if they outright forced us to stop day one there’d be outrage, so they instead ease us in. first a popup, then a timed popup, slowly leading to their actual goal but without the risk of an initial outrage. i know this is an extreme comparison but we’re like lambs to a slaughter
I use IceCat with NoScript, PolicyBlock, DecentralEyes to block 3rd party, and some other add-ons to access bank and pay bills.
Yes and that works currently. But recently Google put a proposal in the chromium engine that could essentially function total webpage drm. If that proposal goes through, and websites such as your bank and electricity company start requiring that feature in order to login, then other browsers would be completely locked out. Changing user agents wouldn’t work, because it is a client side check requested server side. Google argues that it would give websites a way to verify they are interacting with a human and limit abuse. That we wouldn’t need captchas and such. That it would increase security. But it could also mean you are totally locked out using alt browsers.
There is already a similar thing done on ios with safari. But ios doesn’t have a monopoly on users and obviously businesses like your bank or your electric company won’t decide to lock out anyone from paying except with an iPhone. But if Chrome did it, and ios already does it… boom.
While I do not outright dismiss your argument, I believe this general discussion is getting amplified or heightened by people who are neither programmers nor hackers. For the record, hackers are typically good people, it’s the crackers that cause the problems.
I have faith too many people who are I.T. engineers would strongly resist for Google to have a complete stranglehold on the entire internet. The more people are hurdled into a single way of thinking, the more diverse the resistance becomes.
I’m not going to be concerned until the intermet has a collective whole says Librewolf doesn’t work for websites, ungoogled chromium doesn’t work for websites, and Brave browser doesn’t work for websites. Less than that, I will dismiss it as sensational drama.
I’m not trying to form an argument. I’m trying to tell you they are already doing it.
Here is the wiki description. Here is the commit adding it after they got massive backlash from the community and in spite of it. Instead, the person who made the commit made a blog whining that people are mean and they don’t have any better ideas. Then they made a code of conduct for those that wanted to comment. Here is even an explanation from google for the WEI. Some good quotes
It can