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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

I think the writer falls into the "privacy paranoid" category of users. Something vaguely looks like it could be used for nefarious purposes, so they imagine it must be for nefarious purposes.

Also as much attention as privacy gets, those users are far outnumbered by the performance oriented users. So it would be a mistake to kill a performance improvement for an imagined privacy improvement to satisfy (the even smaller segment of) privacy paranoid users.

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> Something vaguely looks like it could be used for nefarious purposes

If it can be used for nefarious purposes, it will eventually be... so it should be considered a bug.

I'm not sure what world you live in...

“vaguely looks like it could” and “can” are not the same.

closing a browser should definitely close all connections associated with it... that is one reason why I don't use Google applications on Linux... because they (used to) keep a process running even when you closed the application (that was years ago and I don't know how it is today).

I just tried it and Chromium, at least, closes all processes when the last window is closed.

But the linked post is talking about a Mac, where the expectation is explicitly that the application keeps running even if it has no windows at present; if you want the process to go away then tell it to quit.

But do they still have that update process running constantly? It would be trivial to send the interesting information once the main process (chrome) is back in memory.

If you really want to close the browser then by all means exit the application. Otherwise these lingering connections are mostly worthless to anyone but a developer as they eventually drop within a few minutes.

Exactly. Users have unfortunately learned to fear the worst. And judging by many reactions here, presumable some from developers, a good number of developers don’t understand their users expectations of privacy and transparency.

have you seen https://www.nothingprivate.ml tech and internet are more hostile now days. company like google/fb will do anything to get user info legally or illegally, as the fine for bad behavior is usually slap on wrist.

I question the view that being privacy and performance oriented are at odds. In practical terms, there is likely to be some correlation as surveillance often uses more client-side resources.

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