I use Firefox and Firefox Mobile on the desktop and Android respectively, Chromium with Bromite patches on Android, and infrequently Brave on the desktop to get to sites that only work properly with Chromium (more and more often - another whole separate can of worms too, this…) And I always pay attention to disable google.com and gstatic.com in NoScript and uBlock Origin whenever possible.

I noticed something quite striking: when I hit sites that use those hateful captchas from Google - aka “reCAPTCHA” that I know are from Google because they force me to temporarily reenable google.com and gstatic.com - statistically, Google quite consistently marks the captcha as passed with the green checkmark without even asking me to identify fire hydrants or bicycles once, or perhaps once but the test passes even if I purposedly don’t select certain images, and almost never serves me those especially heinous “rolling captchas” that keep coming up with more and more images to identify or not as you click on them until it apparently has annoyed you enough and lets you through.

When I use Firefox however, the captchas never pass without at least one test, sometimes several in a row, and very often rolling captchas. And if I purposedly don’t select certain images for the sake of experimentation, the captchas keep on coming and coming and coming forever - and if I keep doing it long enough, they plain never stop and the site become impossible to access.

Only with Firefox. Never with Chromium-based browsers.

I’ve been experimenting with this informally for months now and it’s quite clear to me that Google has a dark pattern in place with its reCAPTCHA system to make Chrome and Chromium-based browsers the path of least resistance.

It’s really disgusting…

  •  Sky Cato   ( @skycat@beehaw.org ) 
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    121 year ago

    The thing that annoys me so much is why every damn website has to depend on gOoGle scripts to function. E.g : most of website depend on googleapis or ajax.googleapis. why don’t you just stop hotlinking everything to 3rd party shits. This is basically spread Google’s domination on web. Remember, those 3rd party libraries are not Free. They take visitors data and make you dependent on their services. So Google has become the gatekeeper of many websites.

    I have a website and I coded everything by hands. No 3rd party JavaScript and other 3rd party BS. It makes my website run so damn fast

    • What you’re referring to is in fact Google Analytics which allows a lot of app to collect intrusive insights on their customers.

      If you want to create an app today, you will use JS, Lemmy uses it, everyone uses it. It’s not dominated by Google, it’s just the standard for building web app today!

      • I am not against JavaScript. I sometimes use JavaScript and I don’t see the wrongs in that. What I am concerned is why so many websites use 3rd party JavaScript. This is disgusting because you sell your visitors out. Besides you can’t control the content of 3rd party scripts and most of them sell your data and spy on you.

        • In the case of proprietary software yes, but using a CDN for delivering JavaScript is sometimes so useful for open-source.

          I see what you’re saying with Sentry, Google Analytics, etc… And it’s laughably hard to escape the influence of big tech in programming today, you are right!

          At least when you want to build an app as we know them know… I’m currently working with some other folks on making the web more decentralized through a database that shares his data across peers.

          Those peers are the user of the app. Let me tell you, the seeds are planted… just need to grow the tree!