💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › users › laur%C3%AB › browser › google%20_chrome.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 10:25:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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Everyone knows what this is, so let's move on to the specifics. First of all, this browser has quite a few dark patterns. Upon turning on Google Chrome for the first time, a window appears with two options: making Chrome the default browser and enabling the sending of crash reports. Both are on by default.
When you reach the main browser window, you are pestered to login to your Google account.
The same happens when you enter the Settings menu.
Yes, that's the Settings menu. To enter the actual settings, you need to click those three lines on top. Anyway, if you do end up logging in, it might be the biggest mistake of your life as Google will now be grabbing everything you do in the browser and connecting it to your real life identity from the Google account:
When you’re signed-in and have enabled sync with your Google Account, your personal browsing data information is saved in your Google Account so you may access it when you sign in and sync to Chrome on other computers and devices. Synced data can include bookmarks, saved passwords, open tabs, browsing history, extensions, addresses, phone numbers, payment methods, and more.
It is important to realize just how much privacy you lose this way; for example, you are sending your browsing history to Google, whereas otherwise, it stays local. But, you don't have to use this feature, and then you're left with "only" the heavy spyware Chrome has by default. Google tells you exactly what they do, in excruciating detail, in the whitepaper linked above. Unlike Mozilla, they are actually transparent. But , of course, always confirm everything with mitmproxy. I can tell you one thing for sure: the spying isn't even close to what FF does; there is no equivalent to Firefox Glean that monitors every interaction you have with your browser. I don't see three different requests appear every time I click a menu or change a pref in Google Chrome; I can actually modify settings in peace, knowing it's not all sent in real time to Google - with system info, unique IDs and other crap included. Don't be fooled though, Chrome is still heavy spyware, as their privacy whitepaper will gladly tell you. There is so much of it, I kind of can't be bothered to analyze it in detail; just read the whitepaper, if you care. There are many Chrome forks with (some / most / all of) the spyware removed, so we shouldn't spend that much focus here. I'll give a few examples, though:
For more, read the whitepaper or fire up mitmproxy. When I tried to de-spyware Chrome, I didn't even come close; the waves of update requests still kept coming. Moving on... as you can imagine, the amount of options revealed in Chrome's UI is relatively little. There isn't even the dumpster known as about:config, so it's worse than FF in terms of customizability. The most egregious issue is that proxy settings can't be set through the UI; not only that, but running Google Chrome through proxychains will error out. So the only option to set a proxy is an in-built command line option - meaning you have to trust that Chrome respects the proxy.
There are no special features in Chrome, it's all going to have to be added through extensions. The amount of RAM usage with one empty tab - in my testing - was 170mb. Though I guess the system configuration matters somewhat, since others reported 140. GTK3 is required; actually, I had a problem running this browser at all since it seems to depend on several new libs, and I still base on Slackware 14.2. And the errors are kind of unintuitive, but I managed to figure it out, eventually. Since it's big corpo Google, the developer of the most advanced browser engine Blink, you can expect the most compatibility with the modern web out of all browsers. Which I guess is what made Chrome so popular in the first place (aside from being the default everywhere, of course). Well, it was kind of fun testing this, but now I'm going to trash it (still feel kind of dirty). Of course, Google Chrome is still pointless to use, since we have many derivatives that lack the spyware and are fully open source.