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Comment by dmethvin | Hacker News Reader

This has a lot of really serious implications. I built a form for a charity that allowed users to buy a subscription but include an additional donation amount. Chrome was sometimes filling that field with the two-digit year. The charity got a lot of complaints and it ruined the trust relationship with the donors who didn't understand what was happening and thought it was intentional.

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Chrome has other behaviour that I think violates a sort of trust relationship. One of which is that Youtube would ask you "do you want to install Chrome"? Almost as if your current browser is not "what you need to access Youtube". This is especially a problem for elderly people who often use the web but don't really understand how things fit together (the way 5 year olds actually do).

> Almost as if your current browser is not "what you need to access Youtube"

This is not just confusing. It's intentionally misleading and unethical.

And it doesn't just affect old people, or YouTube wouldn't have come up with it. Lots of young people grew up with computers and understand how to do what they want to do, but they never develop a systematic understanding of what they're using.

It gets worse, though. While we tech-folk know that all modern browsers are supposed to have near-parity, Google optimizes its sites for Chrome, leading to additional confusion for both knowledgeable and lay users.

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