Any website that implements this API is going to immediately lose me as a user. They can go fuck themselves.
I like that sentiment, but how would you even know?
- Website requires user to visit using particular browser
- User refuses to use said browser
- ???
- No profit
But if said website is your bank’s website then you will also have to go change banks and refinance your mortgage, or give up on internet banking. And there could be lots of implications like that we haven’t thought about yet. Wanna buy something using Paypal? You are shit out of luck if they get on the Google DRM train. It’s looking bleak, but hopefully it’ll be seen as being monopolistic if Google is the only one who chooses to implement it, and are thus seen to be abusing their market power to block websites from working properly on other browsers. If Safari and Edge also decide to implement it then we are all probably all screwed though.
I’d honestly look for an alternative financial institution that either has an app that implements whatever security they think they need or doesn’t implement this DRM bullshit for their website.
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websites that will implement this API:
- your employer
- your bank
websites taht won’t implement this API:
- anything you can choose to quit without significant other consequences to your life
I hate that you’re probably right.
I wish you are right. The potential problem I see is if Chromium browsers implement this and smaller websites are able to get away by violating their user base privacy without significant losses.
Except you won’t have a realistic choice.
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I noticed that too and I dumped Chrome for FF on every machine I use as soon as I read about this
Hopefully they prevail, I will be telling everyone I know to switch to firefox, and additionally changing my parents devices to they as well. Thankfully these days it’s really easy to do so
That’s good they won’t be adopting WEI, but if my bank or some other critical site decides to enforce a desktop browser with it, I’m still in the same boat. I did think of a way to avoid a WEI browser on my desktop if it comes to that. I can probably substitute a phone app for any critical services, but that’s still a drag. I don’t like phone apps much, I use a desktop browser for everything.
I think Google’s destruction of the Internet is most simply a matter of influence. If Chrome didn’t have the huge market share they wouldn’t be able to pull off this kind of thing, open source or not. Unfortunately people have a herd mentality with everything on the internet so we allowed it to happen by doing what we always do.
The article refers to Vivaldi’s response as scathing, but I think it is fair and even and the best overall summary I have seen -> https://vivaldi.com/blog/googles-new-dangerous-web-environment-integrity-spec/
What about Safari? Will Apple bend over to Googles will and use their new standard?
They already shipped something very similar last year…
https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/
Apple strips any freedom its users might have. Disgusting and forever perplexing how this evil company is not getting the shit it deserves.
I was not aware of this. Thanks!
Woah …even safari uses chromium ?
It uses webkit, which Blink, Google’s browser engine is a fork of.
No, safari is based on WebKit (which itself is based on KHTML from KDE). Chrome once upon a time was based on WebKit, but it’s now based on a fork called blink.
In any case, this is more of a “will Apple implementation what Google wants implemented?” question. Same with Mozilla being in that list, they use a completely independent engine for Firefox that shares no lineage with Chrome.
Thanks
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While I’m glad they are speaking up against it, I don’t believe that it will change anything. If Google decides to implement it, it will just end up exactly like it did with WC3 EME, as summarized in this the 2014 article from if I’m not mistaken a Mozilla dev:
I know of people recommending Chrome (not Chromium) because it has Flash Player natively incorporated, so you no longer have to install it separately.
This serves to prove that the majority of users doesn’t know about either the technical or ethical differences in the software they are using.You may also think of the pirated software the are using,but this is a different matter. Ignoring this marketshare goes against Mozilla’s idea of a web available to everyone, not to mention that Firefox is no longer the most used browser as it used to be a a few years ago and it is therefore forced to comply with this kind of requests.
Which is why we have government bodies. As usual, it will probably be the EU to castrate g**gle in the future.
EME was a bit different. Hollywood media was already encrypted. Even on DVD. They required encryption for streaming. To this day it’s the only sector that really uses EME. Other streaming media doesn’t even bother.
They have no leverage over the monopoly google has on the browsers marketshare. the only people who can change things are the end users by switching over to non-chromium browsers, but we all know this won’t happen
People said that about internet explorer in the old days
IE sucked though. Chrome doesn’t.
They lost because they were challenged by a company with more money and bigger interest in dominating the ads market.
Google didn’t have more money than Microsoft. Google those days just had a better product, and still a shitton of money. These were still the days of “don’t be evil” for Google
Google has been so far very quiet on this issue. I wonder why.
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Seriously, why though?
This is perfect. The more browsers refuse to implement this, the more the antitrust against Google is going to sting.
Brave and Vivaldi are both built on Chromium though…
If only Google supports this, the rest can fork it together.
Forking would be insane because of how much code is in Chromium and how much work goes into maintaining it. The realistic thing to do is to keep doing what they’ve been doing: maintain a modified branch. WEI would just be one of many changes between Google’s version and other vendors’.
maintain a modified branch
So: a fork. It’s not unusual for a fork to regularly merge back the upstream changes while maintaining its own set of changes.
They can still reject the proposal. Just because they’re built upon Chromium, doesn’t mean they need to utilise or retain every feature Google adds to it.
I think it’s not easy this time.
Any browser choosing not to implement this would not be trusted and any website choosing to use this API could therefore reject users from those browsers.
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For sites that fully embrace the new web environment integrity procedure would that break chromium browsers like Brave too?
That would break websites, not browsers.
That is semantics that wont help the users. They still need to change browser to access their banks website if their bank is enforcing WEI. There is nothing “broken” in the technical sense, the website and browser will be incompatible with oneanother. The blame is clearly on the bank but what’s a single user gonna do if this becomes industry standard for banks?
(I am using banks as an example of a service you cant easily avoid, this would also be true for other important stuff like digitialized government access etc ect)
That’s was what I meant. Websites not functioning properly and informing users to use approved ones like Chrome or Edge.
Shitty google doing shitty things. Just business as usual
Wondered how to deactivate the auto update of Chromium in the setting. There is no checkbox to untick. You have to twiddle with the regedit to deactivate updates. WTF?
Guys, Firefox (or LibreWolf) all the way!
or Fennec for F-Droid on Android (Firefox fork)
I haven’t been following this. What’s happening?
Google is trying to add code to it’s chromium software that would functionally allow for DRM between you and a website. It would be a huge blow to your ability to control ads and what software runs on your PC when you connect to a site.
google is introducing an API for websites to request a cryptographic attestation that your browser is the official version that it claims to be - that is, not some other browser pretending to be chrome, or a modified version of chrome. apple has had an API to do this for years, and nobody seemed to mind that, but google is pushing it as a standard that any browser could implement and that’s made a lot of people very angry.
the main concern seems to be that it will squeeze smaller browsers that don’t implement it out of the market. in response, smaller browsers are apparently choosing not to implement it.
