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Topic: The Awesomesauce of Chrome (Read 20659 times)

Re: The Awesome Arse of Chrome

Reply #25
Extensions like Vimium are fairly interesting.
In a private window, all Chromium extensions are disabled. IMHO, this makes the entire system of extensions irrelevant. I suspect that Mozilla makes the same decision at some point - disable all extensions in private window/mode. Maybe the current transition already implemented this? 

Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome

Reply #26
In a private window, all Chromium extensions are disabled. IMHO, this makes the entire system of extensions irrelevant.
I don't use Chrome or any of its forks myself but AFAIK you have to enable extensions for private browsing in Chrome.
As soon as you do so, your extensions will be enabled in private mode as well.

Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome

Reply #27
In a private window, all Chromium extensions are disabled. IMHO, this makes the entire system of extensions irrelevant.
I don't use Chrome or any of its forks myself but AFAIK you have to enable extensions for private browsing in Chrome.
As soon as you do so, your extensions will be enabled in private mode as well.
I looked around and you're right. However,

Not all extensions can be enabled in Incognito mode. You will know which ones can and cannot when you view your list of extensions. Only those with the “Allow in Incognito” box are the ones that will work.



Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome

Reply #28
Chrome 69 is out. It's also 10 year anniversary for the thing.



Look at that, they are bringing square tabs back! Is it only an aesthetic deja vu or is there more? Yes, there is more.

Though not an exhaustive list of user-reported problems, we’ve read user reports indicating that Chrome downloads SWF files instead of playing them, notification blocking doesn’t work, problems exist with lags when scrolling with touchscreens, websites won’t load, and there are sync issues, crashes and freezes, problems with logging in, displaying of the wrong language, inability to save passwords, and crashing when opening bookmarks or tabs.
It's deja vu a la Internet Explorer: Grab market dominance and then halt development.

Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome

Reply #29
It's deja vu a la Internet Explorer: Grab market dominance and then halt development.
There was comment somewhere recently about Chrome using a lot of memory.

A presumably Chrome-affiliated person replied that's why Chrome is so fast.

I refrained from commenting.

Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome

Reply #30
Google's Proposed Changes to Chrome Could Weaken Ad Blockers

https://www.wired.com/story/googles-proposed-changes-chrome-could-weaken-ad-blockers/

I personally have noticed several signals lately that Google is actively developing its products, such as Android apps and Google websites, particularly Youtube, towards outright adware. My VPN Android app, something I pay for, said in an update that Google demanded that they remove their adblock feature. And Jon von Tetzchner also mentioned something about Google having turned evil (and that Vivaldi complied with it).

More of the same:
And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.

But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools.

The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer.

Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome

Reply #31
Chrome deploys deep-linking tech in latest browser build despite privacy concerns • The Register
Google has implemented a browser capability in Chrome called ScrollToTextFragment that enables deep links to web documents, but it has done so despite unresolved privacy concerns and lack of support from other browser makers.
It comes with "Terms of Service" update.

Chrome is not a browser. It is a service. (Serving its master, of course.)

Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome

Reply #32
I proposed something similar for Opera in my time, but with a XPath(-lite) syntax. For my purpose (and I think many other purposes), the node tree was/is more useful than merely string-to-string.

Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome

Reply #33
Webbrowsers have evolved over my head meanwhile, in a very bad way. They have stopped doing simple things, also stopped providing some obvious necessary features, and now mainly provide the wrong "service" to users. Many smart people have written about the phenomenon better, but here is my take from the perspective of a few simple needs and limited understanding.

Webbrowsers used to show webpages. Webpages used to be static text and images. The only glitzy-flashy parts were ad popups and embedded video-audio files. The ad popups were usually popouts. To prevent them, popup blockers were invented. Then ad popups moved into webpages. In fact, there are more popups than just ads that deserve to be blocked - most notoriously the cookie popups bureaucratically demanded by the EU despite all the harm it predictably caused to humanity for zero benefit - so the need for popup blockers is more acute than ever, yet there are no reliable popup blockers any more. The best I have seen out of the box in the area of ad/cookie/consent popup blockers is Brave browser. Something like /etc/hosts approach works to block the content of ads, but not their placeholders, so it is not real popup blocking.

When Opera went Chrome, smarter people had already noticed that the era of webbrowsers, as browsers of webpages, was over and the era of YT/FB apps had arrived. On FB you don't have a page. You have a service where you need to log in. The FB serves you a content feed interface and a chat-with-contacts interface. Both are somewhat customisable and provide notifications with limited reliability. This service would really be better provided by a specialised app - and it is - but in this day and age we have webbrowsers - all webbrowsers - built to serve it. If a webbrowser cannot do FB, the webbrowser is said to be not working. Which is ironic, because without logging in there is nothing to do on FB. A web address that only functions for logged in members should not dictate the webbrowser industry.

YT provides videos. I have never (never intentionally) been logged in to YT, but when logged in, you can subscribe/bookmark and comment and upload and have your "full experience" more or less like with FB. Different from FB, YT also works when not logged in. But the main content is videos - multimedia, not readable text. Again, since YT is not a standard webpage, it is sad to have it dictate the definition of webbrowsers.

So, one feature lost over recent years is popup blocking. Adblocking by means of adprovider addresses works, but it does not block their popups. This problem is superacute when it comes to the cookie popup madness. Webbrowsers still allow an internal setting to block all cookies, but this does not block cookie popups. The EU demands that people must get cookie popups regardless of the choices they make regarding cookies, so everybody gets cookie popups. This is a modern form of torture imposed on people who browse the web as a matter of their profession. Employers aid and abet the torture by preventing employees from using browsers of their choice, extensions of their choice, particularly self-developed extensions. No. All choices are done by the employer, whose sole choice is to limit all choices to MS defaults in compliance with the EU directives.

Another feature on the verge of extinction is the ability to work offline. In non-Chromite webbrowsers the button or menu item is still there, but websites increasingly fail to function when there is no live internet connection. Also when you block Javascript. Javascript used to be a tiny extra enhancement, but some webpages think it is fully legit to show nothing when Javascript is off, even when the actual content has no inherent dependence on it.

Chromites do not think RSS is a thing. To be honest, I never liked RSS as a protocol. I think it should have been designed as something of a content grabber, e.g. look at the webpage, take <h2> element and then all <p> elements until next <h2> element, and present the result to me, instead of a separate protocol with its essentially distinct content which apparently does not need to duplicate or be related to the webpage content in any way. But RSS is there, it is an internet protocol, and despite its inherent independence and unrelatedness it more or less serves webpage content in a specific format, so as such it should be a built-in webbrowser feature.

The same for other internet protocols: FTP, IRC, email, and whatnot. Chromites don't let people know about them, and the industry and legislators think this is perfectly fine. Let Chromites dictate what people know or don't.

I am most disappointed with simple formatting in modern internet. On my computer, on my screen, I should be able to see things the way I want or need, whether black on white or white on black, any colours I choose, any widths or lengths I choose. It is an obvious accessibility thing. But the industry and the legislators think that accessibility means adding zoom buttons to webpages, despite zoom buttons being a prominent eternally present and easily accessible built-in feature in all browsers. And of course making cookie popups and other consent and notification request unavoidable and obnoxious - this is awesome accessibility in the mind of legislators and the industry.

Formatting is most easily fixed with text-based webbrowsers, such as Elinks or W3m, but every now and then they are denied content due to Javascript. Again, an accessibility issue that the industry and legislators should care about. They care in words, but their actions demonstrate the opposite.

Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome

Reply #34
Google hasn't really improved or done much new over the last 15-20 years, and Chrome is no exception.

 

Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome

Reply #36
Different owners. Overall a good thing, but doesn't really solve the problem.

And there is another wrinkle. This process has been going on for a while, nearing resolution. And under whose administration will this happen? Trump's.

Alphabet is a 2 trillion dollar company. Whoever is in the position to set the rules, is set to make billions. You know what happens when a new regime takes over, well-connected to the old regime, and the US is facing a government of grifters, thieves, and cheats.

Old broligarchs, meet the new broligarchs. Did anyone mention Wildberries?

Only constraint to that grift is that Alphabet is a $2T company, they have the legal power to go on for years if the new administration goes too far.