Technology

I've long been trying to de-googlify myself, but it's certainly ramped up this year.

Been trying out Kagi and just set up proton mail account. Not sure what I'll land on in the end but it's nice trying out newer services.

And hope the EU will oppose it.

I expect we'll lose about 90% of the web within five years as this becomes normalized.

It will primarily be the seo driven AI crap driven ripoff regurgitated shitfest that's arisen in the last 5 years tho.

I'll be waiting for a search engine to arise that only shows user controllable presentation and will use that.

A way to filter out the corporate trash will make the human web better, not worse.

That's not even the biggest level of "we told you this would happen."

They pulled this shit previously with other standards (WebHID). Where they proposed a terrible standard, and then implemented it ignoring all feedback. Only last time it played out over months, and this time... weeks?

Sweet jesus.

Be Evil, Do Ads

People that care about this stuff are probably already jumped ship.

That's because the firefox sub moved to Lemmy...

The problems start to happen when buisnesses adopt this en masse. Expect all banks to implement this for example. You can use Firefox all you want, but then you won't be able to do online banking.

Standards are really fucking important to help people stay functional in a society. This is one area that the ANCAP mindset just gets it totally wrong, unless you like the idea of being a hermit.

Anyway, we are already seeing some websites basically reject browsers like Firefox because they basically give the consumer too much protection and freedom. Arguably we've seen this before, but this may be a new tier of corporate lockout of open standards as consumer protection gets thrown in the trash. Thanks America.

It's a shame that no matter the amount of outrage, no matter what the pitfalls of this change may be, it's going to happen no matter what because money.

Chromium, not chrome. Which means also Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and a lot more. Basically only Firefox and Safari are left as the big non-chromium ones.

But that's not the worst of it. Even if you tear out this code, more and more websites will be built that rely on it. Which means Firefox etc also need to include it to keep functioning.

Pardon formatting, on mobile. Its a form of device authentication. Apple does this with safari already BTW, and it can reduce things like captcha because the authentication is done on the backend when a request hits a server. While still an issue in concept with Apple doing it, chromium browsers are a much larger market share. In layman's terms this is basically the company saying, hey you are attempting to visit this site, we need to verify the device (or browser, or add on configuration, or no ad blocker, etc) is 'authentic'. Which of course is nebulous. It can be whatever the entity in charge of attestation wants it to be.

This sets the precedent that whomever is controlling verification, can deny whomever they see fit. I'm running GrapheneOS on my phone currently, they could deny for that. Or, if you are blocking ads. Maybe you're not sharing specific information about your device, and they want to harvest that. Too bad, comply or you're 'not allowed to do x or y'.

This is the gist. The web should be able to be accessed by anybody. It isn't for companies to own nor should it be built that way. Web2 is a corporate hellscape.

Edit wrt Safari: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/

From my limited understanding as a common pleb, they are inserting DRM into Chromium browsers to prevent ad-blockers.

If manifest 3 didn't change egoogke chrome share I doubt this will.