Starting January 4 Google will block sign-ins from embedded browser frameworks

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/031604.html

by dredmorbius • 6 years ago

326 182 6 years ago

lists.webkit.org

rootsudo• 6 years ago

This already is blocked via "Safety" for lots of older printers and SMTP relays.

chmod7752• 6 years ago

So how will thunderbird (and other software) sign into gmail accounts?

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

Thunderbird can use "app passwords" and/or oauth2, I believe. It's not trying to maintain a browser session login cookie.

Macha• 6 years ago

So app passwords are something Google are slowly boiling the frog on to get rid of. As of the last year or two, Thunderbird is using OAuth2.

_The way it does OAuth_, is by opening a google sign in in an embedded browser, and then catching the API key in the redirect by intercepting the navigation in the embedded browser.

It's not a browser session cookie, but it does require the user to log in. To replace this and use the desktop browser, thunderbird would have to spin up a web server, and I'm not sure what restrictions Google have about TLS on redirect targets, which may be problematic to spin up a trusted TLS server on arbitrary end user devices.

They could of course set up a centralised service to echo the token back to end users, but this seems likely to be even higher risk of the service stealing your oauth tokens and less trusted by those types of users still using a desktop email client.

izacus7• 6 years ago

Same way it does right now (and many apps did it for years): it'll open your default browser (Chrome, Firefox, whatever) and wait for it to return the oauth token to it.

chmod7752• 6 years ago

It opens a google sign-in window within thunderbird for me. Interesting.

FemmeAndroid• 6 years ago

How does this work? Like, in practice I understand how you open the default web browser and log in, and get an oauth token. But how does the default browser hand it back to thunderbird or whatever application made the request? Is there a standard way for a browser to return a value to an application that called it?

yyyk• 6 years ago

Standard POP3/IMAP logins should still work, I believe?

anoncake3• 6 years ago

You are not supposed to use Thunderbird. You are supposed to use the web interface so Google can control your experience and show you ads.

Javimoya• 6 years ago

Does this impact hybrid mobile frameworks like Ionic?

izacus7• 6 years ago

Nop, not really, they'll still be able to get the token back via custom URL like normal apps.

vaccinator3• 6 years ago

Wow, now is the time to switch to something else?

esteth2• 6 years ago

Why would it be time to switch to another browser because Google is disallowing apps from embedding Google oAuth pages in their own WebView? This seems like a security win for users - you'll no longer have to trust that the app isn't phishing your credentials.

vaccinator3• 6 years ago

Time to switch away from Google services... Of course dont go back to Google Chrome...

andybak• 6 years ago

This is about apps using an embedded webview to present a password page instead of using the system browser. It was basically training people to enter their credentials into 3rd party apps which is a terrible idea.

vaccinator3• 6 years ago

I get that but I use apps that I like to give access to my Google account to... Looks like its going to be an issue now.

dn3500• 6 years ago

Does this mean Google is explicitly repudiating web standards and refusing to interoperate with any browsers except the ones they approve? Or is there more to it than that?

izacus7• 6 years ago

No, this means that Google demands that apps use the default browser you've set for login instead of the builtin WebKit of the device.

Wowfunhappy15• 6 years ago

And what if your default web browser is Epiphany?

paxys3• 6 years ago

Quite the opposite actually. OAuth is designed to broker token exchange between two services in a standards-compliant web browser. Apps have increasingly been getting around it by embedding browser shells in their own interface, making the process less transparent for the end user. This opens users to all kinds of phishing attacks (e.g. an app might show you a Google sign-in page which is actually hosted on their own server, or steal your credentials even if you are actually on google.com, or automatically click "approve" without any user feedback etc.)

Enforcing that OAuth is handled in a browser controlled directly by the OS is the right thing to do.

mehrdadn2• 6 years ago

an app might show you a Google sign-in page which is actually hosted on their own server, or steal your credentials even if you are actually on google.com

I'm confused, how does "this browser is not supported" translate into "this request is coming from a third party server"? Can't a third party just use whatever browser is supported to send the request?

dag11• 6 years ago

Will this block sign-in on Tesla's browser and Youtube app?

arthurcolle• 6 years ago

Sounds like it, but I'm sure their corp dev/partnership teams will make a special exception for S&P 500's newest member!

bootloop• 6 years ago

They could just redirect the authorization to the users phone.

izacus7• 6 years ago

No.

dawnerd• 6 years ago

That's been broken for a long time anyways. Workaround is to just go to any site that uses google login, then magically you're logged into youtube.

1f60c• 6 years ago

Google are playing with anti-trust fire here.

fungi• 6 years ago

Ya, leverage monopoly to push their own "supported" browser.

esteth2• 6 years ago

This just seems like fixing a security bug? They're saying that they'll no longer allow apps to embed the oAuth login inside their own embedded WebView, right? Seems like this is in the interest of protecting users from malicious apps that pretend to show Google's oAuth screen but actually show a phishing site.

Wowfunhappy15• 6 years ago

The issue is that one person's WebView is another person's web browser. You can't really block WebViews unless you decide anything other than a whitelisted browser must be a WebView.

hakfoo• 6 years ago

As a security measure, the cows are out of the barn already.

Workflows already exist where an app shows an embedded login page. Users have already become accustomed to it. A malicious developer trying to phish in that flow will just substitute a self-hosted or local simulation of the Google login form. Worst case, you pretend there was an error and punt the user to "backup login" in a real browser to now blow your cover. This won't prevent such scams.

If they had made the decision several years ago, they might have been able to say "We've never and never will supported this type of login flow; if you see it, it's a scam" and managed expectations on a going forward basis. But now you're stripping functionality without a clear user-facing notification that embedded logins are suspicious. Is there even a reasonable way to convey that info to most potentially impacted users today?

Of course, that doesn't solve the problem of dividing the world between "real" and "embedded" browsers, but that's another story. Again, if this wasn't a regression, it would be more forgivable. I can accept that the full Google experience won't work on other unsupported environments (say, the web browser packed in with OS/2), but it's not like those worked yesterday but not today as a policy choice.

ashneo765• 6 years ago

This in NOT just a bug. This is killing off the web masquerading as that. Google is evil. I can't say this more

anoncake3• 6 years ago

"Users can use browsers of their choice" and "Logging in does not throw you out of the app and open a browser" are not security bugs.

dheera• 6 years ago

No, they are just tightening controls of their own OAuth to avoid peoples' Gmail accounts being phished by scummy apps.

If the app uses a webview to connect to its own brand of oauth, that isn't affected.

1_player2• 6 years ago

If only they'd actually get burned, this time.

tsm2• 6 years ago

Even if WebKit is not blocked, we can be confident January 4 will be a sad day for browser diversity

This is true, I hate that this is true, and I hate that there's very little to be done about it.

I use Firefox for ideological reasons, and last week got off my ass and ensured all my documents (from Dropbox), music (from Google Music / now the inferior YT Music) and photos (from Google Photos) were stored in a way I could control. My plan going forward is to use an old laptop running Syncthing as my primary source of truth for files. Email is next (but more complicated since I don't want to self-host it).

It helps me personally to take Stallmanesque approaches to managing my digital life. And if Google continues to get more and more restrictive I have the technical acumen to find or make alternatives—or figure out how to do without. But I'm worried about the growing number of non-technical users who are increasingly dependent on technology and—startlingly—increasingly less technical. People who only use Google Docs on their phone and a laptop have no reason to understand that documents correspond to files on disk that can be edited by programs running locally.

It more and more seems like the future is tech oligopoly with more and more subscription fees. What else could happen once a generation has been trained to only use Approved Tools running on Approved Servers?

izacus7• 6 years ago

This literaly demands that Android apps use your Firefox browser for login instead of a builtin WebView. This prevents the apps from stealing your login credentials with phished data.

Seriously, what are you ranting about here? What does what you write have anything to do with a fundamental security requirement?

tsm2• 6 years ago

I think I'm a little fired up about the Play Music -> YT Music migration, recent Google Photo storage restrictions, etc. What I see in TFA is another case of Google limiting choice in a user-hostile way. I happen to use Firefox and will be unaffected by the above, but Firefox is the only non-Webkit-based browser of any consequence. I'm incensed on behalf of people who use Epiphany or Brave or Konqueror or anything like that.

malinens• 6 years ago

many apps use webview for login as they have single sign-on. they dont want to re-implement logic so it works native or some other hacky things

_jal• 6 years ago

I don't consider resistance to a single firm having near-complete visibility into my life 'ideological'.

I call it prudent.

But I agree, this will make me correct my last bits of Google-use.

izacus7• 6 years ago

I don't know why this is here, because this requirement has been in place for years - e.g. I've hit it at least two years ago where Google OAuth didn't allow builtin old WebKit login anymore.

Instead, you need to call users' default browser (Firefox, Chrome, whatever they have) and it'll return back with the token. Just like OAuth on desktop.

It's much, much safer, because the app can't see or hijack the login process - it doesn't get access to the login form and can't phish you with it.

The utter ignorance in comments here is really depressing, what happened with HN?

jchw• 6 years ago

For context, the author of this mailing list posting is concerned because Epiphany (the default browser in GNOME) uses GtkWebkit, an embedded Webkit browser engine. Presumably, it would be treated like any other unsupported browser.

(Edit: Additional context: in follow-up replies, they seem to have tested it by sending a header to try the changes early, and as of now it doesn’t appear to break things. I have not read the entire thread; folks should check the replies though.)

sheerun• 6 years ago

I guess the easiest solution is to use Firefox User Agent. It's obsolete header after all, isn't it?

kodablah3• 6 years ago

My default browser is one I built, and it hasn't worked with Google auth since they disallowed auth from CEF. Not warned, put captchas in front of, etc but disallowed. Yes the ignorance in HN comments can seem depressing, but I decided to respond to this one anyways.

marakv2• 6 years ago

Yours is very edge case though, and the grandparent is rightly pointing out that the headline is a little misleading and comments are generally negative for a positive aspect.

edoceo• 6 years ago

I'm interested in this browser code you speak of...as a fledgling browser builder.

Wowfunhappy15• 6 years ago

The writer of this post is the developer of a Webkit-based browser for Linux. Not an email or chat client with an embedded log-in screen—a real, true browser that just so happens to not be named Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. It is the default browser in many Linux distributions.

light_hue_1• 6 years ago

Yes. And we are all well past the point now where antitrust legislation should be invoked to break Google up. This is another attempt to use one piece of Google to promote another piece of Google.

gruez2• 6 years ago

It's much, much safer, because the app can't see or hijack the login process - it doesn't get access to the login form and can't phish you with it.

Not really. On non-sandboxed platforms (eg. windows or mac) it does nothing because the program already has full access to the operating system. It could very keylog the password as it's being entered into the "real" browser. Regardless of whether it's sandboxed, it could also launch a phoney "real" browser (ie. custom build of firefox/chrome that has keylogging logic built into the browser itself), and keylog using that. I'm not sure how that can be detected.

soraminazuki• 6 years ago

This entire post is about legitimate browsers being banned from Google logins. It's really depressing to see quite a few people sidestepping this point entirely and even accusing people of ignorance.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 6 years ago

"It's much, much safer, because the app can't see orhjack the process - it doesn't get access to the login form and can't phish you with it."

What if you are the author of the "app" and its sole user?

yipbub• 6 years ago

whatever they have

That's what is being threatened, other browsers. Google is throwing its weight around to try and enforce browser standards that are bad for a lot of people. Just like with amp.

It's much, much safer, because the app can't see or hijack the login process - it doesn't get access to the login form and can't phish you with it.

Apps that try this shouldn't be running on your computer. This is not much safer, it's negligibly safer with a significant cost.

The utter ignorance in comments here is really depressing, what happened with HN?

The irony.

ashtonkem• 6 years ago

That's what is being threatened, other browsers.

Is it? Oauth regularly opens Safari on mobile and Firefox on OS X for me; it's not clear that this move itself is forcing users to chrome per se.

If they're blocking non-popular browsers, that's obviously a problem. But if they'll let users open Firefox or Safari, then it seems fairly obvious to me that this is a mistake more than a sinister plan to drive Chrome adoption forward. After all, if they were trying to drive Chrome forward why would they push me more towards Safari?

kodablah3• 6 years ago

They have already done this with Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) which I use in my everyday browser. Since it can't do logins, even things like Google Groups fails auth and I'm forced to use Chrome instead of Chromium.

It is very annoying, Google announced it well ahead of time, but in general just doesn't care. They suggest the browser integrate with external auth options as if I want to customize my browser for Google auth.

They're actively fighting certain user agents with secret heuristics after having people create/need Google accounts for lots of things. Bastards.

Google234• 6 years ago

Just use a normal browser then. You aren’t blocked from the web.

Wowfunhappy15• 6 years ago

But Chromium is a normal browser!

bzb6• 6 years ago

As easy as impersonating Chrome—if they can detect you, you’re not doing it well enough.

ocdtrekkie• 6 years ago

This doesn't really surprise me?

I've found apps launching login screens in their own embedded browser windows difficult to verify aren't phishing, since they usually don't even show a URL bar, and obviously, could fake it.

I can't say I disagree with the expectation you launch a real browser for OAuth purposes, though it's key they support all real general purpose web browsers.

josephcsible• 6 years ago

They don't even need to fake the URL bar. A malicious app can steal your password from the real login page if it's in its embedded browser.

thu21115• 6 years ago

There's another scenario that matters here: an ordinary phishing website. Yes, about 15-20% of users never look at the URL bar and will type their password into any site that looks like the login screen regardless of how obviously bogus the URL is.

However, the server-side code for the phish now has a problem. The user may be protected by two-factor authentication. To handle that case, the PHP script or whatever needs to step through the login process in the same way a browser would. Google have tech that can make it very, very hard for this PHP script to do that (it's called BotGuard). So the next move is that the phishing site needs to use an embedded browser to try and evade BotGuard's detections. Then it can obtain the necessary codes to trigger the 2-step verification challenge and intercept the number sent to the user's phone, and finally complete the login to obtain session cookies before storing them and redirecting the user to the real google website (so they don't suspect anything).

There are ways BotGuard can detect embedded browsers apparently, as they specifically say they will ban CEF and embedded internet explorer. But if you do that then people who use the embedding features to make their own browsers are out of luck. It's really tricky because it's hard to see how you can get critical mass for a new browser if you're limited to OAuth (which is meant for APIs). You'd have to get in touch with Google somehow and ask them to whitelist your browser. If they're sharp and fast about that even for new or hobby browsers then maybe this won't be so bad. If they get jammed up in product management bureaucracy and don't whitelist browsers fast enough, it could turn into an anti-trust issue for them.

jbay808• 6 years ago

Yeah, this is ironically why I can't use in-app payments on Android; it prompts a Google Play login overlay and there's no way to verify that I'm looking at a legitimate request from the Play store and not a counterfeit from the app itself.

floatingatoll• 6 years ago

I thought the entire phone would already logged in, such that no overlay is required. You describe it as being different. Do I misunderstand how Android account handling works?

szhu• 6 years ago

The browser must not provide automation features. This includes scripts that automate keystrokes or clicks, especially to perform automatic sign-ins.

Can't Chrome do this via Chrome extensions?

kevingadd2• 6 years ago

Yes, but only on PC. If Chrome was built from scratch in 2020 it wouldn't have extensions, just like on Android

You can also do full automation with Chrome's remote debugging API without installing anything (it's just websockets)

macksd2• 6 years ago

I think this is good. My big concern with OpenID was that, beyond it's technical security, it was training users to enter very valuable credentials (like their Google account that they probably use for bank emails, etc.) all over the place for other services (like some random app that lets you use your Google account), where they don't really know how to confirm that the credentials are going straight to Google. Doing this in their legit browser makes this a bit better.

ashneo765• 6 years ago

No. This is terrible for the web. This closes of the the web to just their "legit" browser, like an app mandated by them. The very thing that made Google, Google is killing that.

macksd2• 6 years ago

Ok - so in an embedded browser how do I know with high confidence my credentials are being sent encrypted to the right authenticator? If that functionality isn't part of the web, then I don't subscribe to it.

BlueTemplar3• 6 years ago

Can't users pick another OpenID provider?

madrox2• 6 years ago

FWIW, Google announced they'd be doing this April of last year. Their reasons for it are security based, and make sense to me: https://security.googleblog.com/2019/04/better-protection-ag...

It seemed like they were planning to enforce it a long time ago. Perhaps they let the deadline slip to give developers more chance to adapt.

purpleidea• 6 years ago

Their reasons for it are security based, and make sense to me

Preventing legitimate users that use different browsers is not good behaviour. One company shouldn't be able to control the web this way.

If they wanted to add a warning about a particular security issue in a browser, OK, but this blocks them outright.

You'll also know that you have fight captchas in Firefox, but rarely in Chrome. It's not right!

madrox2• 6 years ago

If you read the article, you'd know they're blocking all embedded browser frameworks, including CEF. Embedded chrome has the same security risks. This isn't a partisan policy, nor is punting responsibility to the end user to make decisions always better. Even as an educated engineer, you have no way of evaluating whether that embedded browser is doing something nefarious with your login data or not unless it's open source, which few mobile apps are. Non-actionable warnings are meaningless.

kbenson9• 6 years ago

Preventing legitimate users that use different browsers is not good behaviour. One company shouldn't be able to control the web this way.

They're talking about their own services that they require accounts for here, not "the web", or even general search, AFAICT. You can still use google, you just can't log in using an app they aren't sure is trusted, for user security. Google goes a great many problematic things these days, but I'm not sure this is one of them.

You could keep a trusted browser around and use it just for authenticating and getting a token. That's all they care about here, that they have a certain base level of assurance that you aren't being directed through an application that can steal credentials.

StillBored• 6 years ago

I was using the googlevoice python plugin a couple years ago. At some point they decided they definitely didn't want anyone using googlevoice from an automated system and its been broken for a year+ now. I spent a couple hours with various headless browsers/etc and developer tools trying to see if I could get anything to login. I didn't try super hard, but i'm still not 100% sure what they were doing to detect actual user interaction.

It was easier to just pay a couple dollars a year to a different service that prioritizes having a working API.

bb010g• 6 years ago

What Voice alternative do you use now?

tosh• 6 years ago

naive question: how is this implemented/enforced?

thu21115• 6 years ago

They have a system for generating JavaScript programs that detect what browser you're using and whether it's embedded.

paxys3• 6 years ago

They have been doing this for a long time already. It's a good thing that random apps cannot hijack your Google account sign-in flow.

tinus_hn• 6 years ago

Is it really that difficult to just include a complete copy of Firefox and robotically control that?

kevingadd2• 6 years ago

It's large and complicated, but there are definitely wrapper APIs for that sort of thing at this point, yeah.

megous• 6 years ago

So the story is that Google built up their Chrome browser on top of work done by KHTML/WebKit projects, and now, they'll potentially try to block users that are still using Konqueror from using Google services that require login?

Symbiote• 6 years ago

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

It's just like Microsoft in the 1990s.

Any developer who values open computing (open source software or hardware, general purpose computers, running whatever programs you want, working around DRM, owning your own data) should be avoiding systems, tools, services and devices designed by companies like Google, and recommending the same to friends and family. Google does not have our interests at heart.

kbenson9• 6 years ago

Yes, they'll require this for authentication, not use. There are already ways to log into Google accounts using a trusted platform like a browser when the environment can't be confirmed. Google Cloud Shell has a mechanism like this, where it will generate a URL that you paste into a browser, and it will prompt for login if you aren't, then provide a token you can paste back into the shell utility, and then it's authenticated to perform actions on Google Compute Engine as you through shell commands.

This is essentially what the embedded browser context is doing in an automated way. My guess is there's a way to manually do this already, or there will be soon.

The main thing they are trying to do here is make sure the login process is secure as they can make it. I think there's a non-negligible increase in security by requiring somewhat trusted applications to make the request.

Wowfunhappy15• 6 years ago

So in order to log in to Google Services in a browser that isn't Google Chrome, I have to install Google Chrome?

est312• 6 years ago

they'll require this for authentication, not use.

Except for workarounds, I can't watch age restricted youtube videos without an account. And even for normal content, youtube wants me to log in very often. I have to decline all the time. I fear that youtube will be authwalled eventually like instagram and similar services.

mehrdadn2• 6 years ago

Should the title be changed from "embedded browser frameworks" to "unsupported browsers"? The latter seems far more consequential than the former.

Edit: I wonder if this is intended to be an attack on browsers like Ungoogled Chromium that Google doesn't like? (https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

xrisk• 6 years ago

Does this block stuff like qutebrowser?

octoberfranklin• 6 years ago

Yes.

ashneo765• 6 years ago

I live qutebrowser and this is frustrating.

The-Compiler2• 6 years ago

FWIW Google already did this back in 2019, without any announcement - at that point, I added a workaround, which I hope will continue to work: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/5182

etaioinshrdlu• 6 years ago

The only correct response by other web browsers is to spoof other browsers as hard as necessary to work around this bad behavior.

smaddock3• 6 years ago

With measures like this, Google is actively preventing new, independent browsers from ever scaling on their own.

Want to sign in to Google? Use one of the selected browsers with a significant, existing market share.

But first though, are you actually human? Let's see if your browser is compatible with our reCAPTCHA service. [0]

Oh, you wanted to watch something on Netflix? I hope your browser is approved by Google for DRM playback. [1]

[0] https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/1320410639244746753

[1] https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-br...

varenc2• 6 years ago

The intention here is that users don’t enter their password into an embedded web view where the host application can inject JS or otherwise sniff the password/session cookie. (or just phish them). That’s a good thing. A new standalone browser should be a separate case. Hopefully.

In an ideal world the Android/iOS framework would enforce that an insecure embedded webview has a distinguishing User-Agent or some other tell that Google can check. A standalone browser wouldn’t have that and in theory wouldn’t be caught up by Google’s enforcement of this. That’s how it should work, but it unclear to me if that’ll actually happen.

coolreader18• 6 years ago

A new standalone browser should be a separate case.

Right, but what are the chances google will allow people to sign up with their own user agent with their new browser engine? Or even if that was a feasible thing for them to do, why should _they_ be able to gatekeep that? The security argument is valid, but there should be some web standard or something to address that, not google deciding who gets to read their email depending on the browser they use.

smaddock3• 6 years ago

The issue also affects Electron-based browsers, something I wouldn't consider "embedded". These are a few browsers affected off the top of my head:

- Beaker https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/1749

- Min https://github.com/minbrowser/min/issues/868

- Agregore https://github.com/AgregoreWeb/agregore-browser/issues/65

From what I can tell, it's really any browser not well known by Google.

jsiepkes• 6 years ago

ChromeOS also lets you sign-in into Google via an embedded browser view when you login to the device.

Though I guess Google will probably exempt themselves from this policy...

l3s2d2• 6 years ago

In an ideal world we would have settled on an authentication protocol which everyone could support. Something like "oidc://idp-url" which the OS could have a built-in handler for.

ashneo765• 6 years ago

This is not a security feature. This is smoke and mirrors. If it was really about securing the web, Google would made IETF and W3C recommendations, instead of trying to kill competition. This is strictly market grabbing and anti competitive

cma• 6 years ago

"The intention"

Stated intention. Unless you can read minds.

ashneo765• 6 years ago

Knowing Google, security is just smoke and mirrors for excluding any competition in the browser and app space.

anonymfus• 6 years ago

The browser must not provide automation features. This includes scripts that automate keystrokes or clicks, especially to perform automatic sign-ins.

Don't all major browsers have such automation features? Sounds like everything is illegal, including password managers and accessibility tools.

anoncake3• 6 years ago

Password managers aren't needed if you login to everything using Google, as you are supposed to.

CameronNemo• 6 years ago

This automation is an important part of password manager hygiene. Password managers only autofill credentials on the correct domain to prevent phishing.

If they are really blocking password manager extensions, then they can expect far less google logins from me.

varenc2• 6 years ago

From Google:

“The browser must identify itself clearly in the User-Agent. The browser must not try to impersonate another browser like Chrome or Firefox.”

Which is a bit funny considering that Chrome impersonates Mozilla, Safari, and Gecko! (As do all browsers)

Chrome’s User-Agent for reference:

“Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 11_0_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.66 Safari/537.36”

Spoofing other browsers is a long standing tradition. Funny to see Google trying to forbid it. Here’s a great history on User-Agents: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

brendoelfrendo• 6 years ago

Furthermore, wasn't Google talking about phasing out and replacing user-agent strings? User-agent leaks data and is somewhat fingerprintable, so the idea was to further genericise Chrome UA strings and adopt a new standard for sharing data about the client.

Found an article: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-to-phase-out-user-agent...

Fnoord• 6 years ago

Using privacy.resistFingerprinting in Firefox on a Mac makes it appear like an other browser version of Firefox, on another OS (Windows).

Aissen• 6 years ago

And you forgot Konqueror with the KHTML engine.

graderjs• 6 years ago

I think this will cause chrome headless to stop being able to login to Google accounts.

But since Firefox is also now supporting chrome remote debugging protocol, it might be possible to swap chrome headless for Firefox, if your use case involves that. For example, automation, testing or remote browsers.

egberts1• 6 years ago

That’s why I turn off background running process off in various web browsers.

Also put tab to sleep once it’s out of focus.

justinclift• 6 years ago

Weirdly, we got the same notice a few days ago, but it said it meant we'd no longer be able to authenticate people using our external auth provider (auth0.com).

Which sounds like it really leaves our Google users up shit creek without a paddle. :(

Starting January 4 Google will block sign-ins from embedded browser frameworks

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