What changed?Ī few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. If you didn’t take advantage of this option, Google’s privacy policy was clear: your data would stay on your computer where it belonged. Sure, Google offered an optional “sign in” feature for Chrome, which presumably vacuumed up your browsing data and shipped it off to Google, but that was an option. This might be kind of sad for Mozilla (who have paid a high price due to Chrome) but overall it would be a good thing for Internet standards.įor many years this is exactly how things played out. As a benefit, the Internet community would receive a terrific open source browser with the best development team money could buy. Even if the browser never produced a scrap of revenue for Google, it served its purpose just by keeping the Internet open to Google’s other products. In this setting, Chrome was a beautiful solution. This posed an existential threat to Google’s internet properties. Worse, Microsoft was making noises about getting into the search business. In 2008, the browser market was dominated by Microsoft, a company with an ugly history of using browser dominance to crush their competitors. When Google launched Chrome ten years ago, it seemed like one of those rare cases where everyone wins. Today I wanted to write specifically about Google Chrome, how much I’ve loved it in the past, and why - due to Chrome’s new user-unfriendly forced login policy - I won’t be using it going forward. After all, that’s what Twitter is for! But from time to time something bothers me enough that I have to make an exception. This blog is mainly reserved for cryptography, and I try to avoid filling it with random “someone is wrong on the Internet” posts.
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