headlines have focused on the detrimental effect this will have on ad blockers, which will need to adopt a complex workaround to work as now. There is a risk that users reading those headlines might seek to delay updating their browser, to prevent any ad blocker issues; you really shouldn’t go down this road—the security update is critical.
It's almost like tying together feature updates with security updates was a deliberate choice by tech companies so that they could tell users shit exactly like this.
How can there be any real market choices when software literally tells users "for your own safety, you must abandon the things you want, and take the things we give you". How can consumers influence the direction of the product if they never have the option to decline that direction?
We're all trying to figure out where these headlines came from. The stable channel with all the fixes does not (at this time) bundle the warning. How is that users have become confused and believe the dev channel is the only way to get security fixes?
The headline is supposedly CISA urging users to either update or delete Chrome — it's not Chrome/Google itself. However, I'm having trouble finding the actual CISA alert. It's not linked in the article as far as I can tell.
When it comes to open source software, market choices aren't nearly as necessary because new ones can be created at will and very low cost by forking. But in the abstract thech companies are definitely not interested in choices. Choices don't maximize profits.
The article says that’s what the government is telling employees since there were several critical vulnerabilities found in chrome. It is very convenient that these vulnerabilities were patched in the same update that manifest v2 is removed though
CVEs are constantly found in complex software, that's why security updates are important. If not these, it'd have been other ones a couple of weeks or months later. And government users can't exactly opt out of security updates, even if they come with feature regressions.
You also shouldn't keep using software with known vulnerabilities. You can find a maintained fork of Chromium with continued Manifest V2 support or choose another browser like Firefox.
Government isn't telling employees shit. Federal users have no control over browser updates or most settings. At best this is a directive to push updates to it department head.
Remember, it's not an all-or-nothing situation, every step you take away from google helps. And you can always reevaluate later, and take time to figure out what works best for you.
I'm still working on it, but I've cut out quite a bit. Start with Chrome, and work your way down.
When you get to email, Gmail has a very convenient forwarding feature so you can forward all email to the new one while you change accounts and whatnot. I made a new account elsewhere, and I have a separate folder for email from my old Gmail and my new email. Every so often I'll go fix an account or two, so I'm making steady progress.
For me, docs/drive is the hardest, so I'm doing it last. I'm playing with self-hosted options, and am still in an adjustment period.
Getting away from Google Maps has been a tough one. There aren't many options there, it's either Google, Apple, Microsoft, or OpenStreetMap.
I've been contributing to OSM for my local area as much as possible to update businesses and their opening hours, website, etc., but it's not a small task.
Sync.com was my solution to replacing Google Drive. It was the only one I could find that actually did everything Google Drive did (and is less expensive). They're honest and communicative, unlike Dropbox or Google.
I choose to just continue not having it in the first place. I uninstalled it from my work PC a year ago and never put it on either personal install. Definitely haven’t missed it.
We still use it in biology ,but not in IT we have windows 10 or 11 on them I always install Firefox on them if it isn't already there one time some Ukrainian kid set the language .