inside of it behave in all sorts of lamentable ways.
Yes, but the worst human in an org, has the potential to drag the whole org down. Further, people are not aligned, so groups may disagree with an act, but each lack a majority to effect change. And group infighting may mean no cooperation.
We see this in politics. Orgs are political too.
(no "political" doesn't mean US Left/Righr here. It means simply "political" which can have nothing to do with government or party politics)
Politicians are also humans, everyone working for De Beers are also human... Please stop justifying egregious behavior from company who is destroying the fabric of internet with too many useless ads....And it isn't first time they are doing it, these "engineers" were the one who removed mv2 without better ad blocks in mv3.
Just for your info classic ublock style doesn't work on mv3. Google have severely limited adblocking in chrome now. They deprecated very late due to pressure from people, not out of goodwill.
Useless to users, not to advertisers. And, many people like me have never purchased any products after seeing ads at least on internet.
1. ads are not useless.
2. without ads, there would be significantly less free content for people to read.
3. politicians are human too, but not the best of us except a few. Yes.
It's hip to say ads make things worse, but reality is often much more nuanced.
My original point being, many times an external person may think something is intentional when it may very well be a bug or may be there for a good reason.
I have observed a few of those both as an external person or an internal person.
Can't remember the last time I saw an ad for something I was actually interested in. These days I am often discouraged from buying a product based on ads.
I complain about Firefox out of hope that the people at Mozilla will pull their heads out of their asses. I dont bother complaining about chrome because I generally do not use it and I certainly don't expect anyone at google to care at all about their users, decency, etc.
Chrome may be an excellent browser, but the venn diagram overlap with malware keeps getting larger.
Is it excellent? It feels more to me that the competition does not really exist - or just sucks. And then people largely gave up, letting the adMoney take over everything.
I abandoned firefox when a mozilla dev claimed Linux users can only listen to audio via systemd+pulseaudio (unless you recompile firefox but who in his sane mind wants to use mozconfig in 2026 - https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...). On adChromium, audio on youtube videos (also owned by Google) works fine, without me having to change anything. And older firefox versions also worked fine. At that moment in time I realised that firefox was no longer about the people. I stopped using it and I seem to not have been the only one who got frustrated with mozilla.
Firefox is amazing
I don't use pulseaudio and audio works fine. (I use pipeware)
Pipewire just works without needing the awfulness of pulseaudio, but there's also "apulse" to shim directly to alsa if you want more like the older behavior. But Pipewire is far more compatible and modern.
What sane person use non systemd Linux? I kid, of course and thank you for your service in keeping the linux ecosystem honest in terms of reducing systemd’s hegemony and everything but this cannot be a problem you are not used to running into.
how does it need systemd? also, you could continue using alsa using the wrapper, or you could use pipewire
You should fork Firefox and make an alsa version.
This is just a sound bite, not engagement with reality.
Write enough to defend your position.
> This is just a sound bite
I agree it sounds like a sound bite.
> Write enough to defend your position.
But it also feels to me their point was clear, despite their more… mathematically poetic way of putting it.
I believe their argument is something like: “As time goes on, Chrome keeps adding more and more user-hostile features. At some point (perhaps now) we should consider if those outweigh its positives.”
It's not, but believe what you want.
Its clear to me that Chrome is a key logger, they bundle it with random software, it spies on the user and collects data on the user, among many other things.
It's okay, they're not a monopoly according to this administration. Nothing to see here, carry on!
Google and the rest of the billionaire class thank you for ensuring everyone is too divided by red/blue tribalism to ever have enough unity to mount a fight against them. Well done!
Exactly. It is like Google has only emerged during this administration with their shenanigans.
iirc lina khan was appointed during the first trump admin and got most of her work done suing to split google during the biden admin?
you are a bit out of the loop if you think this is a partisan issue, or specifically one thats only there when trump is in charge
She got nominated by Biden in Biden's last term in March of 2021 and left in 2025 two weeks after Trump assumed office.
She did not get appointed under Trump nor did substantial work done under his administration.
Edit: I do not necessarily disagree with your comment on the partisan aspects of this issue. This is only meant to respond to the first paragraph.
Using Lina Khan as an example (your only example?) undermines your point because she started upset Biden and was quickly fired after Trump 2 started.
Allow me to be anal for a moment, but what is the point of doing “if I remember correctly” for something like this?
You can very easily look up exactly when Lina Khan was appointed and get answer very quickly. Is it not worth the effort checking these things before commenting?
Ok rant over. Sorry to be an asshole. This is not your fault as much a standard which should be changed.
I’m 100% with you on the spirit of this comment. I don’t understand it either. I fear the standard you mentioned has been set at far too low of a level.
It seems to be very popular on this site to condemn surveillance capitalism and billionaires. But who built and still maintains the basis for their power, misusing it and the billions. So-called smart engineers like many of HN readers. If they rated morale higher than their personal 100Ks we would not need to wait for a government to stop the misery (in vain).
Yes, I have worked for 400,000 employees corp, then for a 70,000. For the last 15 years I have staid under 100. The pay is less, but it's easier to look into the mirror each morning.
What rock have you been living under?
So we cannot say anything bad about the current administration without being divisive? What does criticising them tell you about tribalism?
The point is that no matter which party rules, they are bribed by big business to represent the interest of big business. Criticism without change does not really work well.
This administration has done nothing to end or undermine the antitrust cases against Google. In both cases the judges found Google in violation of antitrust law, but both handed down fairly mild remedies, despite the administration (prosecutor) pushing for much stronger changes. The judges were appointed by Clinton (Leonie Brinkema) and Obama (Amit Mehta).
Perhaps not US cases, but those aren't the only antitrust cases against Google.
What about Trump's threats after Google was hit with a 2.95 billion Euro fine from the European Commission's antitrust investigation?
From last year: "EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič on Monday made an 11th-hour intervention to stop the European Commission from issuing a penalty against American tech giant Google for its search advertising practices, amid continued trade threats from U.S. President Donald Trump." https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-google-antitrust-decision...
Or from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/google-meta-big-tech-6-billi... "In February, Trump signed a memorandum stating the U.S. would consider tariffs to “combat digital service taxes (DSTs), fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”"
That memorandum is at https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...
Here's a link in case it's needed (I suspect most people that assume all of their problems are because of the administration don't actually read links but maybe if it's from their court?)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-googl...
> In both cases the judges found Google in violation of antitrust law
Exactly. They have been determined to be a monopoly, but have been allowed to continue to be a monopoly because not being a monopoly could damage their business.
Why wouldn't they do anything that they felt like doing if they had been assured immunity to any government intervention. Every company in the country, tech or not, heard this loud and clear. Thanks, Obama. Thanks, Clinton.
This admin likes when entities lose in court because then they can dangle non-enforcement.
No politicians are going to fight a media company. They're in the PR and advertising supply chain.
‘Lake America’ buys breathing time too.
This administration has spent quite a lot of time going after media companies.
The administration is serving private business only. They don't care about the people.
It is not a democracy nor a republic state. It is an oligarchy. Thankfully more and more people realise how corrupt the orange mafia is. Recent polls show that - people learn slowly, but they learn.
This admin said they are:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
> Google used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in search and search advertising.
No mention of chrome://settings/clearBrowserData
Use this before using chrome://settings/siteData
Not sure if this is still the case with current versions
One of the top comments in this thread suggests Chrome is a keylogger
https://thomascountz.com/2025/07/17/chromes-ssl-bypass-cheat...
This blog calls this a "cheat code". One could also call it a keylogger as that's what it feels like when using it; there's no display of the characters being typed
Using a local TLS forward proxy is a more effective way to control cookies than using Chrome settings. Of course, Google tries to make this more difficult with the requirement for the "cheat code" but typing into the keyloagger is not always necessary, not every site requires the "cheat code"
When you log into Google, you also log into Chrome. This means that you'll have a lot of exceptions for Google websites or else a "clear history" would log you out of Chrome.
Not justifying it (I don't use chrome) but that's likely what's happening here.
In the article he explains he’s not signed into Chrome nor Google during the experiment.
This is what the “Allow Chrome sign-in” setting is for and is turned off by the post author.
What I mean is that the browser has exceptions for Google and that most likely not all code paths follow the user settings. Still a bug though.
I feel like the obvious thing to check here is that all chrome processes have terminated between tests. If it's still running some zombie process of course the data would persist.
At least on windows, closing chrome doesn't close the system tray process which keeps Chrome and Gemini prestaged and cached. Wonder if OP is experiencing a version of that on his Mac?
Microsoft Edge does this too, iirc, for "Startup Boost".
> Wonder if OP is experiencing a version of that on his Mac?
No.
It would still be a (albeit convenient for google) bug, as the setting indicates closing all windows as the trigger for deletion.
It's convenient that "zombie processes" only retain data for Google-owned sites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583517
Why would that cause only Google’s info to be preserved across sessions, though? Somewhere, Google are privileging their own data and preventing it from being deleted when other data are deleted and the browser is configured so everything should be gone.
Coincidently, I ran into this same situation last week. Spent way too much time trying to delete some accidental search query from pasting something in the url bar. Tried a bunch of things without luck. Had to manually delete records in a couple of SQLite files under the Chrome profile to make it go away.
While I absolutely believe this, the author should include a control. Go to a different website that sets data, and show that it is deleted when Google data is not.
I did: "As far as I can tell, www.google.com is the only site exempted by Chrome."
My screenshots do not show this, but my screenshots were not intended as proof, merely as explanation. Chrome is available to everyone and used by millions of people, so anyone who wants proof can reproduce the issue themselves, and I hope that they do.
The fact that the first screenshot is a totally empty browser window (just to show the address bar) made me lose faith about reading the rest of your writing...
Looks like a lot of the other folks here read the post
Huh? I can't make sense of this criticism. What "faith" do you need?
Every screenshot in the blog post is the same size, which made it easier to do the <img> tags. (I write my blog in raw HTML.) Also, the first screenshot shows that my start page in Chrome is not Google Search, which is in fact quite relevant to the content of the blog post.
For the same reason, I showed a screenshot of Chrome sign-in disabled. Nonetheless, another commenter (who doesn't even use Chrome!) claimed that Chrome sign-in was the cause: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582989 To be honest, these comments depress me.
About half of all comments are completely tangential and/or from people who only read the headline. Another 25% are contrarian bickering. You just have to ignore all that if you want to stay sane.
Faith that the blog poster chose carefully to convey meaning, including with images. A huge image, 95% of it white, just for "I want to show you the address bar" is incoherent communication. Technical issues like "It's because I write the HTML myself" make it even worse, because you hide behind that and can't even see why it's disrespectful to the readers.
> just for "I want to show you the address bar"
I just said that there was another reason: "Also, the first screenshot shows that my start page in Chrome is not Google Search, which is in fact quite relevant to the content of the blog post." So contrary to your claim, I did in fact choose carefully to convey meaning with images.
> you hide behind that
I'm not hiding anything.
> can't even see why it's disrespectful to the readers.
You're right, I can't see why it's disrespectful to the readers. But you speak only for yourself, singular reader, not other readers, plural. I suspect that if we took a poll, we might find that you're the only person on Earth who thinks my first screenshot was "disrespectful". It's such a bizarre cause for offense, I'm truly baffled by that.
Moreover, the HN guidelines say, "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Thus, your comments are disrespectful to HN readers.
Perhaps the sibling comment was correct: I have to ignore your comment if I want to stay sane.
I just don't understand why people keep using Chrome.
Just another reason to stop using chrome and it's related browsers.
If you don't want to hand the biggest ad company a monopoly over web-browsing, start using a gecko based browser like librewolf, zen, mullvad or firefox.
Also support Ladybird. It's not generally usable just yet, but the strides its taking forward are immense.
Google just did Google thing on a Google owned browser. No surprises here of course
> all Google Search results are now opaque https://www.google.com/goto?url= garbage rather than the site URLs!
Can google justify why are they doing this? I wish google will die sooner if they start behaving like this.
1) So the backend can track you across fingerprinted links
2) So you can't know what's searched without getting tracked
You're the product, not the customer.
Remember AMP?
Baby steps and they’ll try again.
they don't have to! they remembered they control all browsers. much easier for the same goals they had with amp
Google still uses amp on websites with a lot of ads... go figure that the king of ads dislikes some ads.
Interesting observation: As soon as you right click on a link, it switches from that to https://www.google.com/url?...
they do that because they added this dark pattern on gmail almost two decades ago and absolutely nobody ever complained.
why wouldn't they expand it?
> Can google justify why are they doing this?
Look at Google's earnings reports and see what constitutes 80-90% of their revenues and profits
It's to protect against scrapers that aren't running JavaScript. Makes it more costly for them.
Folks,
We must do something about Google. They ruin the www.
Hey, let’s not forget Cloudflare
Yes, switch to Firefox, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49527748
Google/Alphabet is a bunch of useful good intentioned services wrapped around an nonuseful evil analytics core/monopoly. The people who work with good intentions that “just want to build cool things”, protect the monopoly and the people with bad intentions, who work to empower Google’s monopoly.
I used to search on google.ca exclusively with disabled js and cookie
Until the day it no longer works. Sad.
Google is playing a dangerous game here and I think it's going to bite them in the butt. First, some history.
One thing that made Microsoft successful was a strategy called embrace, extend and extinguish ("EEE"). This is what they tried to do to Java back when it was believed that Java was a threat to Microsoft's platform monopoly since the Java mantra was "write once, run anywhere". Microsoft added all these proprietary extensions after licensing Java.
Well, Microsoft basically did the same thing to knock Netscape off its throne. It was the whole basis for the antitrust suit. This was aimed at Java too because Java introduced applets. MS added ActiveX controls. MS did succeed at killing Netscape but the antitrust suit (and probably the victory over Java and Netscape) led us to more than a decade of hell with IE6 compatibility as MS basically abandoned their browser.
Google did something in the mid-2000s that nobody thought was possible: they created a browser and got mass adoption without having a platform. People willingly downloaded it. And when it was first released, it was magical. They pioneered one process per tab. At the time, Netscape had faded into Fireforx and it was pretty bad. Your entire browser could hang since it was one thread per tab and it absolutely did hang.
At this time and really through the mid-2010s, Google was a good actor with Chrome (IMHO). Chrome was secure, stable and a pretty open platform. Unfortunately for Google, this became a problem as use of ad blockers became more widespread. Where Chrome once became a posterchild for standards support, other parts of Google weren't so... open. Youtube at this time started playing games when people were using non-Chrome browsers.
Anyone who uses Chrome knows that the anti-ad blocking really stepped up. Changes to what extensions are allowed to do killed uBlock Origin. Google has risked regulatory wrath by special-casing their own user-tracking and ad cookies while blocking other third-party cookies. They also tried to phase out third-party cookies in favor of what sounded like a first-party only tracking (FLoC? I think it was called?).
Another issue is that Google always wanted people to be logged in with search and for the longest time they weren't. Well, people basically opted in to this by using Chrome and using a Google account. I used to really like the Google account syncing with Chrome. A lot of that for me has been replaced by using a password manager.
My point is I once was a huge Chrome fan and now I really want there to be an alternative. I trust Apple with Safari/iOS more than Google with Chrome/Android at this point. YMMV. I find myself using Firefox a lot (again).
Anyway, this whole messing with user tracking and ads I think could be Chrome's downfall and might invite regulatory scrutiny.
Microsoft did attempt the EEE strategy against Java with Visual J++, but Sun slapped that attempt down and Visual J++ was always a pretty minor footnote. The end result of this effort was C#. I should note that the much more successful EEE strategy against Java was Google's Android.
MS was successful at killing Netscape largely because paid software is difficult to compete against free software. The ActiveX controls weren't a feature with a lot of use--I can probably count all the sites I usedwith ActiveX controls on one hand. More common were the four big plugins: Java (for applets), Flash (counting Shockwave as part of Flash), Adobe Acrobot Reader, and Silverlight.
Netscape famously rewrote its codebase to try to implement the new web standards (like CSS2) more quickly, which contributed greatly to its ultimate collapse. After Netscape collapsed, MS laid off most of its browser development team, which let IE6 languish for years without improvements, going from the most standards-compliant browser on the market to the least standards-compliant. The rise of Firefox caused MS to pay attention again to web browsers, eventually restarting development and leading to IE7 being finally released. Only subsequent to that (and Firefox taking a large chunk of the browser market) did Google Chrome come out.
I have to say that things weren't so bright. You were correct that Google had no platform, but Google never had any qualms about doing illegal things. To start with, the average person had no idea what a browser is, they had 'the internet' installed on their computer. Someday 'the internet' had changed on their computer.
How? Well, remember that Windows had (or: has) no equivalent of Linux software repositories. People browsed the internet and downloaded software (including malware) from big download sites. Google sponsored those sites and had google chrome injected in every installer. Think about that when Google talks about 'sideloading Android apps'. People just had no idea, but all of a sudden their internet had changed.
Secondly, Google hijacked other browsers by urging people on the Google homepage to install Google Toolbar (if I remember the name correctly) This provided a different way to spy on user's browsing activity, plus it provided a springboard toward a full chrome install.
Thirdly, Google pushed users aggressively to download Chrome across all of their products. I remember Google telling me on every page that my browser was not Chrome.
Chrome was never an offer from a benevolent party, on the contrary. I have been talking against many a deaf ear that it isn't that smart to install an ad viewer from an ad company, even if the first page load feels more flashy in Chrome. I am glad that people finally are starting to wise up, better late than never. Especially the stupid excuses I heard from tech people that insisted Chrome is the only way has learnt me that tech people aren't as smart as we think they are. Don't take that personally.
We now have to free the internet for the average Joe. That won't be easy if we can't evade consequences from crime as Google can.
Thanks, this is too easily forgotten
> Google has risked regulatory wrath by special-casing their own user-tracking and ad cookies while blocking other third-party cookies.
Google is too big a company to let something this essential slip through. Therefore the only reasonable position is to assume it's intentional, unless somehow proven that it was just incompetence.
If intentional, that would count as a repeat offense. I hope EU regulators throw a crack team of coders/researchers at this, disassemble every last bit of binaries involved, check history of changes, turn Google offices upside down for relevant internal docs/memo's etc. The works.
Then -unless proven to be an honest mistake- fire up another anti-trust case. But this time tripling or x5 the fine.
A company of Google's size & influence, pulling this kind of shenanigans repeatedly, should either be forced out of business or become unprofitable. Oh and have the responsible leaders up top (CEO?) serve actual jail time.
Don't trust Google
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I suppose this allows google to better persist browser identifiers in order to facilitate advertising?
I'm not surprised they do this since advertising represents almost 3/4 of Google 's revenue. If anything, why should anyone expect something else? Company in the ads business modifies monopolistic browser to make money with ads and more news at 11. If it's not this, it's going to be another thing in the future.
Being surprised or not, and being pissed about it or not are orthogonal.
I'm also not surprised and do fault Google for it. We shouldn't give them a pass just because they're regular offenders, it should be the opposite IMHO.
What I am surprised about is that even with all of this effort that is put into tracking us, the majority of ads that I see don't even fit my demographic.
I think it's due to the lack of proper ads at a price point worth it. For instance your local fishing shop won't win the ad auction for your eyeballs against Binance or Tinder, even if you have absolutely no interest in the latter.
ungoogled-chromium is where it's at
>> I’m personally inclined to cite Hanlon’s razor here rather than engage in conspiracy theories.
That is a likely case. Chrome is their closed source software unlike the Chromium browser.
Hanlon’s Razor applies to human behavior, not corporations.
Engineers are humans.
Corporations are not, they're made of humans but they behave worse than an individual.
And who do you think makes these behavioural decisions? There is no “corporation”, there are, however, those currently on that company’s payroll.
It’s their fault. The people. The humans. The ones working there. The ones knowingly employing their knowledge in service of the company.
It’s always the humans.
If the structure doesn't have any influence at all on the behavior, why do we have regulations against monopolies (at least on paper)?
No one says structure doesn't influence behavior. Intended behavior is not the same thing as actual behavior, and groups of people don't behave like individual people. Metaphors to organisms are just: metaphors. We've known for a very long time that mobs of people will do nasty, destructive things that individuals in the mob wouldn't otherwise do. Corporations will also do nasty destructive things that individuals in the corporation wouldn't otherwise do.
Did you read the comment I was responding to? They said corporations don't exist and the individual humans deserve all of the blame. I fully agree with everything you said except for "No one says structure doesn't influence behavior"; I think that's pretty much exactly what the comment I responded to argued.
I don't have access to that commenter's state of mind, but I take it to mean that the "corporation" as a singular entity only exists on paper and in fact acts as a group of individual humans. I don't think that's the same thing as saying the structure having _no influence_, especially since that structure pays people and money influences the behavior of individuals. No influence is a much stronger claim than what was made. But I could also just be projecting my thoughts on the matter onto others when I say "no one says structure doesn't influence behavior".
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree then. The context of their comment was whether the corporation or humans are to blame, and the comment I responded to reads to me like saying that the corporation has no blame and the humans have all of it.
Your opinion honestly does seem mostly aligned with mine (there's potentially blame for both the corporation and the individuals, with the corporation's portion of the blame being from influence on the individuals), and personally I find it kind of hard to determine how much the individual deserves since it depends a lot on circumstances we might never know (e.g. if the individual had a really sick family member, I genuinely might find it understandable that taking a job from Google that pays well even if it's doing some weird stuff with browsers; that's an extreme example, but my point is that I don't think whether it's blameworthy or not is a binary). I just don't read the comment I responded to as agreeing with any sort of nuance like that; my reading is that they're asserting that the individuals are fully and solely blameworthy and that the fact that they were operating under the behalf of a corporation is insignificant.
Fully agree. Humans are social animals who behave differently in different contexts, and the corporate context statistically ensures that the humans inside of it behave in all sorts of lamentable ways.
Corporations are just groups of people working under a common name towards a common goal, even when that goal is flimsy or bad.
Yes, but the worst human in an org, has the potential to drag the whole org down. Further, people are not aligned, so groups may disagree with an act, but each lack a majority to effect change. And group infighting may mean no cooperation.
We see this in politics. Orgs are political too.
(no "political" doesn't mean US Left/Righr here. It means simply "political" which can have nothing to do with government or party politics)
> Corporations are just groups of people working under a common name towards a common goal
Exactly in the same way as humans are just groups of cells working under a common genetic identity towards a common goal.
Politicians are also humans, everyone working for De Beers are also human... Please stop justifying egregious behavior from company who is destroying the fabric of internet with too many useless ads....And it isn't first time they are doing it, these "engineers" were the one who removed mv2 without better ad blocks in mv3.
>useless ads
If the ads were useless, advertisers would not pay for them to exist.
>without better ad blocks in mv3
MV3 adblockers were built before MV2 was deprecated.
Just for your info classic ublock style doesn't work on mv3. Google have severely limited adblocking in chrome now. They deprecated very late due to pressure from people, not out of goodwill.
Useless to users, not to advertisers. And, many people like me have never purchased any products after seeing ads at least on internet.
1. ads are not useless. 2. without ads, there would be significantly less free content for people to read. 3. politicians are human too, but not the best of us except a few. Yes.
It's hip to say ads make things worse, but reality is often much more nuanced.
My original point being, many times an external person may think something is intentional when it may very well be a bug or may be there for a good reason.
I have observed a few of those both as an external person or an internal person.
I don't think anyone is denying the value of advertising to Google or its advertisers.
But with fewer ads influencing their spending, readers might have more disposible income left over to fund content.
Might is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Can't remember the last time I saw an ad for something I was actually interested in. These days I am often discouraged from buying a product based on ads.
It's also just a razor, and not a very useful one.
Does the same behaviour manifest in Chromium?
I can reproduce it with Chromium 152.0.7977.75 on Debian sid.
Interesting, thanks for testing!
Google needs to be broken up.
Absolute piece of garbage browser, just use firefox and or ladybird once it comes out
I hate $THING Firefox does, and I'll complain about it, and I will use $CHROMIUM browser and not complain about that for some reason!
I complain about Firefox out of hope that the people at Mozilla will pull their heads out of their asses. I dont bother complaining about chrome because I generally do not use it and I certainly don't expect anyone at google to care at all about their users, decency, etc.