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by nvk·11y ago·view on hn ↗
The biggest issue I have with Chrome is how aggressive it's been about linking Google IDs with the browser. I've lost data twice by bugs related to not having a linked ID.

Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account.

15 comments
You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data.

Google Chrome now has a "feature" that will automatically reset your homepage, search settings, wipe all extensions and wipe all extension data whenever it detects an unexpected change to any of your settings files or they do not match up to the PC they are locked to.

The goal was to prevent third parties from hijacking your search engine within Chrome. Things like bundleware installers on Windows that switch it.

The actual result is that all your settings are now locked to a specific PC and will be reset anytime anything changes. As the developer of Google Chrome Portable, this means only your bookmarks move with you as you move PCs unless you're logged in. This also means that even if you backup your Chrome install, if your PC dies, you can not restore that Chrome install on another PC. Your bookmarks will be restored, but you will lose your settings, extensions, and passwords since your profile was moved to a new PC.

This stands in stark contrast to Firefox which is completely self-contained. If a third party bundleware installer hijacks your search engine or homepage, you can simply set them back as they should be. All your extensions, extension settings, etc will continue working as expected whether or not you opt to use Firefox Sync.

Well at least there's a reasonable explanation, and even if I don't like it for myself, as an IT guy I totally understand where they're coming from.

  You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to 
  your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data.
Oh man... Settings and bookmarks are not "data" in any substantial sense.

Incognito mode at all times, no Google ID ever, trash local history on every exit. I don't carry the expectation that my bookmarks must live on and follow me from machine to machine.

I don't care about what my search preferences are. I simply turn address bar searches off, or point it to localhost. I don't conduct rampant web searches from the address bar, because an address bar is an address bar, and I only feed it well-formed URLs. I don't waste my time regularly using web sites that can't provide me with a URL that isn't intended to be typed, and sub pages that I can't readily navigate to.

Address to long? No soup for you. Absurd URL parameters? No soup for you. Deeply nested pages, locked away behind a login, 30 clicks deep, and obscured by dark patterns? No. Soup. For. You.

Preferences are preferences, and that's all they are. The default install should be completely useful and practical as-is, on a clean install. If it isn't then preferences should be exportable to plaint-text using an open standard.

Firefox happily dumps its bookmarks as simple JSON. As a result, when I want to transport my bookmarks I can, although, digging back into my archive more than a year 50% tend to perish due to simple link rot.

Judging by your comment, I bet you're also fed up with the web being overloaded and scripted to hell to build enterprise applications on top of a system that was only designed to deliver plain readable text with links to other plain readable text. Me too.

I think web applications should never have existed. The web was designed for hypertext, images, and other static consumable content. It wasn't designed to be a platform for massive distributed applications. Why are there so many security fuckups on the web? Because it wasn't designed to be secure. The fact that people are now programming desktop applications in JavaScript against NodeJS suggests to me that the web has gone too far. We should have built something new to handle what we now call "web applications".

I, too, look at huge disgusting URLs every day and wonder why we didn't see this coming.

This was the driving reason I switched back to Firefox as my main browser about a year ago. It reached a tipping point when I discovered that there was no way to unlink a Google apps business account from Chrome without resetting the browser entirely.

Being that I'd never intended to 'sign into Chrome' in the first place (the form looks awfully similar to the gmail login), I essentially rage-quit Chrome and haven't looked back since. I've embraced Firefox and I feel better using free and open source software.

Performance has been excellent. The only thing I regularly notice is that many startups seem to only QA their products in Chrome.

You can just create a new Chrome "user", linked to another Google account (or not), make it the primary account, and delete the old one.

They've actually gotten very upfront about their user features in recent versions. It's a great toolset for maintaining different sessions with multiple sites. Or for using as an incognito session with less ephemeral data.

Similarly, I became uncomfortable with the integration that Chrome was encouraging. Add to that the issues it was having with font rendering and displaying at different DPI's, and FireFox has been my go-to browser ever since.

Additionally, I've found FireFox to be more consistent about it's quality, vs having occasional releases with a jump in bugs/instability.

Google's way of handling accounts is infuriating.

I have multiple g-mail accounts. One of them is my primary personal one, and another one I use is a shared account that my band uses for business and soundcloud.

Google makes it hellish to sign out of one and into the other. For the longest time, I had them linked, and my band mates could see my personal e-mail. I don't know if they could get past a log in point, but the fact that its so hard to keep them un-linked and log into one or the other is infuriating.

Create a chrome user for each google account. There is then a hotkey for quickly switching between users.
You should probably understand this: Google doesn't give a shit.

The total market share of people who care about whether or not their browser is linked with their Google account is probably less than one percent. The value they get from knowing everything you do online? I'm not sure how you'd calculate that, but I'm positive it's greater than losing the tiny number of hackers who are protective of their personal data.

Google will continue to build the browser under the assumption that your browser will be linked with your Google account. If you don't link, you'll be a permanent edge case.

If you don't want to link your account, it's much easier to just switch browsers.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing my employer, read the links for yourself. I work at Google, not on Chrome.)

> The value they get from knowing everything you do online?

This is a myth. Or less politely, a lie you have been told.

https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/privacy/ is very clear about exactly when chrome reports back data, including what happens when you sign in. It does not report your online activity in ways different from other web browsers. It sends just about the minimum possible to implement the features it provides.

Who said the browser has to report everything you do online to be of value.

I don't claim to know anything about how Chrome works, so could be completely wrong in this, but my sense is that it is part of a broader desire to tie together tracking across all devices. Cracking that nut is very difficult from an analytics perspective, and having people logged in to Chrome across all devices provides a very convenient GUID for matching against AdSense units, DFA tags, GA tags, etc.

So the value in this play is not necessarily in knowing everything you do online, but simply knowing that you are who you are regardless of device or Chrome instance. That means data about you is consistent, and can feed into the broader targeting algorithms to serve you the right ad, at the right place, at the right time.

Again, I don't know what data Chrome makes available to Google's ad services, so please tell me if I am in fact incorrect here.

You're right. We can add this (already predictable) aspect to our visions of the future where we get into our self-driving Googleobile that on startup signs into our Google accounts...
They want to make their little OS inside your current OS, so that's it, they introduce accounts, users, apps, notifications... Meanwhile most people (including me) just want to browse the damn open internet.
To be fair, the trend of the browser usurping the OS has been going on for years. Any browser that wishes to stay modern and competitive has no choice but to leverage the inner-platform effect to a full extent.
They are free to that, just please give me a reasonable way of opting out.
Just don't sign in? I don't feel being pushed into anything. If you're annoyed by that new button near the window management buttons, there's a chrome:flags thing to disable it (enable the new avatar).
The new Opera has the same engine of Chrome and none of the inconveniences. I'm using Firefox as primary browser and Chrome in another virtual desktop to work in Google Drive because it's a little faster (maybe too many extensions). I replaced it with Opera and it works well. I have no idea if it can use Chrome extensions, never installed one anyway as it was a single purpose browser.
It's called Chromium.
Sorry, but "most people" couldn't care less about whatever concerns you have and actually appreciate the benefits of easier Google app usage.
I'm moderately well-informed about the trade-offs I'm making when I sign in to Google services and I choose to do so.

I also do so with Amazon and Microsoft and would probably claim that I am offering informed consent.

I'm keen to have it explained to me where I might be in error on this matter.

I'm not sure that's totally true – the number of people I've seen who are frustrated by constant popups, reminders and so on far outweighs the number of people who I've encountered talking about how much they want to sign into multiple accounts…
"Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account."

But that's their entire business model.

hahahaha! Great response. Yes, mass digital surveillance or mass collection of data if you like. This is arguably Google's hidden agenda and perhaps the most compelling reason to dump Chrome aside from performance issues.
It's not a "hidden agenda." It's their overt, openly stated business model. They're an advertising company.
> I don't want my browser linked with my Google account.

You might want to pay a lot more attention to SSL-based tracking methods, e.g. https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-se...

Uncoupling your use of Google services from your other online activities is much harder than many people seem to believe.

> https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-se...

Visiting a page on a creep's domain to find out about its creepiness seems like a bad idea.

I ditched Chrome for FF a couple of months ago for EXACTLY this reason. The omnipresent account name in the title bar was the clincher.
Then just change the name on the user. It's not required that you have the same name in the browser as on your Google account. I renamed mine "Work" and "Personal". It's helpful to isolate things so my side projects don't get sucked up into my work stuff.
exactly!! I don't want Google everywhere.That's why I changed the default search engine to duckduckgo. Let's see how it goes.
Funny, that's part of why I use Chrome. Having all my Google accounts and apps available is a huge feature to me.

Plus Firefox crashing is a huge downside.

As for privacy implications, there's no reason to believe Google does anything inappropriate, and I rather like having my internet experience tailored based on past behaviour.

To each their own I guess.

I tried that. DDG just wasn't even remotely good enough to service my searching habits.

Instead, I've switched to Disconnect search. They proxy searches and claim to do so anonymously. So at least I'm not directly contributing to Google's profile building that way. It does add a second or two latency per search, which can be annoying.

FF switched to Yahoo, and I'm just amused at how bad it is. They even open results in new tabs by default, a lame trick used to try to accidentally keep people on your site.

It's unfortunate, but Google really does dominate in search.

You should try the Epic Privacy Browser if privacy matters to you but you still want the speed/security of chromium.
This. I use Firefox specifically because it allows you to set history to NEVER be remembered. Really wish Safari did the same...
Why not just always open Incognito windows?
How did you loose data that way?

And I agree 100% with you!

I also lost data by this: I was trying to disable browser profiles but inadvertently deleted the cloud portion of my account that stored all my bookmarks.

I'm a goddamn software developer, software doesn't usually make me feel stupid. So congrats to Google on that I guess...

I lost all bookmarks as well (in Google Chrome Canary, not stable Chrome) due a bug. Canary sometimes is buggy and parts of the theme (e.g. scrollbar) sometimes even look like OSX, probably because most Chrome devs work on OSX and don't regression test the Win7+ daily-build that often.

Storing bookmarks as *.lnk as with IE3+ is still the way to go. Though, I found out that 50% of my bookmarks are obsolete and many were never archived in archive.org due evil robots.txt entries.

I'm honestly curious about the scenario where not having a linked ID caused you data loss. I was an early adopter of Chrome but have not used it for a while. Is this linked ID just the Cookie or another mechanism? How could not having it cause data loss?
Not sure how, but this happened to me. Specifically, my bookmarks accumulated over years seem to have been wiped out when I did decide to sign in. Turns out I had already synced a new computer, so Chrome decided to helpfully delete my un-signed-in bookmarks with the blank set from the new computer.
This is probably one of the reasons why I have been using Firefox for web browsing and Chrome only as a dedicated gmail reader. I doubt this is what Google wants, but it has been working great for me.
My solution to this was to use both. I use Chrome only for Gmail and Docs (drive, whatever...) and disabled the auto-updater. I use Firefox with DDG for everything else. Couldn't be happier.
why did you disable the auto-updater? sounds like a bad idea to stop getting security updates and the like, right?
Chromium does not include the Google bloat and works flawlessly. I don't know whether it will make you lose data, but personally never had any issues with it.
There are forks of chromium like iron improving the situation... If people would use them and contribute.
Why would you use and contribute to one of them instead of Firefox?