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Tom Dale wrote up the #evergreen browser change in 2013. What an incredible improvement that has been for the world!!! tomdale.net/2013/05/ever...

Yes! How Google taking absolute end to end ownership of update results was an incredible bar to raise. No more blaming users they hit the update button when something breaks, or didn't when they were hacked. You have to own the entire lifecycle including breaking changes. bsky.app/profile/h.ol...

Dumb simple is awesome for most people. Especially large orgs. You're only as strong as your least tech savvy coworker, after all.

unlesssss...

I found out I could of course install programs *in* my Start Menu folder. Which ended up being genuinely useful to get WinRAR installed for some school stuff, but also allowed me to install a clock program because they had disabled the taskbar clock. ☹️

Then NT-based Windows came along, and people wanted to install that same software on systems that had user-level security. OOPS, now we need admin to write those DLLs and such. Took a LONG time for developers to just stop assuming they'd have admin access to install. It's a good trend.

Years ago I literally remember installing it on random university computers and showing others they could do it too, I think it might have triggered a privilege escalation prompt but I remember finding you could just go "nah" and it'd work fine anyway.

Ugh, in the XP days, I was running some version of NT (Win 2000?) that wasn't giving admin private by default. The admin promps made me aware of how much apps were using admin. Applications that were Windows certified rarely did that.

I remember this in a hospital as a desktop support! We were supposed to escalate _any_ instances of Chrome being found an a computer because it wasn't approved software. In reality, the machines were so locked down they assumed it was allowed! What's worse, sometimes it *fixed* sites for them!

You there, making me nostalgic for autorun.inf, the U3 cruzer/switchblade and portable apps, like ff portable, how dare you!

and the security benefits of tab and flash player sandboxing on top of that. that was also unmatched at the time.

Of course! More lore: Auto update is *hard*. If you get it wrong you either strand users on old versions or turn it into a DDOS against your update servers.

goddamn that is one of the best domains I've seen around here

"Omaha" is a pretty spicy codename

So much this. Only now, with Intune-deployed UWP apps, can other apps be similarly ‘fire and forget’. Chrome stands alone.

It also crushed my processor so I uninstalled it.

PortableApps did user-level install a couple of years before Chrome. (Not the same way Chrome did but effectively the same result.)

When I install a machine for non-tech users, I set the noexec mount flag on their home directory. Because of that « feature », I have steam in a dedicated isolated user.

Have you read article where it mentioned that Chelsea Manning prefers Apple products over Google when it comes to security?

It's really looking at "We've always done it this way" and turning it on its head.

I've definitely had experiences like that with various autoupdaters in edge cases yeah

I just checked if a page I accessed was access to https today, on mobile. And then I remembered that that’s the default, otherwise would be marked in secure with warning It was literally this one www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/pap...

The most annoying, and viral, feature of Chrome.

and now we can’t use it to block ads cool

Easiest is probably to make an account and let things sync over, but manual profile copy also works: support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bac...

Oh interesting good find. I haven’t paid much attention to it since we yanked it off all our machines, good freaking riddance.