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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Google could respond to this by encrypting all the data (of course the decryption key would also have to be local somewhere on the machine), and then making a complaint against Microsoft under the DMCA if they tried to extract the key and decrypt the data, bypassing the “copy protection”.

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The tools to decrypt the user data folder in chrome would quickly be available to edge since theyre both chromium forks.

All edge needs to do is tell the chromium code to load from the google profile at startup, then change the profile directory after loading to save it to make the copy.

It would harm accessibility for one thing.

Encrypting data on the disk has nothing to do with displaying it in the browser where accessibility tools would be used.

Many accessibility tools on windows use the IAccessible com interface to get text from applications (including google chrome and chromium and many other browsers and applications.)

If google chrome doesn’t prevent this from occurring, Windows/Edge can easily collect this info via the IAccessible interface.

If google chrome does prevent this from occurring it will also prevent accessibility tools from doing the same.

In something like this, Edge is definitely not scraping the rendered content from the front end interface, it’s accessing the underlying Chrome files that store session history, tabs, urls, etc. and then opening the same sites in its own tabs.

I will admit that I’m not an expert on how accessibility feature work, but having a strong understanding of computers I highly doubt its using its own separate rendering engine to access urls directly.

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