Chromium: --temp profile or --incognito ?

"R.Wieser" wrote

| I'm using Chromium to watch some youtube stuff, but have a bit of a problem: | whenever I "just browse" youtube the "you might like this" main page gets | poissonned with all kinds of crap I've looked at just once, upto the point | that I sometimes rather throw the whole history away (cookies) and start | anew. |

Rudy! You show up everywhere. :)

I'm not sure if this will answer entirely, but I've come up with a setup I like. I get a Pi4 to pipe video and do web browsing through the TV. First, I installed Firefox for Youtube and other online browsing and set it up with reasonable privacy.

Chrom[ium] is a monstrosity. It's such a mess that I can't even have a menu bar. When I found an extension it produced a faulty menu bar under the toolbar! Bookmarks? Sure. Go three levels down in that pinnacle of bad design, the "hamburger" button. The geeks who design this stuff think that no one should want any "chrome" around the actual browser window, because it takes up too much space. Then they turn around and go online with their 4" cellphone screen!

Second, I used the utility from this very generous man to set up Hoopla and Kanopy in Chromium:

I live with a woman, so I also set up profies for each of us in Chromium, because we each have an allotment of free movies on Hoopla and Kanopy. But I only use Chromium for the movies.

I haven't tried temp or incognito mode. As I said, I only run Chromium for the movies. Setting up different profiles wasn't hard, but I don't remember the exact steps. I seem to remember looking around in the profile settings and coming across it. The whole thing is behind the current user icon on the toolbar. That's also how you choose a profile. Mozilla products can be set to choose a profile when they start up. Chromium just starts with the previous profile. The trick is to pick very disimilar icons from their idiotic kiddie icon collection, so that you can easily see at statrtup which profile you're running. Then to switch profiles you just click the icon and you get the other profiles showing on that menu.

Mayayana,

:-) Only in newsgroups related to programming an electronics I believe.

I bought a Pi to try to restart my electronics hobby, as well as a chance to get to know Linux. Alas, both go a bit meh.

They all seem to have become that. :-\ I've tried to use an older version of FireFox (one that still accepts user-written extensions), but without hardware video support looking at youtube movies doesn't quite work.

I think I just found what you mean, including the kindergarten profile icons. Its certainly worth a try.

I'll see if I'm able to find where it stores that "previous profile" setting, and use a script to both change it to the one I want and start the browser afterwards. That way I could select a profile directly from the desktop.

Thanks for the info.

Regards, Rudy Wieser

if you're logged-in to any google account in the browser, the watched history is stored there, rather than in cookies.

On Mon, 27 Apr 2020 15:19:54 +0200, "R.Wieser" declaimed the following:

Unfortunately, based on a quick scan of a few files, they are all some cryptic binary format... Not plain text which can be edited...

~/.config/chromium

{Well... "Local State" file looks to be JSON, and so do some deeper down, but not obvious where in them might be anything identifying the "current profile"}

--
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/

Andy,

Than its a good thing that I do not log into Google just to view a few cat videos, don't you think ? Now I can simply start with a clean slate just by deleting that cookie storage. :-)

Regards, Rudy Wieser

Dennis,

Thanks for that.

It does have the word "profile" and "last_active_profiles" in there ... I'll probably have to experiment with creating a few profiles (a Mayayana suggested) and see what changes there. Its a starting point.

Regards, Rudy Wieser

That's your problem, youtube.

Although I don't have much of a problem with google doing what it does, there is a growing movement of interest in LRBY,

--
Adrian C

"Adrian Caspersz" wrote

| there is a growing movement of interest in LRBY,

|

Too bad it's not actually a website. There's really no webpage there. Just script. It's essentially asking you to trust them to run a javascript program in your browser.

Last time I looked at it, there was something objectionable about it, maybe it didn't have a web interface back then, and you had to buy their crypto currency to watch stuff, I can't remember now, but it got uninstalled sharpish.

"Andy Burns" wrote

| Last time I looked at it, there was something objectionable about it, | maybe it didn't have a web interface back then, and you had to buy their | crypto currency to watch stuff, I can't remember now, but it got | uninstalled sharpish.

The whole thing is odd. The program that's apparently needed is some 200 MB, with an installer containing irregular file/folder names and extensions. Some of the files then contain what looks like script and base64.

When I tried the link to see the specs I was brought to yet another broken webpage that's blank without javascript enabled. The code looks a lot like Wix code that loads sites from a database. But the true link to the spec was actually in that code, and on that page there was a link to a PDF version.

Reading that I find a collection indexed via blockchain. (Why?) So people are posting whatever they want to share. OK. Why do I need a 200 MB program and insecure script in broken webpages to access it? They seem to be trying to create an alternate Internet design from the ground up. And part (most?) of the purpose is to charge for content? I've never bought video online and don't expect I will be buying it in the future. It's hard to imagine what I might want to buy. I watch some things on youtube, but there's very little that I'd care about watching if I had to pay or even watch ads.

But the biggest problem here is the same problem that's typical of most geek tech: It's not discoverable without research that few people are even capable of. It's explained here:

But the document is pretty much unreadable. They made up various terminologies and protocols, then talk as though the reader knows them. Even the plain English is not plain English:

" Centralized platforms suffer from several problems because their incentives are not aligned with the incentives of their users. Hosts engage in rent-seeking behavior...."

Incentives? Rent-seeking behavior? What that gobbledygook is trying to say is simply that Youtube wants a cut of your profits and "that's a bummer".

Well, that's enough to convince me never to go there, thanks both :)

Alternative more mainstream video site:

(used to be .fr) although it's probably exactly the same as youtube and others wrt. user profiling.