Ah, now _that_ makes sense why this go published then. Glad to see that common sense prevailed. The day may come when all the use cases for third-party cookies that aren't "track Joe Regular all around the web" can be satisfied with other widely available web features, but until we have all those features I think taking a page from Linus' book and ensuring "we don't break userland" is important (and something I've always loved about the web and I'm glad to see it continuing).

Which use cases? I use Brave, which has a built in toggle to disable 3rd party cookies, which I have set to default, and at least my experience of 'the entire internet' works fine.

Same here, but other browsers. I’ve had zero issues since well before the dot com crash.

embedded iframes that need to authenticate logins but don't trust the parent domain to store the login data there is a problem. You can somewhat work around it with the Storage Access API if that browser supports it (brave doesn't), but it does mean every embed requires a click by the user first before it works properly

Company whose market cap reflects pervasive surveillance non-requested announces that after serious consideration they won’t be removing technologies that enable pervasive non-requested surreptitious surveillance.”

It is going to be interesting to see if anti-trust enforcement's manages to separate Google from its financial and practical hold on web standards/browsers.

The opportunity to increase ethical norms of web browsing would be welcome to me.

Google wants to remove third party cookies but they can't as the government sees it as anticompetitive to their competition. They dont need third party cookies, everyone else does.

Precisely - removing third-party cookies doesn't stop Google from tracking anyone. It just prevents anyone who doesn't own a browser and have one of the three major email providers from tracking everyone.

Well, it doesn't prevent them, but it does make it a little bit harder ...

I personally think this decision hurts users more than anything else. We must let Google's competitors continue tracking us or else it won't be fair to them?

I don't even understand how being forced to divest Chrome will even help. Once another company owns Chrome and can remove third party cookies, Google gets the same benefit.

Google has remarkable financial influence across the four major commercial entity related browsers.

So limiting Google's control over browsers will create more competition. More competition on implementations. And also more competition in terms of features and user centric service.

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Question: Does Google really not gather information from anything but its search engine and first party apps? That would seem financially non-optimal for any advertising funded business.

I would think that sure, they log everything peopel use their search for.

But that they would also find a way to track post-search behavior as well. Google leaving money on the table seems ... unusual if there isn't some self-serving reason they would forgo that.

I am happy to become better informed.

There are only 3 effective browsers - Chrome, Safari and Firefox. I don't see how limiting Google's control will create competition. The barrier to more browsers is the massive investment needed to create one, not any action that Google is doing.

You are correct, although its more correct to say there a only 3 major browser engines, Blink (used by all chromium derivatives), WebKit (used by Safari and some minor browsers), Gecko (used by Firefox and its derivatives). Creating a browser engine is hard, so hard that even a multi billion dollar company like Microsoft gave up on doing it. And we may soon witness Gecko going away as a side effect of the Google antitrust lawsuit.

Google could have removed third-party ten years ago as Safari did…

Their long wait to do it is part of why we ended up in a regulatory mess

Safari's choice broke portions of the web for users of Safari and is part of the reason (I believe) that Chrome continued to take more market share since 2015.