Spoiler: it fits very few company's business models. Some companies can avoid it, if their owners/board want to. But once they take venture capital, or go public, they lose that choice. And that "don't be evil" promise, and most any other, is void.
That is because they are a publicly traded for-profit company. They are legally required to do anything and everything to always make the numbers go up. By any means necessary, which is where any semblance of "not being evil" goes to die. Especially after a product/company was able to get massive popularity for doing/supporting actually good things and/or being known for being "the" name that people think about as being ridiculously well made. So many CEOs and the top controlling shareholders start gutting everything to squeeze out any and all extra profits. Just a hollow shell where massive cuts in jobs and replacing anything that got them there with passive money generating replacements. And since basically all normies just go with whatever they were last really told was good. They don't notice how bad it has become, and don't question it at all (like how many people thought those IE toolbars were just part of IE from an update).
Feel free to skip the next bit as it is more rant about the importance of actually updating the information normies have gotten and just default to.
I on a daily basis have to explain to customers who's computers I work on, that AVG and Avast are beyond bad things to have installed these days. And that they (and really all the major paid for AV products) are the reason that their computer is dog slow. Along with pointing out that all the scary messages they are seeing are from the AV products trying to constantly up-sell them on getting every single one of their pointless products that they will never use/need. Especially bad when you pay for something and think that it will just do the damn thing you wanted without harassment. Just to then get more alerts and pop-up messages trying to scare you more into getting more "protection from X" than you got before giving them any money at all. They just keep using these things all because someone or a few "tech people" that they personally knew at work or before moving somewhere told them it was the best. Same goes for shit like Office and Outlook. So many older folks think they can't use email if it isn't through Outlook and freak the hell out if their drive or OS fucks up. They think they can't create/open documents if it isn't Office (same goes for Acrobat for PDFs). There are randomly people that do need those things, but they also tend to be more aware of stuff like creating backups of PST files.
We all did. It's very much possible that they really meant it at the time. Most companies start with a lot of idealism. And then they become successful and consequently the target of cronies. They feel like they're entitled to everyone else's earnings and the dark pattern begins.
Yeah for real! They were really really quick and light on RAM in the super early days. But that was due to not having much there compared to Firefox and Opera, or even IE and Safari. Even the original Edge browser was kind of quick due to it just not having everything. All of them lose that little advantage after being around long enough to have the code base be added to along with trying to copy features from popular extensions or trying to add random things to stand out. Even when Firefox got heavy with RAM, I still stuck with it due to extensions factually being able to do more that I wanted. But then they solved the RAM issues dramatically with that Quantum refresh, though it did mean many extensions got nurfed by virtue of not having as much access to the OS level stuff (which is probibly a good thing with regards to security and privacy). Even then they still have better access to being able to really block ads and other privacy related things. And that is because they aren't an ad company that wants to dictate how you are allowed to use the internet.
I avoided chrome for a long time. Finally I made the switch because FF was getting too slow on old computers back in the day. Lasted for maybe five or six years before I started getting some bad vibes. Why am I letting google run the web browsing software I'm using? This can't/won't be good in the future.
At least five years ago I made the switch back to Firefox, and haven't looked back. I love having adblocking that works (I use a router level ad block and ublock origin just in case to ensure I block almost every ad on the internet lol).
I'm honestly surprised it took people this long to decide to move away from Chrome.
IE - came with Windows, before I didn't really know what a browser was; we also had Mozilla, but only my dad used it
Firefox - as a teenager, I think I started at 1.5 and used until 3.5 or so
Chrome - it was faster than Firefox, so I used and recommended it to a lot of people; this is also when I started to care about web standards (tried to get IE users to use Chrome)
Opera - used for a couple years until they announced 15, which was going to be Chrome based
Firefox - I used Firefox off and on throughout, and remember the switch to rapid releases, and I've used it nearly exclusively (aside from Web Dev testing) since 2013 or so
Once Opera switched to Chrome-based, I started heavily recommending Firefox. So I saw the writing on the wall about 10 years ago, and now I'm stubborn about avoiding Chrome where possible. I hope others choose to switch too.
Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page.
The blog post says the ad platform is hitting "general availability" today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users.
This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.
Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an "ad privacy" feature has been rolled out to them and enabled.
That's actually what started this whole process: Apple dealt a giant blow to Google's core revenue stream when it blocked third-party cookies in Safari in 2020.
Google says it will block third-party cookies in the second half of 2024—presumably after it makes sure the "Privacy Sandbox" will allow it to keep its profits up.
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They say this is meant to be an eventual replacement for tracking via cookies, but there is literally no way this won't become supplemental to current tracking methods. And I think they know that.
Gonna be hilarious when hackers figure out how to hijack where this reports back to. Particularly since Google recently got rid of most of their senior devs you know, the ones who can actually make secure code.
The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an "alternative" tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can't just not be spied on.