Comments on: Fox News Using Google Gears to Save Data

By: Jean forley

Jean forley — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:38:44 +0000

search.yahoo.com wants to store information on my computer using Gears. I’m using Chrome and this box has come up several times in the last few days on various websites.

By: The Laughing DM » Blog Archive » Fox Responds

The Laughing DM » Blog Archive » Fox Responds — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:41:40 +0000

[...] News finally responded to an email that I sent them regarding their web site wanting to save information to my local system. It only took a week to get a very, very generic email back. Fox News [...]

By: DungeonMaster

DungeonMaster — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:59:12 +0000

Matt, thanks for looking into this and following up with your vendor, Loomia. Let’s hope that what they were attempting is/was no more innocuous than saving a cookie.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:45:31 +0000

Closing the loop on this – Loomia has “fixed” their widget so that it no longer attempts whatever operation was causing Chrome to solicit the user’s permission. I expect it means all sites that use Loomia recommendations (including ours and FoxNews, but also Time and many other high-profile sites that I later visited with Chrome, that were exhibiting this dialog prompt) are now free of this warning in Chrome.

That said, their solution was “Chrome-only” in that they only disabled the loading of the offending code in Chrome.

Whether it still loads (or ever loaded at all) in other browsers is still an open question; that neither IE nor FF throws a warning indicates that what Loomia is attempting does not trip any of the normal security profiles in those browsers, and therefore can’t be too different than setting a cookie (or, more optimistically, just isn’t happening at all because those browsers just don’t support what Loomia is doing – and they simply fail quietly instead).

By: DungeonMaster

DungeonMaster — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:25:49 +0000

Jeff, at least Chrome is making Fox News ask first. IE and FF are not.

By: Jeff Vachon

Jeff Vachon — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:17:54 +0000

The last people on Earth I would want storing information on my computer is Fox news. I would appreciate it if they’d stop asking.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:02:29 +0000

No problem – we’ve also confirmed on our end that Chrome seems to be the only browser population affected (which makes sense – Chrome comes pre-packaged with the Gears plugin; Firefox and IE users would have to download it and install it separately – so theoretically there could be some non-Chrome users affected, but I imagine it’s a very limited community and – at least as our site’s audience goes – has little overlap with our target users).

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:59:19 +0000

(I apologize for this third comment, but felt I needed to clarify what I said: we found on our test site that, by removing this Loomia widget, the message about Google Gears no longer appeared – so it is on that basis that we are working with Loomia to identify the cause of the issue, which we presume at the moment is on their end with an “invisible update” they might have made to their code overnight.)

By: DungeonMaster

DungeonMaster — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:58:33 +0000

Matt, thanks for the info. I’ve hit the Fox News web site with a couple of other browsers (IE & Firefox) and they don’t bring up a popup about Gears.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:54:15 +0000

So some more info for you we just found internally – both Foxnews and our site use a 3rd-party “content recommendation engine” called Loomia. You’ll recognize it on their article pages (and ours) as a widget with a list of 5 or so other article titles under the rubric “people who read this also read”. We are currently attempting to resolve this issue directly with Loomia.