Back in the day we used Ventrilo for voice chat.

Stoat seems like a nice, newer alternative to Discord.

I was responding to a comment that said “it’s not sketchy just lazy.” Anthropic is shipping a piece of software that shares some of the qualities of adware/malware. I don’t need to know or speculate how that software was written to be able to call that sketchy, and I certainly am going to hold Anthropic responsible for that regardless of how it was made.

Put another way, if LLMs didn’t exist, and they had an intern write the code in this way, I would still call it sketchy. It might also be lazy! But none of us know how it was written, so I’m not going to speculate on that.

That’s not really relevant to the point I’m making.

Ah yes let’s wildly speculate about how they may or may not be writing software.

I disagree, it’s definitely sketchy. Going out of your way to install the messaging host for a half dozen different Chromium forks is going out of your way do something behind the user’s back; it’s the opposite of lazy.

Another example is that macOS periodically sends records of which apps you’re opening to Apple, due to OCSP cert revocation checks: https://www.howtogeek.com/701176/does-apple-track-every-mac-app-you-run-ocsp-explained/

I realize this is ostensibly to enable a security feature, but if your threat model includes American software companies & oligarchs tracking what you do on your computer, it’s still something to be aware of.

I agree that this doesn’t rise to the level of “spyware,” but it is extra sneaky/slimy, and it absolutely, IMO, makes your system less secure for no good reason. They could just have a prompt in the UI the first time you attempt to use a feature that requires the native messaging host, which says something like “we need to install extra software to communicate with Chrome, OK?” This is the ethical thing to do.

It’s especially sketchy that they’re preemptively installing it in the right directories for multiple Chromium-based browsers, even ones that aren’t installed on your system.

Yeah, you’re right on that you needed to check for Flash if your site used it. But at the risk of sounding overly pedantic: Flash wasn’t a browser extension either; it was a plugin, which though named similarly were completely different implementation-wise. Browser plugins are not really supported anymore in 2026, due to them having essentially unrestricted access to the host machine.

I have been doing web development pretty much since the web was created.

“Sniffing your browser extensions is normal to be able to render the page correctly” is not and was never a sensible argument. 20 years ago, neither Chrome nor the iPhone existed yet. Most people browsed the web on computers, and “works best in Internet Explorer” was widespread. Web developers were lazy and many of them literally only tested their sites in IE on Windows. Browser extensions themselves were much more of a niche thing since IE didn’t support them.

Thanks, I worked in adtech for a number of years so I’m aware of this use case. I could tell some stories that would likely surprise you at how sophisticated that industry has been for a long time, even as long as 10-15 years ago.

But the parent post specifically said this was “sensible” and maybe “normal” to do this to decide how to render a page. My question was specifically how that claim makes sense at all.

In what fucking world is it “normal” or “sensible” to scan your browser extensions to decide how to render a page? Please explain.

I’ve been doing web development for 30 years (since the time when “SSR” was just called “building a web app”) and I have not once ever had the desire or need to do this.

Here’s an archive link, in case anyone, like me, refuses to read anything on Substack due to their affinity for Nazis:

https://archive.ph/Qh4gw

This is the internet; you can say “fuck” here.