You inaccurately equate the "blogger law" requirements (i.e. having to "register, disclose [blogger's] personal information and submit to the same regulations as mass media") with mass surveillance.
At least wrt searches you can easily send info to, say, AOL, every browser, Y.B included, allows that. (It is interesting for the Russian-speaking auditory to note that Y.Browser doesn't include search engines of other Yandex's competitors on the Russian market - Mail.ru and Rambler, while it has Ask, Bing and whatnot).
Seems like a natural progression. Yandex gets a significant chunk of Russian search traffic and also offer email and cloud storage. Presumably the default search engine will be Yandex...
Whoa, It automatically imports everything from Chrome. Which includes cookies (and as extension login sessions), bookmarks, extensions etc.
Is it just me or - I find that somewhat scary.I daresay, I would expect Chrome to encrypt sensitive information it saves on disk. Yandex does not seem to have imported the plaintext passwords thankfully, but I don't think I trust a new service with this much of private information.
In other words - Chrome, please stop random applications from copying my login sessions and cookies.
That isn't necessarily very easy thing to implement. If the data is accessible by one application, how could it not be available by some other application running with the same credentials? Maybe some "vault" daemon running as a different user could do, but then it would only take reverse engineering the client part from Chrome (if it wouldn't be open source via Chromium already). And all this to protect the application data from other application user is willingly running? TL;DR: don't run applications you don't trust.
If you have configured Chrome with a Google account, on Linux - for me, it does ask me for password on restart. I am assuming the password is for decrypting the passwords it stores in browser's "manage passwords".
Overall, I think either:
a. Chrome can use that account password for decrypting the other senstive information too.
b. or it can integrate with keychain of operation system. If I am not wrong, each time a new application accesses keychain of OS, OS prompts for user's password.
Where would it store that encryption key? How would it store it in such a way that a Chromium fork wouldn't have good access to it to easily decrypt and copy the cookies anyways?
Are you sure it's even an import? I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is just naively using the same cookie stores and bookmarks and whatnot live.
Chrome and Firefox both store cookies, bookmarks, etc. in unencrypted, unprotected sqlite databases in a user profile directory. Internet Explorer stores them in regular text files on the filesystem. Any application run by the same user has trivial access to all of that information.
In many cases that information can't be sent out to an external server and then used to impersonate you, however. Google, for example, has a lot of safeguards to identify abnormal traffic like that and block it out. An application could, however, use the cookies/session info locally on your machine to do things without your knowledge.
This is why security minded apps will log you off all the time. It's not to annoy you, it's because the session security model is just not safe in a computer that may be running untrusted applications. You're responsible of the applications you install not stealing your stuff or hijacking your sessions.
Just like I switched off Opera when it became a webkit fork, I do not see any reason in installing another one.
From my experience, Yandex is only good for one thing: Russian maps. Their accuracy and features are still unparalleled on Russian territory.
When it comes to browser though, I would still use Chrome if I wanted WebKit, FireFox if I wanted features and Opera 12 if I wanted great user experience.
I think last time I tried it, it was behind on the nav part. Did they improve it? Does it allow setting marks for other drivers? Does it show traffic jams?
We built a site for a Russian supermarket and tried using Yandex maps as that's what they wanted. Was accurate for Russian addresses, as you would expect, but ended up switching for Mapbox so we could heavily customise it.
Download page is in Russian, but the interface is in English when installed. International site (http://browser.yandex.com) still has "We're working on it".
So much anti-Russian sentiment - why is Hacker News so full of politics!? Are NSA or GCHQ any better? The thing is that other countries don't trust stuff built in the US anymore and you will see more and more of these.
Some useful extensions like LastPass, Adguard, Pocket and Evernote are packaged (but not enabled) by default. Functionally it's Yandexified Chromium (vs Googlized Chromium aka Chrome—and modulo UI chrome of course).
