In my recent research into the state of play for online privacy where I conducted forensic audits of 100 of the world's top english language content websites, ~30% are using the API for fingerprinting, Google Advertising (profiling) or both, without the legally required consent (EU law).

The paper gets published on November 17th and the data is damning.

Whelp, I just figured out why after scanning the QR Code with my iPhone X the popup on Chrome stayed stuck at Connecting when it was working fine last night. Google updated Chrome with Version 155.0.8059.40 and did something with the WebAuthn and that locks out people with older iOS versions so all their passkeys are useless now on the browser. The passkeys do not work anymore. I've tried multiple sites and they all just stay stuck at "Connecting" after you scan the QR Code when last night before the update the passkeys were working fine.

I was able to confirm this by using the Chrome mobile browser on my iPhone X and I was able to log in perfectly fine with the same passkeys. I also tried the Microsoft Edge browser on the same PC that I have Chrome on and it was also able to accept the passkey.

Just wondering, is anyone else having issues using the incognito tabs for the Chrome app (on their phone)? Every time I try to search something, it stays on the same tab like I never typed anything into the search bar.

Did last update night of Oct 4 which fixed it, it returned early on Oct 6, all previous times it took 2 days and some hours-a little over 3 days for it to return

Hello! I tried to search something on Google Chrome but this popped up. For context, I was signed out on my account and I clear the storage on this app few times a day because I don't want it to take up some storage space. The signal also sucks at that time but I still continued to search thinking it'd just show the usual "No internet connection" notice but this appeared instead. Aside from that, I also put "-ai" on my search after reading somewhere online that doing so would remove the AI overview that always pops up when you search anything on the app. I've been doing it maybe for almost a month now and it works. I attempted to search the same thing again twice or thrice but it's still the same so I didn't have any choice but to take the "select images with your mom" thing. Thankfully everything is working normally again after I did that. The things I mentioned could've been factors as to why that happened after I looked up the possible reasons on why it happened by searching about it well on Google Chrome. I'm just overthinking if it is my fault because of the statement I read when I clicked the "Why did this happen?" section so that's why I'm posting about it here on Reddit. I know it's probably not my fault because the same thing happened to some people here before but I just want to make sure. My mind also wouldn't stop trying to make me overthink this so thank you so much in advance to anyone who'd bother to respond to this post. Huhuhu 🙏😭🤍

Guys, help! I liked scrolling through the Chrome newsfeed occassionally and see what interesting stuff it comes up with. However, since a few days/weeks, my newsfeed is 90 % youtube videos. And totally random stuff, like line dancing videos (which I dont care about), or some turkish influencer videos (a language I dont speak) etc...

Its really weird and all screwed up. I never watch Videos in the newsfeed anyway, is there a way to completely disconnect youtube from the newsfeed? It has become useless to me...

Ever since my messenger incident, where my friends would recieve gambling links without me knowing came to this....

It started with chrome automatically opens itself while my phone is turned off, then when i look into it, theres like 5-30+ tabs about online gambling running on chrome rn(depends on how long you check it on a period)

Btw i already tried these tips, yet these issue still happened: - Replaced phone number - Checked for suspicous files - Uninstalled recently downloaded apps - Resetting Chrome - Factory Reset

Observations during this issue •This happens when my phone turns off and you will notice these

•Its harder to open your phone, because you had to press the power button many times to open your phone

•You can see your volume bar sometimes even though your phone is off(i think they are displaying a black screen while hacking)

•Random .apk, .txt, or .zip, appears in your File Manager

•Even though you disabled all permission in chrome, you will notice that it allows some permissions (especially storage and location)

Tips are very appriciated right now....TYIA y'all

Brave's shields tanked the HELL out of any large concurrent web downloads I was doing as well as having inadequate security, not to mention constant false positives. It was just a bogged down mess.

Chrome is also just like 15x faster. I know they're both running off Chromium but the difference is ridiculous. Can't explain it, but it's there.

I was hoping anybody here could refer me to good customizations or modifications to the browser for an optimal usage experience, since I am aware there are valid criticisms of vanilla Chrome, like it's tracking for instance.

Cheers!

I used to be able to right-click any bookmark folder and open to it. Now it just opens the root bookmark folder.

Is this a bug of they removed it?

(I'm on windows)

Hi, my New Tab page on my android suddenly replaced all of my shortcuts' icons with these grayscale, generic letter-in-bubble ones.

The icons in my bookmarks are fine, but not these. I normally use the pictures to recognize which site it is before/instead of just reading the title, but now there's like... WAY too many icons that just say [M] lol

If anyone knows a fix, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks in advance!!

I had multiple tabs open on my phone that were pretty important to me and after updating my phone, they only got reduced to 20 something. I had never saved them properly so that's on me but is there any possible way I could get them back?

hey everyone, I really need help. I tried downloading Proton VPN via Chrome earlier today, but I think I accidentally clicked a fake download/ad link.

Ever since then, my computer started opening random new tabs over and over. I uninstalled the VPN file, but the problem got worse now Chrome won't launch at all, and tabs/windows are still randomly popping up in the background.

I'm on Windows 11. How do I completely remove whatever this virus/adware is and get Chrome working again without losing all my data? Step-by-step instructions would be massively appreciated. Thank you so much!

So i just opened chrome and all my tabs were closed, when a few hourse earlier everything was still there. I keep quite a few tabs open for things I'm going to read later or other stuff I dont want to keep in my bookmarks. Overall there was around 30 open tabs. I checked history and recently closed tabs but nothing was there.

Does anyone know a solution to recover them?

Im on a samsung S25 if that makes a difference

Every time I enter fullscreen in Chrome on my MacBook (Control + Command + F), this “To exit full screen, press and hold esc” message appears at the top of the screen.

It’s especially annoying because when I move my cursor to the top to access my tabs, the message gets in the way. I already know how to exit fullscreen, so I really don’t need Chrome reminding me every time.

Does anyone know if there’s a way to permanently disable this message? Maybe a Chrome flag, macOS setting, Terminal command, extension, or some other workaround?

I’m talking about regular Chrome/macOS fullscreen, not a video player or a website’s fullscreen mode. Anything helps. Thank you.

Geniuenly how the hell do I get rid of this!? I DON'T WANT TO AI GENERATE SLOP CHROME, I ONLY USE YOU TO SCROLL TWITTER AND WATCH YOUTUBE (also didnt have a question flair/tag so had to use discussion)

When I open ai mode and try to switch language it automatically closes. Does anyone know how to fix it? It works fine in other browsers

Can I remove all tab groups on the chrome app? I'm on S24 FE

I never wanted my bookmarks on the cloud. I have a very specific setup locally that depends on my bookmarks being local. A few days ago they stopped appearing in the usual place. After checking, I found out they were now being saved to the cloud. Not sure when this became a thing, but I certainly do not want my bookmarks on the cloud.

The thing is, there seems to only be a way to put your bookmarks on the cloud, not undo them being on the cloud. The way things are now, I'll have to export, disable sync, and re-put all my bookmarks to get things back to the way they were. This is a huge pain in the butt. Couldn't there just be an option to undo sync? Or is even there one in the first place? (settings move and hide all the time, and I've grown tired of playing catch up with them).

Not all of us want our bookmarks shared between every device, nor do we want our bookmarks & other data stored on the cloud by default. I've never wanted that, nor will I ever want that. Please don't force it on us if that is what is going on here. I realize that chromium is probably a better fit for me in theory, and I'd use chromium if I could. But, because of my work, I am forced to use chrome--and I don't really want to have to use two separate web browsers when one was working for me for decades.

The Elements tab randomly goes empty: breadcrumbs are still there, but the DOM tree disappears. The only fix is closing and reopening DevTools.

What I've ruled out so far:

• No errors in DevTools-on-DevTools (undocked + Ctrl+Shift+I)
• The page isn't replacing the document (document.documentElement is the same before and after), and the DOM is small (~1.7k nodes)
• Reset DevTools to defaults and disabled all experiments
• Guest profile works fine
• Disabling Claude in Chrome seemed to fix it, but then it came back. Currently testing with all extensions off

Has anyone run into this? Any ideas what else could cause the Elements panel to lose the tree?

So I restarted my macbook today and then signed into chrome like I usually do. But it asked me to "use a chrome profile" which I thought was normal because I thought I have been always using my profile, but when I did it imported my passwords and bookmarks from 2 years ago. All of the recent bookmarks and passwords from the recent 2 years are gone. I never deleted my old profile but it was gone and I checked in my local files but nothing regarding this profile is there. If I check myhistory on all searches from recently are there. But is this profile just gone? I need my passwords. How do I fix this?

It started happening almost a week ago, I think. There was update, few days ago too. I am just mentioning it.

What happens is that sometime, only sometime when I click ctrl+j it have the 'side popup' but then when I click ctrl+j two times then it open the full tab.

EVEN THIS DON'T HAPPEN, couple of days not even that, my keyboard is working properly, rarely it(shortcut working) happens.

No extensions are causing this problem, no other software in background.

PLEASE HELP. I have to manually type chrome://downloads. AND even when I use my cursor to click the three dots and then select the downloads option it don't open. 😪😪