If you want an example of how user concerns do not drive software development, check out this Google-backed API A nascent web API called getInstalledRelatedApps offers a glimpse of why online privacy remains such an uncertain proposition. In development since 2015, Google has been experimenting with the API since the release of Chrome 59 in 2017. As its name suggests, it is designed to let web apps and sites determine whether a …
Renouncing Chrome may be good, but there's an incredible dearth of desktop browsers.
After 3 decades or so, when there should be dozens, if not hundreds, competition has whittled them down to 4 Majors, including Chrome and Firefox, and a handful of others based on Chrome or Firefox.
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If the Majors just get less usable, actually declining; the other each have different faults and look as fugly as the Majors, all exactly indistinguishable in a repulsively 'CLEAN', minimalist, Fat Slab display.
Can't agree with that. Is there hundreds or even dozens of any program?
Yeah - Linux distributions. And just look at how that's working out, for things with screens, anyway.
Having hundreds of different browsers would mean there were hundreds of different usage patterns for browsers and that users would be able to determine which theirs was.
> Is there hundreds or even dozens of any program?
Capitalism, as currently practiced, inevitably leads to monopolies. It is a natural instinct for all corporations to grow until they have consumed everything, much like a cancerous cell. Ultimately this never ends well for the host - which in this case is human society itself. There is legislation in place to counteract this, but it is rarely applied. Google urgently needs to be broken up, by separating its advertising side from the software side. The same can be said of many of the other giants of the Internet age, whose influence by far exceed their benefit.
Sadly this is how things work on the www - one player comes to the top and everything else falls by the wayside. The web accelerates the creation of monopolies.
Being able to operate with impunity across borders means the majors can evade much legislation.
Without state interevention we, the public, are stuffed, done up like a kipper and hung out to dry.
Sadly, the way things are headed, No Chrome isn't likely going to be an option for much longer -- at least if you want to do anything useful. The problem is that Google/Alphabet is a business that is selling merchandise to customers. The customers? Advertisers. The merchandise? That'd be you and I.
Google is building/trying to build a perfect advertising platform. It'll be shiny, and elaborate, and it'll allow advertisers to control all aspects of layout and presentation. And it'll allow secure payments. Unfortunately, advertisers are mostly nutcases. Their perfect tool will be wildly insecure in all other respects, because the advertisers don't care about your security or mine. Why should they?
But what about Firefox et. al? They'll still exist most likely. But they'll implement (most) all the Google APIs. They'll have to if people wish to do do banking or buy stuff.
What are we users to do? Two obvious options. Regulation and/or build a parallel world wide network that focuses on user needs rather than advertiser needs. My guess, neither will be done until the situation becomes truly dire.
"I'm already resigned to the fact that it's likely that the web will become unacceptable for me to use at all in the next several years."
Well, it's been clear for a while now that the Web (as such) has no future as far as the global corporates are concerned. Proprietary apps with proprietary implementations and proprietary data formats and proprietary data interchange, that's what it's all about in the foreseeable future. Tim Berners Lee must be spinning in his cyclotron.
So long as the app vendors cartel/oligopoly can make money for the app vendors. who carers whether "information wants to be free". (Well, TBL and a few others might, but Big Money outvotes them).
https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/
it is designed to let web apps and sites determine whether a corresponding native app is installed on a user's device.
The purpose of the API ... to distinguish between the ...two sets of notifications
If users are using the app, then they are very unlikely to opening the webpage version at the same time. And even when they do, the webpages often point them to their app. In additional to the privacy issue and the fact it only works on android, this feature is pretty pointless right from the start.
Sometimes I open up reddit links in browser rather than on an app, I do this on purpose (cos the app doesn't display it correctly etc) and will get a prompt about opening it in the app anyway.
Thing is it's my choice to open it in browser, all they are doing here potentially is reducing that choice and tbh, I'd be more likely to uninstall the app than stop using browser occassionally.
Wrong, dead wrong. The software is for the users. The users are the advertisers. For them IT'S PERFECT!
Vacuum up ever last detail of demographic information, each eyeball gaze, letter typed, click and scroll. Aggregate and SELL, SELL, SELL!
The customers of Google/Alphabet are the advertisers. You are their product. Don't think a single piece of Google's ecosystem is built for your benefit.
I thought everyone who was in the know, knew that harvesting our data to provide targeted advertising at a price was everything Google was about? In return we get a fantastic search engine that feeds the harvester, Maps that are great but record our every move, email that scans our words, calendars that track our days. All free. Not.
> users will have web apps and natives apps from the same source installed on the same device
No. I do not have any "web apps" installed on my devices nor will I have any in future. Their usability is crap, their performance is crap and if they are being promoted by Google they must enable stalking. There is no need for this api, hopefully Mozilla will give it a pass.
"implement the API but to deliver a random and ever changing collection of [responses], some really existing (not [relevant to the user or] the user's machine, just some of those available in general) and some invented."
Prior art also based on faking responses: e.g. trackmenot, from back in the days when a browser was something important and useful.
https://trackmenot.io/
Data-slurping is Facebook's core business, but by using a web browser with some useful extensions, I can use Facebook with the snooping at a level I'll accept.
If you try to use Facebook Messenger with a mobile web browser, it refuses to open, and tells you to install the mobile app. (Changing the user agent string still makes it work though.) Facebook would just LOVE a means to get users off the browser and onto the mobile apps.
(The Facebook and Messenger apps have less functionality than is provided by web access, as well as behaviour like hoovering up your contacts.)
If a company wants to know if an app is installed, TRY to launch it. You know how many f*kn ads have launched the Google Play store (through ad-block-less Chrome) and hopped directly to their own app in the store? Android has a mechanism to associate an app with a specific URL type. And what happens if the app isn't installed? Maybe the device is instead re-directed to a website (in the original url) that either offers the same features, or provides a link to install the app. I'm fairly confident this can work, because when I click on such a link in an app, it asks if I want to open it in the designated app or one of my web browsers.
That way, if someone wants to see which of their 30+ apps (companies WILL partner to trust each other to be able to build better fingerprints) I have installed, they're gonna have to launch each of them individually with 30 different hyperlinks I would have to click one by one.
Nope, this doesn't benefit the consumer in any way, seeing as there are already mechanisms to do what Google et al. are claiming we need it for.
On iOS, you can't launch any app (by using a URL that should launch it) unless you told Apple about it beforehand, explained to Apple why you need to launch the app, and Apple agreed with it. For example, my app needs to send e-mails in rare cases, and because we told Apple, we can launch the Mail app, fill out the e-mail, and the user can then read the email, change the address or contents, and press the "send" button. That's how it should work. If I want to check if some app is installed, no way.
There is a trivial way for apps to be distinguished from web calls. The app can add a parameter (&app=true) to every call. Anyone who says otherwise either needs to repeat grade school or have their mouth washed out with soap.
It's situations like this that REALLY tempt my dictatorial side.
Google is only concerned about the 'privacy' of data it collects - nobody else must be able to collect the same data , or access them, and monetize them. The example of a third party able to make money identifying apps for a fee is their worst nightmare.
If you want an example of how user concerns do not drive how software gets made, check out this Google-backed API
I think you mean:
If you want an example of when user concerns did not drive how software got made, check out this Google-backed API
An example does not prove a generality.
That doesn't solve the problem, though. (And, indeed, it looks like they're going to develop the call with this restriction in place anyway). It would still make it possible for a web site to determine if the corresponding app is installed. For me, that's very nearly as much of a problem as a site being able to determine if any arbitrary app is installed.
My devices and browsers already disclose far more information than I'm comfortable with. This API takes an already terrible situation and makes it worse.
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