It is an abuse of Chrome's position in the marketplace. Google is using their powerful position to give themselves tracking capabilities that other online players can't access. It is a major competitive advantage for Google.
can't alternate browser makers who base on chromium simply disable that portion? like, I expect identifying users was a key business concern in moving Edge to Chromium. Is there something (other than work) preventing them from making it so it'll report back to microsoft-owned domains instead?
Is it because Google's webapps will have their own a/b tests which use experimental features only available in Chrome perhaps?
I mean personally I think they should do client-side feature detection and be back to being standards compliant and not creepy. The only reason why I'd consider such a flag is because they optimize the payload server-side to return a certain a/b test, but even with that they could do the default version first, do feature detection, and then set a session cookie for that domain only that loads the a/b test.
My other Thought was that they test a feature that is implemented across Google's properties, e.g. something having to do with their account management.
So they build a personal back door to a feature that they've chosen to remove for everyone else? Because of it's potential for abuse, yet the very same company is somehow abusing it in a way more sinister way. Antitrust can't come soon enough.
Chrome will only block cross-site cookies that don't use HTTPS and the SameSite=Lax flag. It's easy for trackers to user HTTPS and SameSite=Lax. This Chrome change is mostly intended to protect against Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks, not to block trackers.
