'Phased Out'–Google Confirms Bad News for All 3B Chrome Users

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/10/19/phased-out-google-confirms-bad-news-for-all-3-billion-chrome-users/

35•RupertWiser•4h ago

Comments

jauntywundrkind•4h ago

Google genuinely built an attempt to make the web tracking free. To everyone but browsers. It's a neat attempt & I pour out libations to the attempt.

If the commentariat hadn't been so persistently snipey about Google throughout (assuming only worst faiths), maybe the broader advertising industry might not have achieved the obstructionist regulatory capture that really slammed on the brakes for doing anything different and maybe perhaps possibly better.

Instead we all get tracked forever.

BizarroLand•3h ago

Google also shot itself in the foot with manifest v3 killing ublock origin. I almost liked Chrome for a while until they got rid of the only thing that made it usable for me.

I don't care if Google was trying to do something good. Good things accomplished through evil means are evil.

After all, it isn't as if Google isn't already tracking us itself, selling the data it has gleaned from us to advertisers, and then helping the advertisers specifically target us based on its insane amount of data on each of us.

So whinging about how one thing that might have been a little better died due to their evil overlords's middle managers mismanaging it is a waste of energy.

Scoundreller•2h ago

> Google also shot itself in the foot with manifest v3 killing ublock origin.

Yeah, I’m migrating away from Chrome over that.

3-cheese-sundae•3h ago

Can you help me understand how Privacy Sandbox was going to make the web tracking-free?

zenapollo•3h ago

I hope this news travels to more gen pop. My 82yo MIL uses Firefox because she’s concerned about the acceleratingly encroaching “police state”. That being said as an IT manager, it’s hard to tell my employees to incur the friction of broken Google services (Meet, a few others) for the intangible privacy benefits.

4MOAisgoodenuf•2h ago

What Google services are broken on Firefox?

My anecdata is that GSuite works completely fine daily driving Firefox.

datadrivenangel•2h ago

Every once in a while google meet is notably worse with firefox, or some feature is only enabled on chrome. Not a big deal.

auspiv•2h ago

Maps is the most frequent offender of something that is "kinda broken" on Firefox - black tiles/boxes, slowness, other things not rendering right. But on Chrome, it works fine 100% of the time.

andrewinardeer•2h ago

I have used Firefox on mobile and desktop for a better part of 15 years and I cannot recall seeing black boxes or tiles on Google Maps.

dare944•56m ago

None of that happens for me.

MYEUHD•2h ago

Google meet works perfectly fine for me on Firefox

frizlab•1h ago

And even on Safari. But there are indeed chrome-only features AFAIK.

skybrian•3h ago

“Google’s Privacy Sandbox is officially dead” would be a better headline.

DataDaemon•2h ago

Oh no! Another dead technology from Google!

Anyway...

sunaookami•2h ago

Forbes is blog-spam. Official blog-post: https://privacysandbox.com/news/update-on-plans-for-privacy-...

>We believe the proposed interoperable Attribution standard has the potential to support this objective in a privacy-preserving fashion, and we'll continue to engage on it through the web standards process in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders including other browser makers.

>After evaluating ecosystem feedback about their expected value and in light of their low levels of adoption, we've decided to retire the following Privacy Sandbox technologies: Attribution Reporting API (Chrome and Android), IP Protection, On-Device Personalization, Private Aggregation (including Shared Storage), Protected Audience (Chrome and Android), Protected App Signals, Related Website Sets (including requestStorageAccessFor and Related Website Partition), SelectURL, SDK Runtime and Topics (Chrome and Android).

ChrisArchitect•2h ago

Please just make this a submission the source:

Update on Plans for Privacy Sandbox Technologies

https://privacysandbox.com/news/update-on-plans-for-privacy-...

RupertWiser•1h ago

I tried but hackernews dedupes submissions for posts. The original poster barely got attention with this source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644530

Havoc•1h ago

So instead of a contested privacy approach they're just going full panopticon...

Good thing we didn't build a near-monoculture on this! /s

I'm going to keep using FF as long as it is reasonably workable and hopefully Ladybird comes through too.

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