[spystath]

> how do we protest this?

You do not and you cannot. It was written in stone once Chrome dominated the browser market. What Chrome (Google) wants, Chrome (Google) gets. Despite all the good engineering Google wants to sell ads, that's all there is to it. And the result is this proposal.

> The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal.

It's irrelevant and we are an irrelevant minority. Unless people switch to FF in droves the web is Chrome. And they won't because at the end of the day people just want to get home from their shitty jobs and stream a show. As long as that works everything else is a non-issue.

[Fatnino]

We could at least get everyone here to use Firefox. There's really no excuse for a technically minded person to still be using Chrome for their day to day browsing.

If you do eventually run into a poorly crafted webpage that doesn't work on Firefox you have the wherewithal to decide if you are simply not going to use that site or hop over to chrome just this once.

But the important thing is checking in automatically as a Firefox user in the logs of every other site online. Push Firefox marketshare up and at least some places will be hesitant to write off Firefox as irrelevant.

[p-e-w]

> We could at least get everyone here to use Firefox.

That would accomplish nothing.

> But the important thing is checking in automatically as a Firefox user in the logs of every other site online.

No, that's not important. HN users are a tiny minority compared to the billions of people that use the web daily.

I'm sorry, there's no easy way to say this: Firefox is never coming back. The web of old is never coming back. It's over. Even if this particular proposal gets defeated somehow, a future similar proposal will make it through. There is nothing you or I can do about it. Google is more powerful than most governments, and they are vastly more powerful than any random group of like-minded people who get together on the Internet in the belief that they can accomplish something.

[Shawnj2]

I use Vivaldi (not chrome itself but another Chromium browser) because I want PWA support on my Linux machine so I can have an app for outlook with notifications and Chromium browsers make that far more convenient than Firefox.

[sneak]

> There's really no excuse for a technically minded person to still be using Chrome for their day to day browsing.

Sadly, Chrome is substantially more secure than Firefox.

[pmlnr]

> It's irrelevant and we are an irrelevant minority.

Heh. I was there when it was IE6, and people said the same.

[mavrc]

I was there too. People always say this, but just because a thing changed once does not mean it will happen again. In this case, the population scale alone has changed by over an order of magnitude.

Just doing some quick searching - the first numbers that come up when you search for "how many people used the internet in the year 2000" are on the order of 350 million or so. Comparatively, now, in 2023, Reddit alone has some 450 million users. It would seem right now that Tiktok has about three times the number of active users than there were total Internet users 23 years ago.

Additionally, there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars now resting on Chrome remaining the dominant browser.

Short of government intervention (or absolutely monumental fuckup on Google's part somehow), Chrome is here to stay.

[spystath]

I was there too, in the 1.0 days, and still am. But these days are gone, Firefox is not coming back. Back then Firefox was immensely better than IE. As long as the other alternatives are just as good, there is no reason for the mythical "average user" to change over. Why bother if you can do everything in Chrome? We may understand the differences, ideological or technical, but good luck explaining that out there. There's a massive disconnect between user and technology and as a result people will live in the perfectly curated technological bubble that's been served to them.

[JimDabell]

Internet Explorer 6 brought front-end web development to a standstill for more than five years. Let’s not do that again.

[emilsedgh]

This is not the right attitude. Google wanted AMP. Google didn't get AMP. AMP is dead.

[Aerbil313]

This is not even just Google. Apple, Microsoft, Cloudflare, everyone's in. https://gabrielsieben.tech/2022/07/29/remote-assertion-is-co...

[mschuster91]

It was fun while it lasted though, finally news sites that could be read on an average German mobile data connection.

For the uninitiated: Germany's mobile phone network has been ridiculously expensive and unreliable for decades. Everyone else in Europe has done it better, because no one else thought they could extort 60 billion euros from the providers for RF spectrum licenses - we're still paying for that blatant debt-shifting today.

[troupo]

Before it died it crippled the web, the search, publishers' ad revenues etc.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

AMP is dead, but long live King AMP, now known to subjects as King WEI

[isaacremuant]

Defeatism is not necessarily realism.

There's a degree of saying no and opting out and controlling your own shit that you can do.

Some, like owning a phone and getting tracked to many degrees is inevitable but others, like software on a computer, is quite easy to think about.

You don't need to be a majority to go a different path. Linux users everywhere know this. We never needed the "year of the Linux desktop".

There's usually ways around the designated box. Obviously, get ready to be called names for not bowing down to authority... But you can ignore them and move on.

[EMIRELADERO]

Whatever happened to legislation? I bet most people here would have said the same about Apple's App Store monopoly on iOS, and yet the EU passed the DMA and the matter was closed.

There's no reason why the same can't happen here. The defeatism attitude helps with nothing and is part of the reason why this happens in the first place.

[paulmd]

EU passing the DMA is literally the specific reason why google is unstoppable. They finally cracked the last significant holdout against chrome/chromium market dominance, now there is nobody left to oppose them in the browser market.

[motbus3]

You can by not using Google products. Change the search for ddg or kagi. Change your email for proton. Use Dropbox instead. Remove Chrome, live with iceweasel or Firefox.

It is not like you'll be loosing much. This is the time to change, while we still have other players in the market.

[xg15]

No, you can't - not until you get a significant part of the world's population to join your protest.

The point is that if chrome implements this, netflix, amazon, facebook etc might decide they'll use this feature and only permit browsers who implement this to use this site.

Even if the only browser that does so is chrome, that's fine because chrome's market share is big enough that they can ignore the rest.

Have fun using Firefox if half of the web locks you out or treats you like a second class citizen.

[shadowgovt]

Changing away from Gmail would lose me access to an uncounted number of sites where my login is Oauth of some flavor or other.

[h4x0rr]

What about Safari? It has significant market share. Seems like our best bet now

[drbawb]

I doubt Apple will be our savior here. Apple is in a great position to implement this spec: their secure enclave and the systems they've developed around it are practically the state of the art. Also Apple is in bed w/ traditional media. (Apple News, Apple TV, iTunes, etc.) Microsoft has been doing the same[1] for years w/ Pluton on the Xbox to protect their IP. Google has been doing this on Android using, dm-verity, SafetyNet, et al. Nintendo employs similar protections on the Switch with moderate success. (After the bootrom of the initial HAC-001 was patched on the production floor the only real option to attack a modern Switch is physically glitching the console.)

I suppose Apple may object on the grounds of being a "privacy focused" company, but I'll believe that when I see it. I'm not gonna sit here holding my breath for these megacorps to do the right thing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo

[saurik]

Yeah: the company that is all about locking down user devices and relishes in providing a DRM-ridden platform for developers to maintain complete control over their users is totally going to be against implementing this specification :/. I mean... it's possible? but any hope there is fully predicated on their hatred of Google and their distaste for the web.

[saghm]

If my goal is to try to avoid vendors locking down what I can do with my computer, I don't think switching from Linux to MacOS is going to be an improvement.

[dzikimarian]

Already does device attestation. https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/how-to-bypass-website-captc...

[freediverx]

Doesn't Apple have some leverage here? They may not control the overall browser market but they mostly control the smartphone market (or at least the profitable segment of that market) and lots of those users prefer to use Safari.

I'm aware Apple implemented similar tech a while ago, but I have infinitely less confidence that Google would use it responsibly.

[rodgerd]

> the web is Chrome

And lot of people here squeal like stuck pigs if you suggest anything other than the Chrome monopoly. HM is a constant barrage of demanding that legislators force the Chrome monopoly to be extended to iOS devices!