The Vivaldi browser will not support Google’s FLoC

I think whatever the setupper of the computer dictates whatever Internet is, and secondarily the OS vendor if the new user doesn't have a tech friend.

I don't think Chrome is somehow == Internet for these people specifically. (Personally I call the shortcut "Internet" so it's consistent across devices and they don't have to recognize Lightning on their phone and Firefox on their laptop.)

The Google homepage on the other hand...

Right and there was a reason for that. IE's monopoly didn't fall from the sky. Netscape was flying high and they decided to rewrite the whole browser while IE kept adding features. The end result was that yes, Firefox was born, but its market share collapsed.

Now you have a lot of browsers deciding that the most important thing they can do is remove features and break websites. Maybe those features aren't very good from a privacy point of view, but when the other guy's browser works and yours doesn't, that's not a recipe for gaining market share. Chrome is the other guy, and unlike Safari which is disabling cookies right and left and refusing to load resources, Chrome is willing to do it and sites work with Chrome. So in that dynamic, there is little reason to think that Chrome is going to lose market share to browsers whose main raison d'etre is that they will refuse to load/send resources. If it wasn't for iOS banning non-safari engines, Chrome's market share would be much higher, which is pretty sad given that it's become so bloated. But users care more about stuff working.

I was there using Firefox.

Chromium-Edge was forked after I left MS, but from what I gathered the higher-ups were aware of how far-behind MSHTML+EdgeHTML was, and it was getting worse with each Chrome release. One major problem was the rise in the popularity of NodeJS and Electron: both of which trounced Windows’ Chakra engine and legacy HTA platform (and no-one was building for “Windows Store HTML” for obvious reasons), especially on ARM (IIRC, Chakra didn’t JIT on ARM).

Anyway, Microsoft’s problem is they don’t want to lose the web to Google because they recognise the web is now “the platform”, including desktop “web” apps running in Electron. Any business knows it’s a liability to have dependencies on your competitors. The plan, originally, was to base Edge on Chromium, then built it into the OS, so desktop apps can use modern Chromium features in a build optimised for Windows and the user’s computer without needing 200MB+ Electron packages and 400MB RAM and dozens of separate processes for what should be a trusted application.

...however that still hasn’t panned-out yet. Which I find concerning because I thought Microsoft would treat Chromium the way Apple treats Safari: a browser that puts the user - and their privacy - first, because Microsoft isn’t Google and doesn’t significantly benefit from tracking users over the web.

...but they have been. Edge’s privacy stats are almost as bad as Chrome’s. I’m guessing some GP or VP from the Bing org had a word with OSG’s VPs and convinced them to compromise Edge to benefit Bing despite the overall damage to the Microsoft brand and eliminating possibly the most important advantage Edge had over Chrome.

I have to assume you wrote this in good faith, however, this is a circuitous way of describing how Mozilla / Firefox makes its money.

It comes directly from Google! One can easily imagine a future where Firefox must implement FLoC to continue receiving that money.

You only ever belong to a single FloC. So let's for a second assume the non-adversarial use case. The advertiser isn't using any additional tools to track you. Then the only thing the advertiser has is your FloC. This doesn't identify you individually, but it might correlate with various interests.

If your FloC changes, which it will periodically, the advertiser doesn't have any history, so the correlation changes and you're given different ads.

Now let's assume that they have some additional information, like an IP address. Then they can say ah you had this FloC on this date, and this different FloC later. Its not more identifying (they already have your IP, which we assume is identifying enough). The FloC might let them infer things about your interests on other sites, so they have precise information on your browsing interests on this site, but only partial information on other sites.

As opposed to today, where 3rd party trackers mean they have full information on the other sites too.

and it will include all sites from the last week, whatever you used adblocker to prevent tracking or if the site did not had any social media buttons that would allow then to track you there in the first place..

> That wasn't hard.

It also doesn't explain why that's worse than the current practice of directly identifying individuals. Which is the hard bit.

If it was complemented with a Privacy Budget API– each privacy-losing API call costs budget and there is a limit– to eliminate other factors for fingerprinting and IDing that you can combine with FLoC to unique track people– thus giving advertisers complete browsing history– then I'd reconsider.

Another thing is webmasters can opt-out of FLoC through a header. But many webmasters don't control headers...

And on top of the practical consequences of its implementation.... not good.

Which is just another reason – maybe even a responsibility of every web dev - to stop using chrome.

Indeed it would be and as far as I know it's not been done recently either (anyway not with openly published results). Nevertheless, I would like to see say the top six browsers tested on heavy JavaScript websites that use lots of advertising. I'd reckon 100 sites would be plenty to get a definitive outcome of the speed differences.

Of course, it's unlikely happen given the fact that JavaScript is now so ubiquitous along with the all-too-common assumption that the web cannot cope (or would cease to work) without it—the logic being that there would be little point to the exercise. Moreover, if a such a test were conducted and nuking JS showed that most sites would be much faster without it then it'd still receive negative publicity as the many naysayers would point to website features that didn't work. And that's absolutely true some features will not—and with some, albeit still fewer again, will not work at all.

(Remember, this used not to be the case 20 years ago. So it's time we examined why JS is so critical now when it once wasn't. I'd make a substantial bet that the real or most substantive reason has little to do with improving the experience of website visitors (that is unless one considers that slowing websites down as a benefit) - and it's much more to do with benefiting website owners and their advertisers. One thing is for certain, we really do need to put a proper measure on this. Then, like limiting the advertising on television (as most counties already do with (essentially) the exception of the US), with accurate stats legislators could apply appropriate limits on advertising and data collection, etc. to web services. As things stand at present, it's nothing other than the Wild West.)

Of course, the test sites would have to be selected fairly and with care to provide a representative sample. I tend to gravitate to sites where JS is minimal and where killing JS makes little or no difference to viewing the core material (many technical sites fall into this category). Therefore, taking say the last 100 websites that I've visited would not be a representative sample. Incidentally, of the sites I visit about 95% work very well without JavaScript—so my default experience is to browse without JS enabled. Of the remaining 5% I've a choice of what to do, I can either toggle JS on and refresh the browser or instantly get out of there. On average I'd back out of about two-thirds of that 5% and toggle JS on for the remainder (all up, that's around 2% with JS).

This is where the naysayers miss the point. Whilst it's possible to default JS to off at the beginning of a new session I usually don't bother, so it's not unusual for me to start a new day's browsing with JS still toggled on from the previous session without me initially realizing it. However within a second or so I know that JavaScript has been left on by the way the browser responds (anyone who does what I do will know this experience well). Even if no JS content is obvious or visible on the page, if it's running tasks in the background then I will almost certainly notice it immediately as the browser is less responsive, paging becomes slower and there's a jerkiness to it that's not dissimilar to running programs under a Virtual Machine). I know JS aficionados either won't believe me or that they'll claim I'm exaggerating. Moreover, I know that me saying that I'm not exaggerating or attempting to prove it won't convince them one iota whatsoever, so there's no point in me trying—and then I don't have to prove anything anyway! If anyone really needs to know then he/she needs to do a quick survey of others who don't use JS and they'll soon find that those non-JS users will support what I'm saying.

"they have acquired a remarkable sense of entitlement. (The search still works.)"

Right, this is a good indication that the code that's actually been killed is the monitoring or spyware stuff and the coders/website owners are indignant about the fact that it isn't working (after all, given various error messages we get in these circumstances, we know they're checking to see whether the code in this section is running as intended or not). I regularly get messages such as 'Please turn on JavaScript to get the full benefit of this site [and or] certain features of this site will not work without JS' - and that's true—but they are the very ones that I do not want to work!

You often see the same nonsense with Android apps. Like the PC, I turn off as much Google as I can. I do not use any of Google's services, so on my rooted smartphones this means removing all Google apps (Google Play Services, Play Store, etc.). When the Google apps are removed many Android apps will complain to the effect: 'XYZ app will not run until you update Google Play Services' but they still work anyway (there are many exceptions that won't run and how to get around the problems is too off-topic to discuss here). Anyway, when apps still work but complain about Google Play Services it's almost a certain bet that it's the data gathering aspect of the Play Services that's relevant here—so I just ignore it (most people, even diehard Google fanatics, would prefer that data-gathering didn't work). FYI, always keep your old APK app files before you upgrade (and don't overwrite APK backups, as often that message doesn't pop up in older versions). That's to say, often Android updates contain nothing other than more highly refined code for spying, ipso facto, with Google Play Services and Play Store updates. (Of course, you'll get the security spiel/reason—as that's always the mandatory excuse/justification. Let me put it this way, you'll likely get both security updates and told so, what you won't be told is that Google's Android's Google Play Services 'receivers' schema has also been revamped to collect even more user data than previously (Android experts, I know that's a shortcut explanation/oversimplification but it'll have to do).

In my opinion a better and much more relevant and informative test would be to do a survey of a larger number of websites, say perhaps in excess of a 1000 or more of the most popular ones. Then analyze exactly what JavaScript is being used for on each site—that being to do a detailed statistical breakdown of JS's various functions on a per site basis then average this breakdown analysis across the whole web.

I've not conducted a rigorous test like this myself as it's a great deal of work to get meaningful statistics but I know from the number of times I've looked at the code from heavy JS sites that a very large percentage of the scripting goes into alerting every dog and sundry about what users are viewing and or doing. Whether one analyzes the website code or logs the destination IP addresses these pages call home to, one will see the huge amount of feedback that's being sent to many, many dozens of data-collecting websites. It's quite horrifying to watch it happening (I've been so alarmed that it's not the first time I've pulled the RJ-45 plug out of the PC socket to stop it continuing).

However, some Thunderbird extensions have even become essential to me, most importantly Cardbook, which I use to manage Contacts across devices (shared via carddav on a selfhosted Nextcloud). Does M3 support carddav properly?

Also, can I add multiple mail accounts easily?

Are mails part of Vivaldi sync?

I might actually try it just to get a look at the current state. RSS client is nice, too.