All this… all this multi billion dollar development, all those ‘brains’, all the time and space a tech company occupies in it’s lifetime… just to force you to watch ads?
What a shitty society and what a shitty communication system we have, just because some morons want to earn some billions more…
There is no endgame when it comes to greed, those pricks will always want more.
Multiple billionaires have answerd the question, “when is it enough?” With the reply: “when I own everything.”
We should treat these cocksuckers like addicts and start looking at reform and rehabilitation! Think of the children!
many talks
Long ago, we praised Chrome for helping destroy Internet Explorer. Now it has become the same. No for-profit corporation is your friend.
Mozilla really did that with Firefox and Thunderbird to help kill IE and Outlook Express. Chrome came quite a bit later, but was instrumental in bringing about a performance reckoning, and a push for universal standards, sort of creating that movement. Really shocking now when you think of Google doing that.
That’s a bit revisionist.
Mozilla and Thunderbird existed as decent alternatives, but they had a tiny market share of generally tech minded people, which was a much smaller subset of the population than it is now.
Chrome and Gmail came in and completely demolished the market. They came in with a strong brand name, and a huge suite of features that worked well, and really ignited the Cloud app paradigm.
I have mained Firefox on desktop throughout the decades. But give credit where credit is due.
Not rewriting history or anything. The Mozilla Foundation made those apps to directly compete with Microsoft to offer free and open-source alternatives to the built-in apps of IE and Outlook Express, and they succeeded at that.
You’re pointing out a different thing from the original comment I responded to, and Firefox+Thunderbird were in the mix years before Gmail and Chrome, and if you want to get “revisionist” about it, Mozilla had the browser and mail client as one single app prior to that in an attempt to do the same thing, which was an entire decade before Chrome was released.
You asserted that it was really Mozilla that set up IE’s downfall, and that’s what my dissent is about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Mozilla/Netscape hovered around 20-30% throughout the 2000s. I.E. was the clear winner without any danger of losing its throne until Chrome came along.
Being a steady competitor != destroy. Chrome and the Google suite is what upended the lopsided browser war.
You’re arguing with me (for some reason) that what I said is false. It is not. If you want to talk about impact on MS’s monopoly, you could be correct over time, but that’s decades. Not what my original comment was about.
Mozilla 100% setup the downfall of IE and OE because they made a case that it could done, and also sued Microsoft in court over the Monopoly. Chrome still was years away from showing up on the scene when this all happened.
You’re 100% right. For years Firefox was really the only game in town that was competitive with IE. Even Mac OS had a “IE for Mac OS” because otherwise the Internet (mostly) wouldn’t work on a Mac.
By the time Chrome was released, Google basically had to explain why they were creating their own browser given that IE, Firefox, Safari, and other browsers (WebKit was a fork of KHTML from KDE) were already available. At the time, they justified it with performance enhancements and a different process model for Chrome. There was a good case to be made and Chrome was indeed faster when it was launched.
It’s pretty obvious at this point that the only business model available for Google and most of the other big tech companies is to hoover up your data and use it for the presentation of ads. If I were a more of a conspiracy believer (or even thought that Google had some foresight), I would think that the only reason Google launched Chrome was to eventually do away with ad blockers.
Write to your country’s anti-trust body if you feel Google is unilaterally going after the open web with WEI (content below taken from HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880390).
US:
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation antitrust@ftc.govEU:
https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en comp-greffe-antitrust@ec.europa.euUK:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition… general.enquiries@cma.gov.ukIndia:
https://www.cci.gov.in/antitrust/ https://www.cci.gov.in/filing/atdExample email:
Google has proposed a new Web Environment Integrity standard, outlined here: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md This standard would allow Google applications to block users who are not using Google products like Chrome or Android, and encourages other web developers to do the same, with the goal of eliminating ad blockers and competing web browsers. Google has already begun implementing this in their browser here: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/6f47a22906b2899412e79a2727355efa9cc8f5bd Basic facts: Google is a developer of popular websites such as google.com and youtube.com (currently the two most popular websites in the world according to SimilarWeb) Google is the developer of the most popular browser in the world, Chrome, with around 65% of market share. Most other popular browsers are based on Chromium, also developed primarily by Google. Google is the developer of the most popular mobile operating system in the world, Android, with around 70% of market share. Currently, Google’s websites can be viewed on any web-standards-compliant browser on a device made by any manufacturer. This WEI proposal would allow Google websites to reject users that are not running a Google-approved browser on a Google-approved device. For example, Google could require that Youtube or Google Search can only be viewed using an official Android app or the Chrome browser, thereby noncompetitively locking consumers into using Google products while providing no benefit to those consumers. Google is also primarily an ad company, with the majority of its revenue coming from ads. Google’s business model is challenged by browsers that do not show ads the way Google intends. This proposal would encourage any web developer using Google’s ad services to reject users that are not running a verified Google-approved version of Chrome, to ensure ads are viewed the way the advertiser wishes. This is not a hypothetical hidden agenda, it is explicitly stated in the proposal: “Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.” The proposed solution here is to allow web developers to reject any user that cannot prove they have viewed Google-served ads with their own human eyes. It is essential to combat this proposal now, while it is still in an early stage. Once this is rolled out into Chrome and deployed around the world, it will be extremely difficult to rollback. It may be impossible to prevent this proposal if Google is allowed to continue owning the entire stack of website, browser, operating system, and hardware. Thank you for your consideration of this important issue.Someone needs to make a button on the Internet that sends the email from you.
A mailto link
FYI, the two web links in the example email seem to be cut off, as they end in ellipses. ?
Thanks, fixed.
I just tried them again, and they’re still not working. Both give 404s.
How is this not anti competitive behaviour?
because the us govt doesn’t give a shit about monopolies.
EU might get up in their shit though.
Canada doesnt either. We are run by oligopolies
So blatantly too
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Methinks there is a history lesson you haven’t learned.
MS didn’t get into trouble just for bundling their browser. They got into trouble using every strongarm tactic they could think of to kill the browser market. They broke competitors, deliberately crippled APIs while IE used undocumented faster ones, and put IE in customer faces whether they wanted it there or not. MS used this tactic repeatedly to corner other markets, such as productivity suites. That’s why MS got nailed.
At one point it went from an optional download to being required for the offering system. At that point you weren’t allowed to uninstall it.
Of course that was back before the government was completely owned by tech corporations.
Google execs can rot in hell honestly
I really cant put it into words how much I hate google right now… Capitalism at its finest
If this isn’t a reason to trust bust Google, I don’t know what is.
This video is a really good explanation of why this is a horrible thing for the web.
Based on the post title, I was expecting some new revelation here, but it basically just explains everything that we already knew.
Sadly the only real move the average person has to play in all of this is if they do this, refuse to use any site that blocks access or extensions based on it.
Go back to paying your property tax with checks, etc if you have to. But the only way to deal with these companies is being willing to go to whatever lengths are required to avoid using their products and services.
Which is of course way easier to say than do.
Abandon Chrome and Chromium en masse and this will go away. But normies suck.
i don’t quite get why can’t the attester just… lie… about who he is like if I’m using firefox on linux, why cant my linux attester claim to be actually windows attester and say I’m using chrome?
Attestation depends on a few things:
- The website has to choose to trust a given attestation provider. If Open Source Browser Attestation Provider X is known for freely handing out attestations then websites will just ignore them
- The browser’s self-attestation. This is tricky part to implement. I haven’t looked at the WEI spec to see how this works, but ultimately it depends on code running on your machine identifying when it’s been modified. In theory, you can modify the browser however you want, but it’s likely that this code will be thoroughly obfuscated and regularly changing to make it hard to reverse engineer. In addition, there are CPU level systems like Intel SGX that provide secure enclaves to run code and a remote entity can verify that the code that ran in SGX was the same code that the remote entity intended to run.
If you’re on iOS or Android, there’s already strong OS level protections that a browser attestation can plugin to (like SafetyNet.)
WebChain of trust, the site only trusts certain attesters (yes this would be really bad for Linux).EDIT: Used the wrong “of trust”
How would this affect our use of FediVerse websites? Like Lemmy or Mastodon.
Depends on the devs but I reckon they won’t use the API.
