“Topics API or third-party cookies” kinda goes beyond being a false dichotomy to being a blatant lie. The conflict of interest demonstrates how Google is unfit as the custodian of a leading browser. This is a single-vendor thing to bolster their own interests and which they can only do because they’re a leading advertising company, and which no one else supports in any way.
Firefox and Safari have already stopped supporting third-party cookies, and nothing bad happened.
(There are a few cases here and there of legitimate systems breaking due to relying on third-party cookies for things like login, and these have broken in Firefox and Safari, but they’ll break in Chromium too when it kills off third-party cookies, and the Topics API is completely irrelevant to these cases, being exclusively about advertising interests, so these cases aren’t part of the “third-party cookies or Topics API” deceit.)
Note also how Apple and Mozilla have both taken negative positions on the Topics API: it’s extremely unlikely either’s browser engine will ever support it, making the falseness of the dichotomy even clearer.
Useful further reading, identifying various concrete problems with the Topics API (if “but why should it even exist at all?” wasn’t enough):
(This is also relevant in any antitrust considerations for Google, as noted in the jsnell subthread here—almost all of that stuff was in early 2021, when Google was somewhere in the middle of the pack in their proposals and suggested timeline; whereas if they released it now, they’d be aligning with everyone else. Google have made some noise about delays being for the sake of advertisers at least in part, but I believe that for all the other browsers, their delays have been largely or entirely about avoiding or minimising breaking websites that depended on third-party cookies for functionality, mostly legitimately.)
On reviewing that article, I’m actually not certain what the situation is. It seems to suggest that it’s just isolating third-party cookies, but my understanding is that that’s roughly what they shifted to (for at least new users, and maybe that’s the key) a couple of years back. In at least Nightly, when I checked a month or two back, the default Enhanced Tracking Protection mode was Standard mode, which says that it blocks “Cross-site cookies in all windows”—not cross-site tracking cookies, but all third-party cookies.
I’m not sure why there’s so much obscuration around this stuff. I wish there was a caniuse entry on third-party cookies that identified matters clearly.
> “Topics API or third-party cookies” kinda goes beyond being a false dichotomy to being a blatant lie.
From my original post:
> If there's anyone who [...] has an alternative other than "don't track me" I would honestly love to hear it. I'm sure there are some, but I'm struggling to think of them.
Not only did I never say that the only options were "Topics API or third-party cookies", I explicitly said that I'm sure there were other options, but that I just didn't know what they were.
Firefox and Safari have already stopped supporting third-party cookies, and nothing bad happened.
(There are a few cases here and there of legitimate systems breaking due to relying on third-party cookies for things like login, and these have broken in Firefox and Safari, but they’ll break in Chromium too when it kills off third-party cookies, and the Topics API is completely irrelevant to these cases, being exclusively about advertising interests, so these cases aren’t part of the “third-party cookies or Topics API” deceit.)
Note also how Apple and Mozilla have both taken negative positions on the Topics API: it’s extremely unlikely either’s browser engine will ever support it, making the falseness of the dichotomy even clearer.
Useful further reading, identifying various concrete problems with the Topics API (if “but why should it even exist at all?” wasn’t enough):
https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622
https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/726