Google Archive
Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won’t work properly and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded. ↫ Kyle Wiggers at TechCrunch One of the strangely odd compliments you could give Google Search is that it would load even on the weirdest or oldest browsers, simply because it didn’t require JavaScript. Whether I loaded Google Search in the JS-less Dillo, Blazer on PalmOS, or the latest Firefox, I’d end up with a search box I could type something into and search. Sure, beyond that the web would be, shall we say, problematic, but at least Google Search worked. With this move, Google will end such compatibility, which was most likely a side effect more than policy. I know a lot of people lament the widespread reliance on and requirement to have JavaScript, and it surely can be and is abused, but it’s also the reality of people asking more and more of their tools on the web. I would love it websites gracefully degraded on browsers without JavaScript, but that’s simply not a realistic thing to expect, sadly. JavaScript is part of the web now – and has been for a long time – and every website using or requiring JavaScript makes the web no more or less “open” than the web requiring any of the other myriad of technologies, like more recent versions of TLS. Nobody is stopping anyone from implementing support for JS. I’m not a proponent of JavaScript or anything like that – in fact, I’m annoyed I can’t load our WordPress backend in browsers that don’t have it, but I’m just as annoyed that I can’t load websites on older machines just because they don’t have later versions of TLS. Technology “progresses”, and as long as the technologies being regarded as “progress” are not closed or encumbered by patents, I can be annoyed by it, but I can’t exactly be against it. The idea that it’s JavaScript making the web bad and not shit web developers and shit managers and shit corporations sure is one hell of a take.
Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law, according to a copy of a letter obtained by Axios. In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google’s global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission’s new Disinformation Code of Practice “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services” and said Google won’t commit to it. ↫ Sara Fischer at Axios Imagine if any one of us, ordinary folk told the authorities we were just not going to follow the law. We’re not going to pay our taxes because tax law “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’re not going to follow traffic laws and regulations because doing so “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’re not going to respect property laws because doing so “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’d be in trouble within a heartbeat. We’d be buried in fines, court cases, and eventually, crippling debt, bankruptcy, and most likely end up in prison. The arrogance with which these American tech giants willfully declare themselves to be above EU laws and regulations is appalling, and really should have far more consequences than it does right now. Executives should be charged and arrested, products and services banned and taken off the shelves, and eventually, the companies themselves should be banned from operating within the EU altogether. Especially with the incoming regime in the US, which will most likely grant the tech giants even more freedom to do as they please, the EU needs to start standing up against this sort of gross disrespect. The consequences for a corporation knowingly breaking the law should be just as grave as for an individual citizen knowingly breaking the law.
They tried to keep it from prying eyes, but several people did notice it: Google made a pretty significant policy change regarding the use of fingerprinting by advertisers. While Google did not allow advertisers to use digital fingerprinting, the company has now changed its mind on this one. Google really tried to hide this change. The main support article talking about the reasoning behind the change is intentionally obtuse and nebulous, and doesn’t even link to the actual policy changes being implemented – which are found in a separate document. Google doesn’t highlight its changes there, so you have to compare the two versions of the policy yourself. Google claims this change has to be implemented because of “advances in privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) such as on-device processing, trusted execution environments, and secure multi-party computation” and “the rise of new ad-supported devices and platforms”. What I think this word salad means is that users are regaining a modicum of privacy with some specific privacy-preserving features in certain operating systems and on certain devices, and that the use of dedicated, siloed streaming services is increasing, which is harder for Google and advertisers to track. In other words, Google is relaxing its rules on fingerprinting because we’re all getting more conscious about privacy. In any event, the advice remains the same: use ad-blockers, preferably at your network level. Install adblocking software and extensions, set up a Pi-Hole, or turn on any adblocking features in your router (my Ubiquiti router has it built-in, and it works like a charm). Remember: your device, your rules. If you don’t want to see ads, you don’t have to.
Don’t you just love it when companies get together under the thin guise of open source to promote their own interests? Today Google is pleased to announce our partnership with The Linux Foundation and the launch of the Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers. The goal of this initiative is to foster a sustainable environment of open-source contributions towards the health of the Chromium ecosystem and financially support a community of developers who want to contribute to the project, encouraging widespread support and continued technological progress for Chromium embedders. The Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers fund will be managed by the Linux Foundation, following their long established practices for open governance, prioritizing transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven development. We’re thrilled to have Meta, Microsoft, and Opera on-board as the initial members to pledge their support. ↫ Shruthi Sreekanta on the Chromium blog First, there’s absolutely no way around the fact that this entire effort is designed to counter some of the antitrust actions against Google, including a possible forced divestment of Chrome. By setting up an additional fund atop the Chromium organisation, placed under the management of the Linux Foundation, Google creates the veneer of more independence for Chromium than their really is. In reality, however, Chromium is very much a Google-led project, with 94% of code contributions coming from Google, and with the Linux Foundation being very much a corporate affair, of which Google itself is a member, one has to wonder just how much it means that the Linux Foundation is managing this new fund. Second, the initial members of this fund don’t exactly instill confidence in the fund’s morals and values. We’ve got Google, the largest online advertising company in the world. Then there’s Facebook, another major online advertising company, followed by Microsoft, which, among other business ventures, is also a major online advertising company. Lastly we have Opera, an NFT and cryptoscammer making money through predatory loans in poor countries. It’s a veritable who’s who of some of the companies you least want near anything related to your browsing experience. I highly doubt a transparent effort like this is going to dissuade any judge or antritrust regulator from backing down. It’s clear this fund is entirely self-serving and designed almost exclusively for optics, with an obvious bias towards online advertising companies who want to make the internet worse than towards companies and people trying to make the internet better.
Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements. The concensus seems to be that this is a major achievement and milestone in quantum computing, and that it’s come faster than everyone expected. This topic is obviously far more complicated than most people can handle, so we have to rely on the verdicts and opinions from independent experts to gain some sense of just how significant an announcement this really is. The paper’s published in Nature for those few of us possessing the right amount of skill and knowledge to disseminate this information.
Today, we are announcing the availability of Vanir, a new open-source security patch validation tool. Introduced at Android Bootcamp in April, Vanir gives Android platform developers the power to quickly and efficiently scan their custom platform code for missing security patches and identify applicable available patches. Vanir significantly accelerates patch validation by automating this process, allowing OEMs to ensure devices are protected with critical security updates much faster than traditional methods. This strengthens the security of the Android ecosystem, helping to keep Android users around the world safe. ↫ Google Security Blog Google makes it clear this tool can easily be adapted for other avenues too – it’s not locked into only working with Android and Java/C/C++. Since it’s now open source, anyone can contribute to it and make it compatible – for lack of a better term – with other platforms and programming languages as well.
Speaking of Google, the United States Department of Justice is pushing for Google to sell off Chrome. Top Justice Department antitrust officials have decided to ask a judge to force Alphabet Inc.’s Google to sell off its Chrome browser in what would be a historic crackdown on one of the biggest tech companies in the world. The department will ask the judge, who ruled in August that Google illegally monopolized the search market, to require measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system, according to people familiar with the plans. ↫ Leah Nylen and Josh Sisco Let’s take a look at the history and current state of independent browsers, shall we? Netscape is obviously dead, Firefox is hanging on by a thread (which is inconspicuously shaped like a giant sack of money from Google), Opera is dead (its shady Chrome skin doesn’t count), Brave is cryptotrash run by a homophobe, and Vivaldi, while an actually good and capable Chrome skin with a ton of fun features, still isn’t profitable, so who knows how long they’ll last. As an independent company, Chrome wouldn’t survive. It seems the DoJ understands this, too, because they’re clearly using the words “sell off”, which would indicate selling Chrome to someone else instead of just spinning it off into a separate company. But who has both the cash and the interest in buying Chrome, without also being a terrible tech company with terrible business incentives that might make Chrome even more terrible than it already is? Through Chrome, Google has sucked all the air out of whatever was left of the browser market back when they first announced the browser. An independent Chrome won’t survive, and Chrome in anyone else’s hands might have the potential to be even worse. A final option out of left field would be turning Chrome and Chromium into a truly independent foundation or something, without a profit motive, focused solely on developing the Chromium engine, but that, too, would be easily abused by financial interests. I think the most likely outcome is one none of us want: absolutely nothing will happen. There’s a new administration coming to Washington, and if the recent proposed picks for government positions are anything to go by, America will be incredibly lucky if they get someone smarter than a disemboweled frog on a stick to run the DoJ. More likely than not, Google’s lawyers will walk all over whatever’s left of the DoJ after 20 January, or Pichai will simply kiss some more gaudy gold rings to make the case go away.
Torvalds said that the current state of AI technology is 90 percent marketing and 10 percent factual reality. The developer, who won Finland’s Millennium Technology Prize for the creation of the Linux kernel, was interviewed during the Open Source Summit held in Vienna, where he had the chance to talk about both the open-source world and the latest technology trends. ↫ Alfonso Maruccia at Techspot Well, he’s not wrong. “AI” definitely feels like a bubble at the moment, and while there’s probably eventually going to be useful implementations people might actually want to actively use to produce quality content, most “AI” features today produce a stream of obviously fake diarrhea full of malformed hands, lies, and misinformation. Maybe we’ll eventually work out these serious kinks, but for now, it’s mostly just a gimmick providing us with an endless source of memes. Which is fun, but not exactly what we’re being sold, and not something worth destroying the planet for even faster. Meanwhile, Google is going utterly bananas with its use of “AI” inside the company, with Sundar Pichai claiming 25% of code inside Google is now “AI”-generated. ↫ Sundar Pichai We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster. So much here feels wrong. First, who wants to bet those engineers care a whole lot less about the generated code than they do about code they write themselves? Second, who wants to bet that generated code is entirely undocumented? Third, who wants to bet what the additional costs will be a few years from now when the next batch of engineers tries to make sense of that undocumented generated code? Sure, Google might save a bit on engineers’ salaries now, but how much extra will they have to spend to unspaghettify that diarrhea code in the future? It will be very interesting to keep an eye on this, and check back in, say, five years, and hear from the Google engineers of the future how much of their time is spent fixing undocumented “AI”-generated code. I can’t wait.
Next up in my backlog of news to cover: the US Department of Justice’s proposed remedies for Google’s monopolistic abuse. Now that Judge Amit Mehta has found Google is a monopolist, lawyers for the Department of Justice have begun proposing solutions to correct the company’s illegal behavior and restore competition to the market for search engines. In a new 32-page filing (included below), they said they are considering both “behavioral and structural remedies.“ That covers everything from applying a consent decree to keep an eye on the company’s behavior to forcing it to sell off parts of its business, such as Chrome, Android, or Google Play. ↫ Richard Lawler at The Verge While I think it would be a great idea to break Google up, such an action taken in a vacuum seems to be rather pointless. Say Google is forced to spin off Android into a separate company – how is that relatively small Android, Inc. going to compete with the behemoth that is Apple and its iOS to which such restrictions do not apply? How is Chrome Ltd. going to survive Microsoft’s continued attempts at forcing Edge down our collective throats? Being a dedicated browser maker is working out great for Firefox, right? This is the problem with piecemeal, retroactive measures to try and “correct” a market position that you have known for years is being abused – sure, this would knock Google down a peg, but other, even larger megacorporations like Apple or Microsoft will be the ones to benefit most, not any possible new companies or startups. This is exactly why a market-wide, equally-applied set of rules and regulations, like the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, is a far better and more sustainable approach. Unless similar remedies are applied to Google’s massive competitors, these Google-specific remedies will most likely only make things worse, not better, for the American consumer.
Google now displays convenient artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages — meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can’t afford to block Google’s AI from summarizing their content. That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc.’s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be discovered online. ↫ Julia Love and Davey Alba OSNews still relies partially on advertising right now, and thus Google continues to play a role in our survival. You can help by reducing our dependency on Google by supporting us through Patreon, making donations using Ko-Fi, or buying our merch. The more of you support us, the closer to reality the dream of an ad-free OSNews not dependent on Google becomes. OSNews is my sole source of income, and if that does not work out, OSNews will cease to exist if I’m forced to find another job. Due to Google’s utter dominance on the internet, websites and publishers have no choice but to accept whatever Google decides to do. Not being indexed by the most popular search engine on the web with like 90% market share is a death sentence, but feeding Google’s machine learning algorithms will be a slow death by a thousands cuts, too, for many publishers. The more content is fed to Google’s AI tools, the better they’ll get at simply copying your style to a T, and the better they’ll get at showing just the little paragraph or line that matters as a Google result, meaning you won’t have to visit the site in question. It’s also not great for Google in the long-term, either. Google Search relies on humans making content for people to find; if there’s no more quality content for people to find, people aren’t going to be using Google as much anymore. In what is typical of the search giant, it seems they’re not really looking ahead very far into the future, chasing short-term profits riding the AI hype train, while long-term profits take a back seat. Maybe I’m just too stupid to understand the Silicon Valley galaxy brain business boys, but to a simple man like me it seems rather stupid to starve the very websites, publishers, authors, and so on that your main product relies on to be useful in the first place. I honestly don’t even know how much of OSNews’ traffic comes from Google, so I don’t know how much it would even affect us were we to tell Google’s crawlers to get bent. My guess is that search traffic is still a sizable portion of our traffic, so I’m definitely not going to gamble the future of OSNews. Luckily we’re quite small and I doubt many people are interested in AI generating my writing style and the topics I cover anyway, so I don’t think I have to worry as much as some of the larger tech websites do.
The tech review world has been full of murky deals between companies and influencers for years, but it appears Google finally crossed a line with the Pixel 9. The company’s invite-only Team Pixel program — which seeds Pixel products to influencers before public availability — stipulated that participating influencers were not allowed to feature Pixel products alongside competitors, and those who showed a preference for competing phones risked being kicked out of the program. For those hoping to break into the world of tech reviews, the new terms meant having to choose between keeping access or keeping their integrity. ↫ Victoria Song at The Verge Even though this ended up being organised and run by a third party, and Google addressed it immediately, it doesn’t surprise me at all that stuff like this happens. Anyone who has spent any time on tech YouTube, popular tech news sites, and content farms knows full well just how… Odd a lot of reviews and videos often feel. This is because a lot of review programs subtly – or not so subtly – imply that if you’re not positive enough, you’re going to be kicked out and won’t get the next batch of cool products to review, thereby harming your channel or website. Apple is a great example of a company that uses the threat of not getting review samples, event invites, and similar press benefits to gain positive media attention. I myself was kicked out of Apple’s review program and press pool way back during the Intel transition, because I mentioned the new Intel MacBook Pro got uncomfortably hot, and Apple really didn’t like that. They tried to pressure me to change the wording, but I didn’t budge, and consequently, that was the end of me getting any review items or press invites. I only ever accepted one Apple press invite, by the way, to their headquarters in The Netherlands, which was in Bunnik, of all places. Not much of value was lost without Apple press invites. Nobody wants to go to Bunnik. With every review of a loaned item on OSNews, you can be 100% sure there are no shenanigans, because I simply do not let anyone influence me. OSNews doesn’t live or die by getting reviews of the latest and greatest tech, so I have no incentive to deal with pushy, manipulative companies or PR people. I refused to budge to Apple 17 years ago, during my first year at OSNews, when I was in my early 20s – and I’ve never budged since, either. Now look at everyone getting press access from Apple, and think to yourself – would any of them tell Apple to get bent? That being said, I’d love to review the new Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, if only to make fun of that horrid name. Hit me up, Google.
Last week wasn’t the first time Google was declared a monopoly – eight months ago, in the Epic vs. Google case, Google’s control over the Play Store was also declared monopolistic. The judge, Google, and Epic have been arguing ever since over possible remedies, and in two weeks’ time, we’ll know what the judge is going to demand of Google. Eight months after a federal jury unanimously decided that Google’s Android app store is an illegal monopoly in Epic v. Google, Donato held his final hearing on remedies today. While we don’t yet know what will happen, he repeatedly shut down any suggestion that Google shouldn’t have to open up its store to rival stores, that it’d be too much work or cost too much, or that the proposed remedies go too far. “We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen,” said Donato. “The world that exists today is the product of monopolistic conduct. That world is changing.” Donato will issue his final ruling in a little over two weeks. ↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge I was a bit confused by what “opening up” the Play Store really meant, since Android is already quite friendly to installing whatever other applications and application stores you want, but what they’re talking about here is allowing rival application stores inside the Play Store. This way, instead of downloading, say, the F-Droid APK from the web and installing it, you could just install the F-Droid application store straight from within the Play Store. Epic wants the judge to take it a step further and force Google to also give rival application stores access to every Play Store application, allowing them to take ownership of said applications, I guess? I’m not entirely sure how that would work, considering I doubt there’d be much overlap between the offerings of the various stores. The prospect of micromanaging where every application gets its updates from seems like a lot of busywork, but at the same time, it’s the kind of fine-grained control power users would really enjoy. A point of contention is whether or not Google would have to perform human review on every application store and their applications inside the Play Store, and even if Google should have any form of control at all. What’s interesting about all these court cases in the United States is how closely the arguments and proposed remedies align with the European Digital Markets Act. Where the EU made a set of pretty clear and straightforward rules for megacorporations to follow, thereby creating a level playing field for all of them, the US seems to want to endlessly take each offending company to court, which feels quite messy, time-consuming, and arbitrary, especially when medieval nonsense like jury trials are involved. This is probably a result of the US using common law, whereas the EU uses civil (Napoleonic) law, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
While a US judge ruled last week that Google is a monopoly, and hat it has abused its monopoly position, potential remedies were not part of the case up until this point. Now, though, the US Department of Justice is mulling over potential remedies, and it seems everything is on the table – down to breaking Google up. Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said. Other scenarios under consideration include forcing Google to make its data available to rivals, or mandating that it abandon deals that made its search engine the default option on devices like the iPhone, said the people, who declined to be identified because the process is confidential. The government is meeting with other companies and experts to discuss their proposals for limiting Google’s power, the people said. ↫ David McCabe and Nico Grant The United States has a long history of breaking companies up, but the real question here is how, exactly, you would break Google up. Google makes virtually all of its money using its advertising business, and products like Chrome or Android in an of themselves make little to no money – they probably only cost Google money. Their real purpose is to direct people to using Google Search, which is where the various ads are Google’s real money maker. In other words, what would happen if you were to split off Chrome or Android? How are these products supposed to make money and survive, financially? I don’t understand entirely how Google’s advertising business spaghetti is organised, but it seems like to me that’s where any talk of splitting Google up to create breathing room in the market should be focusing on. Breaking that core business up into several independent online advertising companies, which would suddenly have to compete with each other as well as with others on a more equal footing, would be much better for consumer than turning Chrome or Android into unsustainable businesses. In an advertising market not dominated by one giant player, there’s far more room and opportunity for smaller, perhaps more ethical companies to spring up and survive. Perhaps I’m wrong, and maybe there is life in a business that contains everything Google does except for online advertising, but I feel like said new company would not survive in a market where it has to contend with other abusive heavyweights like Facebook and Apple.
When you’re shopping online, you’ll likely find yourself jumping between multiple tabs to read reviews and research prices. It can be cumbersome doing all that back and forth tab switching, and online comparison is something we hear users want help with. In the next few weeks, starting in the U.S., Chrome will introduce Tab compare, a new feature that presents an AI-generated overview of products from across multiple tabs, all in one place. Imagine you’re looking for a new Bluetooth portable speaker for an upcoming trip, but the product details and reviews are spread across different pages and websites. Soon, Chrome will offer to generate a comparison table by showing a suggestion next to your tabs. By bringing all the essential details — product specs, features, price, ratings — into one tab, you’ll be able to easily compare and make an informed decision without the endless tab switching. ↫ Parisa Tabriz Is this really what people want from their browser, or am I just completely out of touch? I’m not at all convinced the latter isn’t the case, but this just seems like a filler feature. Is this really what all the AI hype is about? Is this kind of nonsense the end game we’re killing the planet even harder for?
That sure is a big news drop for a random Tuesday. A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” according to the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” ↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verge Among many other things, the judge mentions Google’s own admissions that the company can do pretty much whatever it wants with Google Search and its advertisement business, without having to worry about users opting to go elsewhere or ad buyers leaving the Google platform. Studies from inside Google itself made it very clear that Google could systematically make Search worse without it affecting user and/or usage numbers in any way, shape, or form – because users have nowhere else to realistically go. While the ability to raise prices at will without fear of losing customers is a sure sign of being a monopoly, so is being able to make a product worse without fear of losing customers, the judge argues. Google plans to appeal, obviously, and this ruling has nothing yet to say about potential remedies, so what, exactly, is going to change is as of yet unknown. Potential remedies will be handled during the next phase of the proceedings, with the wildest and most aggressive remedy being a potential break-up of Google, Alphabet, or whatever it’s called today. My sights are definitely set on a break-up – hopefully followed by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft – to create some much-needed breathing room into the technology market, and pave the way for a massive number of newcomers to compete on much fairer terms. Of note is that the judge also put yet another nail in the coffin of Google’s various exclusivity deals, most notable with Apple and, for our interests, with Mozilla. Google pays Apple well over 20 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine on iOS, and it pays about 80% of Mozilla’s revenue to be the default search engine in Firefox. According to the judge, such deals are anticompetitive. Mehta rejected Google’s arguments that its contracts with phone and browser makers like Apple were not exclusionary and therefore shouldn’t qualify it for liability under the Sherman Act. “The prospect of losing tens of billions in guaranteed revenue from Google — which presently come at little to no cost to Apple — disincentivizes Apple from launching its own search engine when it otherwise has built the capacity to do so,” he wrote. ↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verge If the end of these deals become part of the package of remedies, it will be a massive financial blow to Apple – 20 billion dollars a year is about 15% of Apple’s total annual operating profits, and I’m also pretty sure those Google billions are counted as part of Tim Cook’s much-vaunted services revenue, so losing it would definitely impact Apple directly where it hurts. Sure, it’s not like it’ll make Apple any less of a dangerous behemoth, but it will definitely have some explaining to do to investors. Much more worrisome, however, is the similar deal Google has with Mozilla. About 80% of Mozilla’s total revenue comes from a search deal with Google, and if that deal were to be dissolved, the consequences for Mozilla, and thus for Firefox, would be absolutely immense. This is something I’ve been warning about for years now, and the end of this deal would be yet another worry that I’ve voiced repeatedly becoming reality, right after Mozilla becoming an advertising company and making Firefox worse in the name of quick profits. One by one, every single concern I’ve voiced about the future of Firefox is becoming reality. Canonical, Fedora, KDE, GNOME, and many other stakeholders – ignore these developments at your own peril.
As uBlock Origin lead developer and maintainer Raymond Hill explained on Friday, this is the result of Google deprecating support for the Manifest v2 (MV2) extensions platform in favor of Manifest v3 (MV3). “uBO is a Manifest v2 extension, hence the warning in your Google Chrome browser. There is no Manifest v3 version of uBO, hence the browser will suggest alternative extensions as a replacement for uBO,” Hill explained. ↫ Sergiu Gatlan at Bleeping Computer If you’re still using Chrome, or any possible Chrome skins who have not committed to keeping Manifest v2 extensions enabled, it’s really high time to start thinking about jumping ship if ad blocking matters to you. Of course, we don’t know for how long Firefox will remain able to properly block ads either, but for now, it’s obviously the better choice for those of us who care about a better browsing experience. And just to reiterate: I fully support anyone’s right to block ads, even on OSNews. Your computer, your rules. There are a variety of other, better means to support OSNews – our Patreon, individual donations through Ko-Fi, or buying our merch – that are far better for us than ads will ever be.
This story just never ever ends. After delays, changes in plans, more delays, we now have more changed plans. After years of stalling, Google has now announced it is, in fact, not going to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome by default. In light of this, we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We’re discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out. ↫ Anthony Chavez Google remains unclear about what, exactly, users will be able to choose between. The consensus seems to be that users will be able to choose between retaining third-party cookies and turning them off, but that’s based on a statement by the British Competition and Market Authority, and not on a statement from Google itself. It seems reasonable to assume the CMA knows what it’s talking about, but with a company like Google you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow, let alone a few months from now. While both Safari and Firefox have already made this move ages ago, it’s taking Google and Chrome a lot longer to deal with this issue, because Google needs to find different ways of tracking you that are not using third-party cookies. Google’s own testing with Privacy Sandbox, Chrome’s sarcastically-named alternative to third-party cookies, shows that it seems to perform reasonable well, which should definitely raise some alarm bells about just how private it really is. Regardless, I doubt this saga will be over any time soon.
In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs. Today, the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener. Please read on below to understand more about how this will impact you if you’re using Google URL Shortener. ↫ Sumit Chandel and Eldhose Mathokkil Babu It should cost Google nothing to keep this running for as long as Google exists, and yet, this, too, has to be killed off and buried in the Google Graveyard. We’ll be running into non-resolving Google URL Shortener links for decades to come, both on large, popular websites a well as on obscure forums and small websites. You’ll find a solution to some obscure problem a decade from now, but the links you need will be useless, and you’ll rightfully curse Google for being so utterly petty. Relying on anything Google that isn’t directly serving its main business – ads – is a recipe for disaster, and will cause headaches down the line. Things like Gmail, YouTube, and Android are most likely fine, but anything consumer-focused is really a lottery.
It’s time for Google being Google, this time by using an undocumented APIs to track resource usage when using Chrome. When visiting a *.google.com domain, the Google site can use the API to query the real-time CPU, GPU, and memory usage of your browser, as well as info about the processor you’re using, so that whatever service is being provided – such as video-conferencing with Google Meet – could, for instance, be optimized and tweaked so that it doesn’t overly tax your computer. The functionality is implemented as an API provided by an extension baked into Chromium – the browser brains primarily developed by Google and used in Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and others. ↫ Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register The original goal of the API was to give Google’s various video chat services – I’ve lost count – the ability to optimise themselves based on the available system resources. Crucially, though, this API is only available to Google’s domains, and other, competing services cannot make use of it. This is in clear violation of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, and with Chrome being by far the most popular browser in the world, and thus a clear gatekeeper, the European Commission really should have something to say about this. For its part, Google told The Register it claims to comply with the DMA, so we might see a change to this API soon. Aside from optimising video chat performance, the API, which is baked into a non-removable extension, also tracks performance issues and crashes and reports these back to Google. This second use, too, is at its core not a bad thing – especially if users are given the option to opt out of such crash analytics. Still, it seems odd to use an undocumented API for something like this, but I’m not a developer so what do I know. Mind you, other Chromium-based browsers also report this data back to Google, which is wild when you think about it. Normally I would suggest people switch to Firefox, but I’ve got some choice words for Firefox and Mozilla, too, later today.
Back in August 2023, we previewed our work on an experimental version of Chrome browser for ChromeOS named Lacros. The original intention was to allow Chrome browser on Chromebooks to swiftly get the latest feature and security updates without needing a full OS update. As we refocus our efforts on achieving similar objectives with ChromeOS embracing portions of the Android stack, we have decided to end support for this experiment. We believe this will be a more effective way to help accelerate the pace of innovation on Chromebook. ↫ ChromeOS Beta Tester Community To refresh your memory, Lacros was an attempt by Google to decouple the Chrome browser from ChromeOS itself, so that the browser could be updated indepdnently from ChromeOS as a whole. This would obviously bring quite a few benefits with it, from faster and easier updates, to the ability to keep updating the Chrome browser after device support has ended. This was always an experimental feature, so the end of this experiment really won’t be affecting many people. The interesting part is the reference to the recent announcement that ChromeOS’ Linux kernel and various subsystems will be replaced by their Android counterparts. I’m not entirely sure what this means for the Chrome browser on ChromeOS, since it seems unlikely that they’re going to be using the Android version of Chrome on ChromeOS. It’s generally impossible to read the tea leaves when it comes to whatever Google does, so I’m not even going to try.
