#Chrome web browser

[edsonjnovaes]

100,000 Stars 1.2

O projeto, batizado de “100,000 Stars”, permite uma navegação virtual bem simples, em 3D e com direito até a um “guia turístico”, que vai explicando alguns elementos básicos do universo. Edson Jesus – 2012 nov 15 An incredible interactive visualization of 100,000 stars you can view in your Chrome web browser. Paul Strauss – The Awesomer. nov 14 2012 O Google Chrome lançou, numa quarta-feira…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome

Last August, a federal judge convicted Google of being "a monopolist" and acting "as one to maintain its monopoly." The judge concluded that key to Google's monopoly was the vast troves of data it collects and analyzes and asked the parties to come up with remedies to address this.

Many trustbusters and Google competitors read this and concluded that Google should be forced to share its click and quer y data. The technical term for this is "apocalyptically stupid." Releasing Google's click and query data into the wild is a privacy Chernobyl in the waiting. The secrets that we whisper to search engines have the power to destroy us a thousand times over.

Largely theoretical answers like "differential privacy" are promising, but remain theoretical at scale. The first large-scale live-fire exercise for these should not be something as high-stakes as Google's click and query data. If anything, we should delete that data:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

The last thing we want to do is use antitrust to democratize surveillance so that everyone can spy as efficiently as Google does. In theory, we could sanitize the click and query data by limiting sharing to queries that were made by multiple, independent users (say, only sharing queries that at least 30 users have made), but it's unlikely that this will do much to improve the performance of rival firms' search engines.

Google only retains 18 months' worth of click and query data, thus once we cut off its capacity to collect more data, whatever advantage it has from surveillance will begin to decay immediately and fall to zero in 18 months.

(However: the 18 months figure is deceptive, and deliberately so. Google may only retain your queries for 18 months, but it is silent on how long it retains the inferences from those queries. It may discard your "how do I get an abortion in my red state" query after a year and a half, but indefinitely retain the "sought an illegal abortion" label it added to your profile. The US desperately needs a federal consumer privacy law!)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

And just to be clear, there's other Google data that would be very useful to rival search engines, like Google's search index – the trove of pages from the internet. Google already licenses this out, and search engines like Kagi use it to produce substantially superior search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

The DOJ has just filed its proposal for a remedy, and it's a doozy: forcing Google to sell off Chrome, on the basis that both of these are the source of much of Google's data, and no rival search engine is likely to also have a widely used browser:

https://9to5google.com/2024/11/18/us-doj-google-sell-chrome/

This represents something of a compromise position: the DOJ had initially signalled that it would also demand a selloff of Android, and that's been dropped. I think there's a good case for forcing the sale of Android as a source of data, too.

In competition theory, these selloffs are referred to as "structural separation" – when a company that provides infrastructure to other firms is prohibited from competing with those firms:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

For example, it used to be that banks were prohibited from competing with the companies they loaned money to. After all, if you borrow money from Chase to open a pizzeria, and then Chase opens a pizzeria of its own across the street, you can see how your business would be doomed. You have to make interest payments to Chase, and your rival doesn't, and if Chase wants to, it can subsidize that rival so it can sell pizzas below cost until you're out of business.

Likewise, rail companies were banned from owning freight companies, because otherwise they would destroy the businesses of every freight company that shipped on the railroad.

In theory, you could create fair play rules that required the bank or the railroad to play nice with the business customers that used their platforms, but in practice, there are so many ways of cheating that this would be unenforceable.

This principle is well established in all other areas of business, and we recoil in horror when it is violated. You wouldn't hire a lawyer who was also representing the person who's suing you. Judges (with the abominable exception of Supreme Court justices!) are required to recuse themselves when they have a personal connection with either of the parties in a case they preside over.

One of the weirdest sights of the new Gilded Age is when lawyers for monopoly companies argue that they can play fair with their customers despite their conflicts of interest. Think of Google or Meta, with their ad-tech duopoly. These are companies that purport to represent sellers of ads and buyers of ads in marketplaces they own and control, and where they compete with sellers and/or buyers. These companies suck up 51% of the revenue generated by advertising, while historically, the share taken by ad intermediaries was more like 15%!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

Imagine if you and your partner discovered that the same lawyer was representing both of you in the divorce, while also serving as the judge, and trying to match with both of you on Tinder. Now imagine that when the divorce terms were finalized, lawyer got your family home.

No Google lawyer would agree to argue on the company's behalf in a case where the judge was employed by the party that's suing them, but they will blithely argue that the reason they're getting 51% of the ad-rake is that they're providing 51% of the value.

Structural separation – like judicial recusal – comprehensively and unarguably resolves all the perceptions and realities of conflict between parties. The fact that platform owners compete with platform users is the source of bottomless corruption, from Google to Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

In other words, I think the DOJ is onto something here. That said, the devil is – as always – in the details. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome, rather than standing it up as its own competing business, things could go very wrong indeed.

Any company that buys Chrome will know that it only has a certain number of years before Google will be permitted to spin up a new browser, and will be incentivized to extract as much value from Chrome over that short period. So a selloff could make Chrome exponentially worse than Google, which, whatever other failings it has, is oriented towards long-term dominance, not a quick buck.

But if Google is forced to spin Chrome out as a standalone business, the incentives change. Anyone who buys Chrome will have to run it as a functional business that is designed to survive a future Google competitor – they won't have another business they can fall back on if Google bounces back in five years.

There's a good history of this in antitrust breakups: both Standard Oil and AT&T were forced to spin out, rather than sell off, parts of their empire, and those businesses stood alone and provided competitive pressure. That is, until we stopped enforcing antitrust law and allowed them to start merging again – womp womp.

This raises another question: does any of this matter, given this month's election results? Will Trump's DoJ follow through on whatever priorities the current DoJ sets? That's an open question, but – unlike so many other questions about the coming Trump regime – the answer here isn't necessarily a nightmare.

After all, the Google antitrust case started under Trump, and Trump's pick for Attorney General, the credibly accused sexual predator Matt Gaetz, is a "Khanservative" who breaks with his fellow Trumpians in professing great admiration for Biden's FTC chief Lina Khan, and her project of breaking up corporate monopolies:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-nominates-khanservative-matt

What's more, Trump is a landing strip for a stroke or coronary, which would make JD Vance president – and Vance has also expressed his approval of Khan's work.

Google bosses seem to be betting on Trump's "transactional" (that is, corrupt) style of governance, and his willingness to overrule his own appointees to protect the interests of anyone who flatters or bribes him sufficiently, or convinces the hosts of Fox and Friends to speak on their behalf:

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/comprehensive-review-revolving-door-between-fox-and-second-trump-administration

That would explain why Google capo Sundar Pichai ordered his employees not to speak out against Trump:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-memes-poke-fun-company-rules-political-discussion-2024-11

And why he followed up by publicly osculating Trump's sphincter:

https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/1854207788290850888

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[netscapenavigator-official]

The Linux Foundation choosing to financially support Blink (Chromium) over Gecko (Firefox) is certainly a choice.

I've criticized a lot of Mozilla's actions in the past as they fight to break even, but if I was the financially struggling backbone of an entire niche desktop platform, and said platform decided to give copious amounts of time and money to my anti-consumer rival (who is very much trying to monopolize me into non-existence) then I'd probably turn into the joker, too. Damn.

[archivlibrarianist]

"The Browser Extension

"Say hello to the Wayback Machine’s Browser Extension.

"It’s available for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

"This free tool is an easy and very fast way to determine directly from your browser if an archived version of the content (HTML web page, PDF, etc.) has been archived (at least once). If a copy/copies is/are available, accessing it/them can be done within seconds and with minimal effort. No cutting and pasting needed. "

[emiplayzmc]

Sibling Lords of Cyber City

Yippee, have had these guys cooking up for a while!!

NTRODUCING, two of the Lords of Cyber City! Browsers are lords and ladies under Queen's authority, but overseeing their own districts of the Cyber World. All of the lords and ladies are 6'3", making them all the tallest of the DR characters I've drawn so far. These two are siblings ^-^

Lord Chrome (He/Him)

The elder of the two siblings, Lord Chrome has one of the biggest districts to oversee in the city. He has a habit of allowing businesses that he funds to have a monopoly within their respective niches, leading to some questioning of their business habits. Nevertheless, his is one of the most popular districts, and he has an ongoing rivalry with the other popular district - Firefox's.

Secretaries and any people who work directly underneath him tend to go missing.

Lord Opera (Xe/xem)

Lord Opera is significantly younger than Chrome, but is nevertheless quite popular. Xey're able to get a lord of sponsors and advertisers due to the freedoms xey allow businesses xey have under xyr jurisdiction. Xis district was originally part of Lady Vivaldi's, but was gifted to xem when xey came into power, making Lady Vivaldi, Lady Bing, Lord Opera, and Lord I.E all have an equal amount of territory.

Lord Opera is a big funder of clothing and customisation businesses within xyr district, and is probably the biggest funder between xem and Lord Chrome into various things, both frivolous and necessary (a lot of customization is bought for xyr body, as well as clothes and upgrades).

Both Opera and Chrome share a tendency to sell of data to the highest bidders - Chrome does it to competing businesses to those he funds, Opera does it for extra money to fund xemselves.

♤~~♡~~♤

RAGHHH I absolutely love Opera's design here, xey were so fun to draw and design.

[nixcraft]

The current status of the browser market when a vendor introduces a new browser

[official-firefox-nightly]

Hey, I must've been updated again to become a gimmick account on Tumblr.com. Oh well, hello world!

@firefox-official @totally-bing @totally-official-yahoo @definitely-wikipedia @the-real-google @totally-microsoft @the-true-internet-explorer @the-tumblur-searchbar @realsafari @yahoo-official @the-official-apple @bingle-official and anyone else I missed because I'm too busy updating everyday.

[marshmiillow]

This is your regularly scheduled reminder to switch to Firefox if you haven’t already

[nimbergarden]

FTU browser & search engine vanity userboxes by me

[perplexingluciddreams]

A while ago I try to switch to Firefox instead of Chrome, because people say it is better (don't understand the reason though). But then I ended up switch back almost straight away because it is too different and hard to use and understand. New and different things is hard.

My technology and computer and Internet skills is rather low, and took me a long time to learn what I know now. I feel like it is impossible for me to learn new things at this age now.

I want to know more about computer things and be able to do it myself. But every time I try to find information and learn things I cannot understand it at all, too complex language and new words that I don't know, and nobody explain the simple stuff first.

All explanations of things I find, always assume the basics is "common knowledge" or "common sense". Which I just don't have. I need to learn every single thing from scratch (with everything I ever learn). Nothing is "automatic knowledge" for me.

Also apparently there is weird video delay thing on non-Chrome browsers now??? I don't even understand what that is but how do I fix it, if I do try again to switch to Firefox? Because people say that Chrome is bad and getting worse.

I just want to understand. Especially because I am complete nonverbal and use AAC device to communicate - I want to be able to know how my "voice" works!

But it is so overwhelming, I don't even know where to start.

[netscapenavigator-official]

I wish there was literally any other option for browsers than Google or Mozilla.

One is a data mining, human rights violating, monopolizing piece of shit that sucks up more electricity and water to fuel its AI endeavors than is even remotely conceivable to the average person.

The other is run by a lunatic who’s currently facing a discrimination lawsuit from demoting someone who took cancer-related medical leave, and would soon rather see the organization become unprofitable again than see the man who is credited for making it profitable, appointed as her replacement.

Like, fuck’s sake. The browser wars of the 20s has just turned into American Politics: Digital Edition.

[storm-and-the-stars]

Recently switched from Chrome to Firefox, and omg y'all, I'm a believer now. I was all bought into the Google ecosystem (pixel phone, Google nest at one point, Google drive junkie), but their shit has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Firefox is great, it loves me, it tucks me into bed at night and gives me a goodnight kiss. Firefox has ad block! IN MOBILE! FIREFOX MOBILE HAS AD BLOCK! And it'll let YouTube play in the background in a tab without all the horrible UI shit Google is adding to YouTube, for free, guys this is so great, you can import passwords and bookmarks, it does everything Chrome does, and it does everything you wish Chrome did. AND it won't track you or sell your data.

I also have switched to majority Duck Duck Go, guys it's awesome, all of the awful UI and ad shit that Google has added in recent years is gone, it's like when Google the search engine was good.

Firefox + ublock origin + duck duck go, best trio since neopolitan ice cream

[emiplayzmc]

Posting this image on its own from the Browser Lords post because I think it's funny hjgfsss

Based on the Google CEO hearing

[nixcraft]

which one are you?

[catgirl-catboy]

Listen, I am sucking Firefox's metaphorical dick as much as the next tumblr user, but there are large sections of the population that literally can't switch to Firefox full-time.

Some workplaces explicitly forbid using browsers that they don't approve of, and sometimes a specific chrome-only extension is needed for a task.

My cousin's school explicitly told them to use chrome to see if kids were doing their classwork during the pandemic. (I'm sure 90% of them were simply using a second device to get around this.)

I have tons of other examples, but I have to keep an air of mystery about me ;)