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"Web Environment Integrity" is an all-out attack on the free Internet (www.fsf.org)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2546109

Read why "Web Environment Integrity" is terrible, and why we must vocally oppose it now. Google's latest maneuver, if we don't act to stop it, threatens our freedom to explore the Internet with browsers of our choice.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

Why is everyone making noise about Google's implementation while barely anyone is making noise about Apple's, which is already in use? https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/

My guess is that Apple just rolled it out silently, while Google goes through a standards process with a public RFC. (edit: Also, Safari isn't as commonly used).

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Apple doesn't have the power to kill the internet, but Google does.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

No but they have the power to fundamentally alter how we use it.

Look at what happened after the launch of the iPhone. Flash was killed, and devs moved to mobile-first or even mobile-only development for web and apps. It completely altered how we used the web, the Internet, and what devs focus on.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves for that.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's a good question. Safari market share isn't as big as Chrome's (62.55% vs 20.5%, according to statcounter), but it's still the 2nd largest. Also note that the WEI proposal appeared around May but made the news only now.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Safari's market share definitely isn't as big, that's a good point. However, it's got 100% market share on iPhones (Apple forbid other browser engines from running on iOS), so there's a lot of people that have no choice.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Really? Like you cannot use Firefox or chrome on IOS?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

You can use the WebKit (Safari’s engine) wrappers made by Firefox and Chrome - but can’t use truly independent browsers

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

There's Firefox on iOS, but it's practically a wrapper around Safari. You get your bookmark synchronization, but everything under the hood runs on WebKit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I have Firefox, Brave and DuckDuckGo on iOS, just no extensions, if you want an external AdBlocker you have to download an app that works at system level

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Apple user are used to being enslaved by a corpo?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Chrome have 60+% share of browser market, so any big change from Google will affect the entire internet.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Silently? No, I'm pretty sure they announced it that they were making captchas obsolete. Plenty of people cheered for it.