Imagine a world where browsers were primarily funded by donation, with every release bringing something new and exciting to the table to entice new donators, rather than milk the customer for ad revenue.
That was nice… Oh well, back to hell, I guess.
start using firefox or firefox derivatives like librewolf. I know people will say “but they don’t have x feature” or “chrome is faster” well until they have the market share they won’t be able to put the development cycles in to fix that stuff. google owning chrome and everyone using chrome based browsers is lining up a huge issue for the future.
Every once in a while I will try something like degoogled chromium because hey it’s probably a bit faster or works in a few more places.
But then nope, right back to librewolf. It works on everything I need it to work on, and I use the browser all day. I use Linux at work so all the Microsoft suite like outlook, teams, and onenote are webpages.
Floorp is a nice one to use and deserves a mention.
Absolutely there are plenty of good niche ones. I think zen is based on Firefox as well and lots of people like it.
From my experience, it’s almost always “Chrome doesn’t have feature x”. It’s the most feature poor browser currently in wide use. The only advantage that comes to mind is web dev tools, which: a) 99% of people don’t care about, because they aren’t web devs. b) Chromium also has, and it’s like the considerably less infuriating twin.
The goal of the Privacy Sandbox initiative is to develop new ways to strengthen online privacy while ensuring a sustainable, ad-supported internet.
Like, that’s all you need to know about what it ever was.
Also, the article is essentially a bunch of barely meaningful corporate blubber in an attempt to disguise the main message.
I’ve been on Firefox for a very long time because of shit like this. I run FF on my phone as well. Might look into Fennec.
As pointed out elsewhere around these comments, this looks like another classic example of enshittification. Just like everything that’s invented, it often starts out with a fairly solid design–it couldn’t succeed without that. Once the success is captured, they can start dissecting the design and figure out what parts can be made with cheaper materials (common example: replacing metal w/plastic) and/or cheaper tech. From that point it’s iterations of further cuts to material and tech until it’s the cheapest, flimsiest version that can still function well enough to outlast the warranty. I’ve been in my field long enough (appliance repair) to see generations come and go and it often runs that route. Sometimes design flaws get fixed during the process, but rarely does the product itself get better or more durable in the long run.
It’s all to perpetuate a cycle of abuse.
I’ve noticed that it has nothing to do with the absolute amounts of currency being exchanged by either party. It’s all about seeing how low people’s standards are, and then trying to nudge them just a bit 🤏 lower.
This has been going on for generations. Every time a generation lowers its standards, a new normal is achieved and businesses immediately try lowering standards further.
Advertising should be straight up illegal, but we’ve been conditioned since birth to accept it as normal. Youtubers aren’t just rewarded with money for putting extra ads in their videos, they’re rewarded with money for contributing to a new normal and lowering our standards.
This is why there are no good deals anywhere.
This is good actually, “privacy sandbox” is like baked in ad targeting service. Better to just block third party cookies. I’ve only needed third party cookies for microsoft 365 stuff.
All for-profit tech eventually yields to enshittification.
tech, food, anything
unless theres meaningful competition
unless theres meaningful competition
late stage capitalism is all about giant corporations merging and becoming monopolists
what’s that?
Competition that is meaningful. Like if you produce bottled water, and you lower the quality of it (like, idk maybe theres stuff floating inside) so its cheaper to make, people will notice and switch to an alternative. And when the alternative tries something similar, they’ll switch back to you. Regulation can also help with this but at the same time it increases the barrier to entry for new players, lowering competition. I think.
So the end result of this is… companies race to burn fossil fuels into plastic to take water away from municipal or agricultural sources, remove as much safety filtering as they legally (or illegally) can “because it’s cheaper and more competitive” and buy up as much water rights and other water bottling companies as they can with the centralized capital because economies of scale mean better margins. And then once they have a monopoly, they jack up the price and screw over everyone who doesn’t have free water in their taps (which is everyone because the cities all got priced out and had to sell their water rights so now people have to buy bottled water).
Regulation in this scenario doesn’t work because the water companies are operating in some country across the world which has no money or army to enforce its laws. Or the local politicians are corrupt. There is no competition because people don’t have any real choice: they have to drink water which means they have to buy it from some company (as opposed to getting it for free as a human right). That is the big lie we’re all told about capitalism: that competition is a given in every market, government regulation is “in the way” and that the free market will somehow lead to the best outcome for all. At least for water (and also for web browsers), that is patently and obviously not true.
Edit: link formatting
What a terrible terrible example. Bottled water is just theft
Like if you produce bottled water, and you lower the quality of it (like, idk maybe theres stuff floating inside) so its cheaper to make, people will notice and switch to an alternative. And when the alternative tries something similar, they’ll switch back to you.
So now you have 2 companies selling bottled water with stuff floating in it.
Cartels
Google is really damned if they do, damned if they don’t here. Third party cookies are very privacy invasive, but replacing it with Chrome watching everything you do and acting as an ad broker is also not great. As long as Google is providing targeted advertising (which you could opt out of in privacy sandbox) then there’s not a really great solution.
I do think they dragged this along enough that all sites now operate properly with third party cookies disabled, so that’s a benefit at least.
Never been happier to see some cookies (I can delete or block).
Can I ask who even clicks on these Google ads? Who is making Google ads valuable by interacting with them?
The same kinds of people who buy the new FIFA every year.
You’d be surprised, but most clicks in the SERP go towards ads. Shopping being nr 1 and then (paid) search ads.
You’d cringe about the things people search and then click ads (even if matching was a mistake and not relevant at all).
it’s rarely about clicks when it comes to banner ads, it’s about impressions (the ad was visible in a user’s browser). as with most advertising, it’s about keeping the user aware of a brand name or product.
while clicking on them does lead to a destination page of some kind, and it may be valuable to the advertiser for you to end up there (back on a product page for some thing you previously looked at but didn’t buy for example) the ad networks and publishers hosting the ads on their pages are mainly getting paid by impressions.
For Google Ads at least, it’s pay per click not impression
I think for most Google Ads the default is still CPC, so Google probably wants you to click on ads.
interesting. I guess I’ve only seen it from publisher settings where cpm might be the preferable model.
It depends on the type of ads and such, I haven’t worked with Ads in like a year though and the platform keeps changing, so if might be different nowadays.
No, nothing significantly changed in regards to bidding. It’s still automated CPC in whatever form you choose.
Thank you Google ads phrog
LOL! No problem
I used to work for a company that made most of its money from shitty ad pages you get if you type a url wrong and you’d be shocked to see their monthly Google revenue. It’s in the millions.
this makes me so mad
It made me mad too which is why I quit and moved on.
adnauseam but seriously I did seen people using chrome, not blocking ads and clicking the first result even when it is labelled as ad. The worst is that they keep interacting with the website in a hope they find what they looking for.
The same type of people who fall for scams. And older people, although that’s redundant.
My wife loves the shopping ads and always complains when the Pi-Hole blocks them.
Thankfully (weird to say), the current political climate has her worried about being tracked online and she’s finally opening up to the idea of proper privacy.
🤢
Can I ask who even clicks on these Google ads?
I click when I want to support the author. I don’t care what I click on, I just click on a few.
You are part of the problem.
Do
noevil.They changed their slogan a while ago. Guess why…
Even when they had the slogan, it was, don’t be evil. That’s a very low bar, because it’s relative to other tech companies. As long as they were less evil than Microsoft, they could pat themselves on the back.
If the goal were actually not to do evil, they would have to look at each individual action and consider whether it’s ethical. That’s something they have never done and of course they’re not going to start doing it in the future.
I wonder if it has anything to do with them possibly having to sell off Chrome
Perhaps more to do with this. Google no longer has legal problems in the US under Trump.
possible. theirs might just become ‘third party’ cookies.
but i think they’re confident that they will not have to give up anything tangible in the current proceedings. toss a little more money into the diaper pail, case is mysteriously dropped or government remedy neutered to a “try not to do that again”.
It might. If some day they don’t control the browser, whoever does control it might be hesitant to build in features that are only there to spy on users for Google. Cookies do at least have some other uses.
Or, Google would be the one blocked by the new owner (who would have all the info that Google would’ve in the past ) not the one blocking.
Whose going to be the new owner? Don’t see anyone stopping up as even Microsoft got out of the browser engine game.
OpenAI would loooooove that kind of info https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dr6neg766o
Wait, isn’t this actually a step in the right direction? Can someone eli5?
Google has been kicking the can on ending third party cookie support for years. Chrome has such a large market share that whatever they decide to do has a huge impact on the ability to monetize content with ads.
There’s no clear direct replacement for identifying users for ad targeting outside of 3pty cookies. Lots of competing ‘privacy preserving frameworks’ but they all need buy in from many players at scale to be effective.
Does this apply to manifest 3 extension changes as well or is this something different
Privacy Sandbox is the thing that tracks you on-device and sends the generic info to advertisers, something like “this user visits hotel websites”.
How dare you think Google would listen to its users and not the advertisers. Fr though I’m not sure, manifest v3 does use a sandboxing feature but it’s unclear at first glance if they are directly related
Add it to the pile
