Chrome is the number one browser in the world for installing Firefox.

That seems unlikely.

Is it? Have that many people been switching that they outnumber users installing it on their new machines?

Definitely number two.

After what? Edge or an older version of Firefox?

Doesn't Chrome send your entire browsing history to Google as well?

Edit: I thought this was a well know fact and if it isn't I might have been to harsh about Google and Chrome.

Edit 2: Thinking about it and searching a bit I conclude that IIRC Google at least used to have access to your browsing history as part of syncing it unencrypted.

Only through sync, which you can encrypt with a separate password to your Google account.

My sync is encrypted so I can't test this for you but I believe if it's not, you can check (and clear) your history here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

Google's privacy policy seems to make it clear that this happens unless encryption is turned on: https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/index.html#signed-in

you missed the obvious one (that is actually related to the linked edge issue): SafeBrowse. SafeBrowse gets ALL your traffic from most browsers.

Ah I was wrong about this!!! SafeBrowse uses hashes.

Edit: never be afraid to admit your were wrong folks :) So it only gets a “potential list” of sites you visited. Wonder if the operators could aggregate the data enough to deanonymize things

The hash isn't even necessarily transmitted, and it's often partial hashes at that.

> Doesn't Chrome send your entire browsing history to Google as well?

Most browsers/users do, essentially. When a person searches Google for example, results are links to Google that redirect to the target sites. Try it, mouse over a result, and look at the URL. Then a user clicks on one and finds a page that likely has doubleclick.net/adsense/analytics/fonts, which all feed back to Google. Or buttons/pixels/whatever for Facebook. Or both. Or both and 10 more organizations. Then since all mainstream browsers by default send referrer info, and since tracker code is so pervasive, and since browsers are easily fingerprintable, trackers follow you along as you click links going from page to page. Trackers are getting redundant high quality data. They're right there with you as you browse; they see what you see. Although some browsers are easier to configure for privacy, IMO the browser you use is less important than how you use it.

Multiple organizations have the potential to possess a near-complete view of your browsing history.

Everything you type into the address bar gets considered for possible completion, right? And part of that quite possibly entails sending it off to Google servers which take a stab at finding completions for it. Your claim seems plausible at least.

Yes, there are some options under chrome://privacy/settings that suggest they send full or partial URLs:

- Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors

- Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar

and then there's

- Use a web service to help resolve spelling errors

whose description suggests it sends more than URLs.

And, if I recall right, you're asked if you want search suggestions in the omnibar the first time you use it for that purpose.

Does that prompt effectively explain its impact to nontechnical users?

Also note there is a “roulette” feature in most address bars, where the browser starts loading and rendering the site before you ever hit submit. Very handy for sites wanting to pursue persistence

My activity[0] is Google's official way of telling you what it has collected about you from sources like Chrome. Things there will be used to personalize your experience.

https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

If you are logged into Chrome your history is synchronized across platforms, tied to your Google account. Same as with Firefox Sync. Not sure about behavior when not logged in, or when incognito.

Firefox Sync is quite different than Chrome's version; with Firefox your data is encrypted locally on your machine before it is synced.

That is also an option for Chrome.

But not the default.

Are you sure about that? Certainly at least some of the synced information is encrypted before sync by default (passwords).

I would love to see a source for this.

It is not so easy to do this MITM trick with Chrome, it has Google certs pinned down.

"For the transparent proxy to work, it needs .google.com to be added to the URL whitelist to allow all traffic to .google.com. This configuration is not supported because of Chrome security features that are in place, and we recommend that you avoid the use of transparent proxies." https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/3504942?hl=en

This link refers to Chrome devises, like Chromebooks, not to the Chrome browser.

You'll be getting "ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR". I could not find any posts on internet that were able to MITM and analyse Chrome to google.com traffic.

If you sign in it syncs history across devices, so I assume it does. Although it would technically be possible that they encrypt it using a key Google doesn't have, I wouldn't assume they implemented that.

It's an option under the sync settings:

○ Encrypt synced passwords with your Google username and password

◉ Encrypt synced data with your own sync passphrase

So stop using a browser from a company that has a source of income besides selling your info to install a browser from a company to which you are the product. Ironic, no?

Not saying MS is not doing anything wrong, but the lesser evil I think.

The upcoming Edge is based on Chromium. So you won’t need to download it a second time :-)

s/upcoming/current/

You need to download Dev or Canary builds to use Edge Chromium (which I am typing this post on), it's not shipping as the stable Edge yet.

Hey, it seems that you're right. Thank you for saying this, I wasn't aware of that detail

In my case it was Edge Beta, and Firefox. Haven't even gotten Chrome installed on my PC.

You shouldn't need Edge, Chrome, or Firefox to install each other. If you know the URL of the file you want to download, you could use curl or wget. (Of course, that won't work if you do not know the URL. But hopefully someone will tell you if you are unable to find it on your own computer.)

Assuming you're on a machine with curl or wget installed. I haven't used Windows in 20 years, but I don't believe it comes with either one by default.

Invoke-WebRequest, aliased as iwr, shipped in Windows as part of PowerShell for 6 years, will do it with no browser.

As of some recent Windows 10 build (edit: 1803 or insider 17063+), curl.exe (need to specify full executable name not just "curl", which is aliased to Invoke-WebRequest by default) is shipped by default as well. I believe it came around the same time as OpenSSH. You'll also find a tar.exe binary.

Does curl or wget ship with Windows?

Yes, apparently -

    >curl
    curl: try 'curl --help' for more information

    >where curl
    C:\Windows\System32\curl.exe

No; to get it without going through a browser you'd have to install Windows Subsystem for Linux as an optional feature, then download a Linux distro from the Microsoft Store - arguable whether that doesn't involve a browser, really.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

Because google is any better? And engine-wise they're the same these days.

because the rumor has it that "Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft" and we haven't yet caught google in such embarrassing situation

Well, by default, Chrome sends whatever you're typing in the URL bar to Google for auto-completion. No need to catch Google in such situation, it's a feature of Chrome.

Edge does that bit too. Things typed in the URL bar are only a small subset of "pages visited", typically would not include session IDs etc, ...

Fair enough.