Does nobody find this intrusive when it appears on sites like pornhub? Of all places where I'd sign in with a Google account... holy heck, I was very surprised they chose to let Google do that nearly-fullscreen popup on their site upon every visit (since you visit in private tab, it's a fresh session every time)
Even on reddit it annoys the heck out of me and I was very surprised they let this third party ruin the experience (when they don't even do it as first party). What if they all start doing it, facebook and github and the lot, you need to click away four banners? But maybe not enough people have privacy extensions installed and reddit can just track them forever and thus store a one-time dismissal. Anyone here in the know whether this doesn't show a measurable drop in returning users?
There's a big upside to Google One Tap. It makes users sign up for your product like crazy.
I recently added it to a SaaS web app I'm working on, and the number of new sign ups went up 8x overnight. You don't necessarily have to create an account to use the minimal functionalty of our app, but after signing up you do get some perks, and we get a way to communicate with the user through email. So I think it can be beneficial for both parties.
You're assuming that the user actually wants to sign up. In reality, it's likely that they're just clicking "Continue" in order to get rid of the dialog and couldn't care less about a signup.
Users want to use the site and don't care whether or not they are signed up. They do care about going through tedious registration forms and email verification codes. That's why sign-ups go up so much - users know they won't have to deal with the registration tedium.
They trade that for the tedium of dealing with being automatically added to email lists for sites they don’t even remember signing up for and only used one time.
All the spam email is why I’m very picky where I choose to register.
They have yet to block the Apple email relay. Granted, I haven't used it or tested it on every site. That said, Apple has one advantage other filters don't have, which is people who own Apple devices tend to be desirable to very desirable customers, which means adding friction to this would drive away higher average spenders.
I also use the fastmail.com masked email address for things, and that has not yet been an issue either.
And if you have an app in the AppStore and you allow third party sign ups through Google, Facebook, etc. You must allow “sign in with Apple”.
There is absolutely no app or service that I would use thst forces me to sign in with Google and doesn’t give me a choice to Sign in with Apple and let me Hide My Email.
I've encountered one site that didn't accept a Fastmail address. I don't know what they expect me to do - I'm not making a Google or Microsoft account just to register on your dumbass website.
Big upside to the provider, not necessarily the consumer.
Perplexity has a "sign in with Google" pop up that loads late, often when I've already started typing in my query, and thus blocks the rest of my typing, negatively affecting the UX of the service. So I looked up how to get the fuck rid of it and added that method to uBlock Origin, and now I'm a happy (freeloading) chappy.
The delayed focus capture is the most annoying part. I'll be in the middle of typing or scrolling with the keyboard when it steals focus. I type pretty fast, so sometimes I've punched in a bunch of text before realising it all vanished into the popups frame.
Since shifting to firefox it's not a big deal as I have more control, vimium can stop focus being stolen and ublock can block the in web versions of the popups. Which if Googlers are reading, I made the swap after a decade of Chrome use because of your continued anti-user, anti-privacy stewardship of the product. Your trajectory is obvious. I hope the products leadership gets the message some day, but I suspect it's financially working out just fine.
Do they pay for anything? I'm all for reducing login friction. But that popup is like people that accost you in the street trying to enlist you into their cult.
Also true if I use my gmail address. I'll confess that for many websites I don't care that much. Depending on a password manager would be better, though.
Semi-related anecdote: I lost my Reddit account to a cryptocurrency spammer due to a weak password and had to create another, so I lost my preferred username. Annoying but not a huge deal. (Reddit did freeze the old account but wouldn't give it back.)
The email is ultimately the second factor that lets you make important changes to the account in many cases. For example, changing your password. It's more important than the password in nearly every security critical account I have.
This is not always the case. Reddit sometimes locks the account until you verify it or reset the password by email. Happened with my email pointed at a .tk domain and I had to call freenom a bunch to get the domain back.
Since the last few years Reddit has basically just become Facebook 2.0 and it's not even worth using at all. They probably got acquired by private equity or something.
And still couldn't sign-in-with-google. On an email linked that way, so no password recovery. Would likely be a new account - with bonus "that address is already in use" problem.
I agree, there may be an additional step necessary if the page doesn't handle this case already, but this way you can still prove (more easily) ownership to the support.
You're both right. If an account on your service is completely meaningless, I'd rather press one button than type my email, choose a password and go through a stupid email confirmation workflow. Also, it's very annoying that you need an account at all.
Last month I subscribed to DAZN TV through Google in order to watch a FIFA world football semifinal match. I deleted the third party allowance a week later. The final was free globally.
> So I think it can be beneficial for both parties.
No. Because those who don't want to sign up do get bothered by that popup which also reminds them of the fact that Google just tracked that visit and wants you to use Google to sign up on that page.
The chuzpe it takes to do that, from part of the website owner and Google...
> Does nobody find this intrusive when it appears on sites like pornhub?
It's extremely intrusive, regardless of which site it shows up. It's a reminder that the likes of Google are collecting all the personal information they can get from you, and building up a personal profile that covers all aspects of your life, not only your online presence.
I would never visit a site like pornhub in a profile that I was logged in to anything other than similar sites.
note: I'm not excusing the feature but come on! Have some common sense before visiting a site like that?
The place I hate the popup the most is mobile. It comes up moments (0.5 to 2 seconds) after the site loads (say tripadvisor) which means it's possible accept it by accident as it appears under your finger. Your info is immediately shared so there is no way to recover. You're effed.
I means sure, I hate it on desktop too, but on mobile it's directly on top of the content and so more likely to be accepted by accident. IIRC you can turn this off in your Google account (or maybe only Google Workspace?)
Note that I hate it for other reasons too. There's no reason Apple/Firefox/Microsoft/Meta and any other major id providers couldn't offer this too. But if they did, then you'd see 5 of these show up [Sign in with Google], [Sign in with Apple], [Sign in with Facebook], [Sign in with Microsoft], [Sign in with Firefox]. So in other words, this seems like a tragedy of the commons in progress.
To steelman the feature though, easily sign up and easy login would be super convenient if that's what I wanted. It might be nice for a Web API that made this more privacy focused (or maybe that already exists). But yes, I'd like to see Google's specific popup disappear - be banned.
> I would never visit a site like pornhub in a profile that I was logged in to anything other than similar sites.
But that's not relevant. The popup appears whether you're logged into a google account or not. It's just an extremely annoying popup that appears all over the web.
Chrome has it built into the browser. If you fake the Chrome user agent string from Firefox, it'll also not show up (but you shoot yourself in the foot in other ways so I'm not advising that). Or so I heard on Mastodon a few days ago iirc
This also means that Google made it unblockable in Chrome. User scripts and extensions cannot block a browser UI feature... I guess thankfully you haven't logged in on the browser and it's clever enough not to spam it then
> note: I'm not excusing the feature but come on! Have some common sense before visiting a site like that?
I first read this as directed at the person you're replying to (me) but then saw a second possible reading: the site should know better as to expect you are logged into google with like one click
Idk which it is so I'll answer both: people are logged into their OS these days, call it Chrome (the browser, but it's close enough to an OS nowadays) or Android but either way it's a big trackfest and nobody besides a few nerds like us here bats an eye. And I indeed don't visit those sites with cookie states of other sites ^^
As I said above, the feature is super useful to people who want to "login with Google" so plenty of people with common sense would "use the feature".
The common sense part is it's common sense, at least to the HN crowd, to not visit a site like pornhub using your main profile, or so I would have expected.
I did too, until uBO got blocked. So I had to reevaluate.
Chrome now has a site setting that blocks this crap. For the browser-based popup at least. That's the one that pops up in the top-right and is not part of the DOM of the page.
You can go directly to chrome://settings/content/federatedIdentityApi to set "Block sign-in prompts from identity services" as the default behaviour for sites. You can also set exceptions for some sites if you want that.
If you need to go there manually, it is:
1. Settings
2. Privacy and security (in the menu on the left)
3. Site settings (at the bottom)
4. Expand Additional content settings (under Content)
5. Third-party sign-in
> How do you get ublock to work in chrome after the update?
Why does anyone keep using Chrome if they care the slightest about privacy? You're using a browser owned by a company that sells online ads. What do you expect?
Works fine for me. It has a lot less options, truly "Lite", but most people will be fine. Whatever Google might do that will make this extension worthless, we will se, for now, it seems to be working. (It's funny that the Chrome Web Store lists this extension as "Featured".)
By the way, on Android, I replaced Firefox with Microsoft's Edge. It supports uBlock Origin (no "Lite" in the name, not sure what that means, I did not check the details of how much it supports since it just works as it is). It is significantly faster than Firefox (again, Android). It plays all videos, while Firefox just showed an "unsupported" placeholder for videos on some niche sex video site I happened to accidentally visit.
Supposedly, filter lists only get updated when the extension is updated with uBO-lite. Google could just start delaying approval for these adblockers and their filter lists would become out of date fairly quick.
Or just use Firefox because even using chromium is empowering Google to keep playing these games. Maybe you have a problem with Firefox (most people won't notice the difference) but is that problem worse that the problem you have with Google?
> Or just use Firefox because even using chromium is empowering Google to keep playing these games.
This. People like to complain about problems, but I wonder why they don't invest half that energy in actually fixing the problems.
> Maybe you have a problem with Firefox (...)
I've started to notice there is a very vocal opposition of Firefox whose common trait is that they actually do not or cannot present any tangible argument against Firefox. They just shit talk about Firefox, and hand-wave their criticism with inane comments like "they lost the boat".
Sometimes I wonder where that absurdity comes from.
I have plenty of arguments against Firefox, but engaging in browser holy wars is so tiresome. I used Firefox since before it was called Firefox up until v89 (I think) when I finally had enough. That's when they for the millionth time messed up the UI in new fanciful ways, and removed more features I relied upon daily. It's a pattern going back decades, and the usual tired old argument is, just install this addon to restore the functionality, or add/remove this to userchrome.css, or install whatever from some random Github link. The problem is I first have to spend time and energy finding these things, and then the authors have to keep supporting them in perpetuity. And often it's tiny stupid things like removing "show image" from the context menu, I now have to install an addon for, but it's a feature I use all the time, but their precious telemetry says only 10% (or whatever) of people use it, so it gets axed in the name of minimalism. Inevitably those 10% of users will whine about it on Bugzilla, and inevitably it will be WONTFIXed and comments disabled. I've seen this scenario play out SO MANY TIMES.
I like the idea of Firefox. Not the execution.
After ditching Firefox, I installed Vivaldi, and while it certainly isn't flawless, I can set up every aspect of it how I want, and in the four or so years I've used it - with a few minor exceptions I could revert with in-browser settings - it looks and works exactly how I set it up in 2021.
So in summary, for me it was very much a paper-cuts thing, rather than any single major Mozilla catastrophe.
> I have plenty of arguments against Firefox, but engaging in browser holy wars is so tiresome.
I think you're trying to make up irrational excuses.
If you feel the need to criticise something and be vocal about it, the very least that's expected from you is that you present your basis that sparked your vocal criticism of something.
If you are very vocal to shit talk about something but cannot present any basis supporting your personal opinion or put together a coherent argument, that tells everything to know about what credit should be given to what you feel compelled to say.
> I used Firefox since before it was called Firefox up until v89 (I think) when I finally had enough. That's when they for the millionth time messed up the UI in new fanciful ways, and removed more features I relied upon daily.
Firefox's UI barely changed in over a decade.
The biggest change they rolled out in the last decade was introducing and removing Pocket, and the sidebar and vertical tab support introduced last year.
> It's a pattern going back decades,
Point out exactly what you single out as what you feel represents the best example.
So far you wrote a wall of text and mentioned absolutely nothing that supported such a visceral opinion.
> So in summary, for me it was very much a paper-cuts thing (...)
You mentioned no paper cut. You just wrote a wall of text about nothing. No wonder you shielded yourself behind "browser holy wars" nonsense.
You seem irrationally hostile because I offended your favorite browser.
>best example
The best example is probably their design philosophy which seems to mirror that of Gnome which is, we know what's best for you and you will use our software how we envision because we know better. I didn't keep a list of every Firefox annoyance in preparation of having another pointless internet argument one day, but I mentioned the straw that broke the camels back, and I pointed out how Vivaldi gets UI right.
> Many such cases. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/fresh-new-look-for-firef...
Wait, you mean when they just hid the home button by default? Idk, didn't they round some corners at that time too? Matching the style everyone else was doing. The video they reference is here[0]. Even on that page you link it looks more like over selling the redesign... I remember that change and how it really didn't feel different. It looks a lot like my browser currently is except I enabled vertical tabs and groups, which, to be clear, both are optional. Oh, I noticed the download icon currently has little edges like ⎵ instead of _ and the back and forward arrows don't have circles around them. I'm really having a hard time finding the differences tbh.
Also, you can, and always have been able to right click the toolbar and click "customize toolbar" if you really want the home button back. They do keep your settings and it will sync across browser accounts.
I mean you can have preferences and that's all cool, but these don't really seem to be reasons to have such passionate dislike. They're fine for indifference and a different preference, but hate?
But I do envy you. I wish I had such a life that the difference between viewing an image in the same tab and a new tab was the biggest problem I had to worry about.
> And often it's tiny stupid things like removing "show image" from the context menu
Are you talking about how they changed "View Image" to "Open Image in New Tab"?
I mean... come on... that is... petty.
There's two easy workarounds if you are really adamant about not having that new tab. 1) copy the link and just paste it in. Ctrl (or cmd)+L to the browser bar and then just paste. Pretty quick thing. I do something similar when pages prevent the opening image and I just pull it from the inspector instead. 2) You can just drag the image onto the tab.
I mean.. I get it. I'm a vim user so who wants to lift your hand and reach for the mouse. But I'm not sure that kind of thing is even a paper cut. Paper cuts draw blood. Making you view an image in a new tab instead of the current one is more like they don't have your favorite color toy. Annoying, but it's not like anything meaningful changed.
Wait until they remove the feature YOU rely on hundreds of times a day. I dunno why you are so eager to invalidate my opinion. It's not impossible to work around, I'm not retarded, but it's tedious as fuck.
In their defense, it wasn't a rename. "View image" viewed the image in the same tab. But yeah, I agree that it is a pretty petty thing to be passionately upset about.
> they actually do not or cannot present any tangible argument against Firefox. They just shit talk about Firefox, and hand-wave their criticism with inane comments like "they lost the boat".
Have you seen that Mozilla has basically become an ad agency?
> Have you seen that Mozilla has basically become an ad agency?
Even taking these comments at face value, this blend of arguments is pretty stupid given that you're making this sort of claims about Firefox when discussing not using Chrome.
To be clear, I do use Firefox and haven't even installed Chrome/Chromium for a long time. But given that Mozilla is inching closer and closer towards ad agency, it's only a matter of time that Firefox will open up the same issues that Chrome has.
The argument of Firefox vs Chrome is not siloed and inherently includes the argument of what their respective developers do and don't do. If we didn't need to include them in the face of such an argument, there would be little reason to switch away Chrome.
What if my problem is that it's funded by Google to the tune of a billion a year and spent a large part of the last two years trying to reposition itself as an ad company?
2. Should be "Firefox, an ad company sponsored by Google to keep anti-monopoly at bay"
My choice at that point comes down to which is the better browser rather than some moral support for one company over the other. It also rubs me the wrong way that Mozilla is pretending to be the good guy underdog.
In an ideal world, and hopefully soon, there would be a real third choice but for now they're the same picture.
1) Google, a $2.3T ad company
2) Firefox, an ad company that Google pays $300m/yr for Google to be the default search engine
3) Safari, a $3T ad company that Google pays $20bn/yr for Google to be the default search engine
4) Opera, an ad company that Google pays ??/yr for Google to be the default search engine AND is Chromium based
5) <other> browser, an ad company that Google pays ??/yr for Google to be the default search engine (and is likely Chromium based)
Your choice is #1, because #2 is funded by #1?
I am still failing to see the logic here. If anything, I'm more confused. What do you use? Ladybird? What about before that? Seriously, I'm so fucking lost here.
If only that worked on mobile Firefox, which doesn't support extension sync APIs. Other add-ons (eg tampermonkey) got use cloud storage accounts (Google Drive and/or Dropbox) for this, despite not being as useful on mobile devices (the UI for tampermonkey specifically is terrible on a phone)
their "private" is not private. about a month ago, i searched for some health-related stuff in a chrome incognito window and then immediately afterwards got related sponsored product ads on amazon in a logged in normal window.
"Private" and "incognito" mode are fundamentally misnamed. They provide almost no real privacy wrt counterparties over the network, just to other people using the same computer after you.
I remember upon introduction, tech news would jokingly refer to it as the porn button if they were immature enough (and let's face it, back then most of us and the web news sites were quite literally immature). Sounds like that would be more accurate, but it fell out of style and now we have this name :(
This is not true of any web browser because of fingerprinting. That’s the point of fingerprinting for ad networks.
You can try using a different device but even then, I occasionally get recommending things that are definitely influenced by my roommates (i.e. on the same WiFi)
Using something that prevents fingerprinting helps, but only if you don’t use that browser all the time — otherwise it’s just another fingerprint — and still on the same network.
Anti fingerprinting is nice but if you get served ads based on your IP address you're going to need more than just a browser to escape tracking based advertising. Adblockers aren't good enough when websites you visit use first-party servers to forward data back to ad networks.
Serving ads based on IP seems foolish when very, very few people have a static IP. I'm sure that a healthy minority of folks on HN do, but we're hardly representative of the general population.
Your IP is a lot more static than you give it credit for. It's not like the dialup era where you get a new IP each time. For example I have a dynamic IP on my cable modem, but it might as well be static as it only changes after there is a long term power outage. Also, it's likely if you're on a home connection most often, then you only have a limited pool of 32k or so IPs, which dramatically lowers the bits of information needed to identify you.
Untrue, you can modify it enough to avoid giving it more entropy. Possible approaches include:
- Spoofing browsers down to the TCP stack
- Plausibily random values
- Every possible bit scrambled on each request
You can see a similar thought-process behind Tor bridges so it is tried-and-tested. Noted that it is a much more difficult feat to accomplish in a full blown browser rather than network layer.
One of my fav party tricks when I get on someone's Wi-Fi is to search for an obscure disease with an expensive treatment. Everyone in the geographical area seems to start getting ads for it for a while afterwards!
Try Mullvad’s browser. It does a lot more to avoid user fingerprinting, even locking the resolution of the rendered content to various sizes. There are some things that make it less practical as a daily driver, but it seems good as a secondary browser for private mode.
"Incognito", on ANY browser, is not meant for that. Is meant to not leave traces on your PC, so your son/daughter/wife/husband can't see you've been watching porn (for instance). You're still tracked by the sites you visit, unless you use some kind of blocker (and, even then, you may still be tracked server-side).
The firefox private window seems to work better than the chrome incognito mode. Maybe brave would be even better because I tested brave against fingerprinting libraries once and it was the best at avoiding any detection.
Brave confuses me. On one hand it seems to have quite good privacy tech, but then on the other hand there are instances of what seem to be quite shady actions. Both impressions come from comments and anecdotes, I have not looked into it myself.
Deeply paranoid people can have occasional good arguments mixed in with their sociopathic traits. The fact that Brave didn't fork Firefox, or build their own like Ladybird implies to me that they are not really trying to improve the system. It's like Windows users extolling the virtues of the LTSC version.
Yes, also in hindsight of my comment, there is nothing inherently conflicting about those two sides of brave. I think my impression was that because they valued privacy, it follows they should be more 'on the level', or something. Which is clearly absurd.
I was trying Chrome on a work computer (because why not, I'm only doing work stuff on it). That incognito (but not really) mode made me download Firefox in an hurry.
But yes, I chuckled the first two time but it quickly got boring.
And BTW this clearly indicates what the people who are responsible for this behaviour not only don't bother with this 'use case' but also never use the 'porn mode' themselves.
It does disrupt the user experience and clobber a site's own home page, but associating a persistent identity to a user is VERY valuable to sites, and normal sign up flows have a lot of friction. They probably figured it's worth the cost if it gets more users to login/create accounts. Its presence despite the drawbacks indicates a lot of people use this feature.
I don't think so. Far as I can remember Reddit decided to lock down their site and start monetizing user data. They don't and never have had any sort of widely used authentication like googles SSO and Email combo. Far as I can see Meta and Google are the main "Real users" players at least in the wider internet ad markets.
Actual Identity companies have almost no presence outside of banking/finance/gov from what I see.
> nearly-fullscreen popup on their site upon every visit
I did a bunch of trial and error awhile back instead of reading the docs but you can add a rule to ublock that will look something like this. Hopefully someone comments a better filter than this mess lol
> Seriously, how the fuck do people raw dog the web? It's unbearable.
I agree, I got it to “work for me” by only using the sites I like, but there are times where I stray from my beaten path because I’m searching for something and it’s awful. I don’t think I would have fallen in love with computers if I was raised with the web being what it currently is.
I wonder if this is a driver of ChatGPT as a search engine, everything else is so bafflingly bad and all people really want is information.
I’m super happy Google’s login with my name, appears on PornHub, especially since I’m using a separate browser, Firefox mobile, for this only, never used it for anything else, never logged in. Luckily Firefox mobile gives websites access to something on my phone about my identity. But I’m happy it does this.
Because it exposes how much websites know about us. It’s like Facebook showing face recognition in 2015. It’s creepy but it reminds you constantly how creepy it is.
Just imagine how many sites collect all this info and DONT personalize what’s shown to you…
Of course, one day AI will probably automatically do realtime editing of porn videos so they will be customized for your name/location/job/background/interests.
I lived alone for years and don't even bother with incognito.
But if I cared, I on Firefox can make a separate container for that stuff and login that way. I get a burner account and Google (at least from PH) can't see anything other than other adult sites I put in that container.
They also recently must have changed the container, I noticed my adblock wasn't catching it anymore. What I find annoying though is its often slow to load and conveniently the sign in button is right where you'd click
Agree it's intrusive on all sites, but that is like the last place where I want to make mental space for "hey btw big brother is tracking you here too ;)" reminder popups
I find it intrusive on every single site it’s on. Every time I look at how to get rid of it, I’m pointed to a setting in my Google account to stop it, and it does absolutely nothing.
As far as I can tell, I’m more sensitive to this stuff than normal people, but I’m less likely to return to a site that annoys me like this. I’m also less likely to use Google as a result of them being behind this. While it’s not the only reason I use Kagi, it’s certainly an item in the pro/con list.
The same goes for all of Google’s pop-ups and nudges to switch to Chrome. It’s infuriating. Everyone not using Chrome knows Chrome exists and are choosing not to use it. They really need to stop with the heavy handed push and respect user defaults.
(I laughed out loud.) Hey! I liked Google+ >:( Met some cool people on that site and I guess my thought was that anything is better than a facebook monopoly on social media and this has an actual chance
I actually did like Google+ as well. I used Google Buzz (I believe it was the precursor to Google+) because Twitter seemed weird, and then it just made sense for me to use Google+ because I was already invested in the ecosystem. And it just seemed so much cozier than FB.
Even on reddit it annoys the heck out of me and I was very surprised they let this third party ruin the experience (when they don't even do it as first party). What if they all start doing it, facebook and github and the lot, you need to click away four banners? But maybe not enough people have privacy extensions installed and reddit can just track them forever and thus store a one-time dismissal. Anyone here in the know whether this doesn't show a measurable drop in returning users?