Metanote: I wasn’t sure if this post really merited being designated a Red Meat Friday item but it is polemical and will doubtless anger some people so I guess it qualifies.
As most of you know, we here at Irreal are not (or at least no longer) fans of Google. Their crimes are well known and documented—at Irreal and elsewhere—so there’s no need to relitigate them here.
But—to channel Arlo Guthrie—that’s not what I’m here to tell you about. Rather, I want to talk about Google’s Web browser, Chrome. The main thing I don’t understand about it is why anyone uses it. Its performance is no longer top-of-the-line and its main purpose seems to be as an information harvester for the Google advertising machine. Yet it is, by far, the most popular browser. Why is that?
Now there’s something new to add to the list of Chrome atrocities: changes to its extension policies and API. In its crusade to fight ad blockers, Google has modified Chrome’s extension API to make filtering more difficult and, worse, demands that all updates (including filter rule updates) go through its app store and review process. That has the effect of preventing the ad blockers from updating the rules fast enough to keep up with Google’s constant changes to its anti-adblocking scripts.
Google, of course, is describing these changes as improvements to Chrome’s security and performance but that’s transparent nonsense. The changes are, in fact, user hostile so I ask again, why is anyone using Chrome?
The TL;DR, if you’ll forgive such a thing at the end of the post, is this: Get rid of every Google service and app that you can. In my case, that leaves only YouTube but, sadly, that’s what this post is really about.