Google is Kafka at scale. All of the other characters in The Trial besides Josef K have been optimized away and replaced with silicon.
The key insight that made it possible? That responding to front-paged Hacker News complaints doesn't have to scale. This allows them to shaft users in the vast majority of cases which never become high profile.
I personally aim for a startpage that loads instantly and since browsers no longer let you use a local html file as one, I've made an extension that registers a custom new tab page.
I don't use any frameworks since it's a pretty simple page, essentially just groups of links. If you need to, you can always use something like fetch to load external resources.
I believe Firefox and Chrome do not allow you to set a local html file as a new tab page. You can set it as a home page but then you need to manually navigate to it after creating a new tab.
I use Chrome. I build a static HTML file and have set a New Tab page policy[1] in my paid Google Workspace[2] admin console
to use this static HTML file via a file:// URL.
Now I had to try. I can make Firefox to open my Startpage whenever I open a new window, but not for each new tab. Chrome only as the first window after I start the browser. (MacOS)
> do you really think Google could get rid of third party cookies tomorrow and not get sued out existence?
Considering that ad blocking extensions still exist, yes. The browser (user agent) is supposed to act on the behalf of the user, not the remote server. It's not required to use cookies, display ads or run malicious code.
On what grounds would an ad company sue Google for a change in Chromium that enhances the user's privacy, while they can still display ads (just not track the users as much)?
Look, you can go into Chrome today and disable third party cookies via a setting. There may be a way to create an extension that does this change automatically.
Almost anyone other than Google can make this change without major legal worries, but because Google is in both the ads market and a browser vendor they can't rock the boat.
On what grounds? There are businesses whose only product is targeting information for ads. If they can't get the data they need then they can't produce a product and will go out of business.
Hopefully Mozilla and Apple can start pushing some of the tracking replacement technologies since they don't have their hands tied like Google.
I feel like substack has proved that high quality writing can be monetized really well by providing contracts in the range of $200k/year for some of its writers.
