- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
Google has stated it plans to address developers’ concerns by “making web publishers promise not to abuse the API”.
Google’s new browser-based tracking functionality available via their “Topics API” has sparked numerous concerns recently, including fear that the heightened communication of web browser history could lead to “fingerprinting attacks” which could be used to track users across devices by profiling recent web history.
When prompted with this issue, Google started their short-term solution is to have web developers who enroll in the new Topics API platform take pledge that they will not abuse the new tool, whatever that means.
I suspect the list of people who switched to Chrome from Firefox, especially within the last decade, is vanishingly small.
In the early days of Chrome, it was svelt and lightweight compared to Opera or Firefox, but IE had the vast, vast, vast market share. Chrome handled tabs in a really cool way (the way ALL browsers now do it, putting them right in the application title bar in place of menus). The light touch and nice tabs made it worthwhile to switch at the time. And frankly, Blink was better than Gecko. But even then, the goal of all of the browser wars was to get people off of IE. IE didn’t respect web standards and made it flat-out hard to build websites. Switching someone to Chrome from IE was super easy so many people were encouraged to do so.
For most of its life, people were switching from IE (and Safari) to Chrome. Not Firefox to Chrome.
Nowadays, Chrome is just everywhere. People know it, and it still has a fairly-undeserved reputation as being better than the default browser (Edge/Safari).
So the reason this feels so illogical to you is because that scenario just… wasn’t happening.
Clearly you’ve never read Hacker News. :)
Every point I’ve made has several threads on pretty much every Hacker News post about Mozilla or Firefox.
I was using Firefox when it was still called Phoenix, and I switched to Chrome briefly about 10 years ago when it was actually a bit better than Firefox. At the time, most people I knew in the tech sector were using Firefox. It’s Firebug extension was a major boost for development. Chrome was a bit better and their dev tools were even better than Firebug at the time.
I switched back to Firefox when I saw the direction Google was taking it, and I know a lot of other people did as well. Still, many people stayed with Chrome. There’s no shortage of comments on Hacker News about “I dropped Firefox because X” or “I tried to switch to Firefox but X”, where X is one of the things I mentioned.
Chrome got to where it was in no small part to us “computer people” saying it was good. And now not enough of us are saying Firefox is good. It breaks my heart to see so many young and smart developers choosing Chrome.
We’re heading back to the bad old days of IE dominance, with proprietary extensions, playing fast and loose with standards, and market dominance pushing for things that only benefit one company. ActiveX still gives me nightmares.
Heading back? We’re already there! The default troubleshooting procedure when there’s webpage issues is “Try in Chrome, preferably without adblockers”, they all assume Chrome