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Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#401

Post by mgkimsal »

partiallypro wrote: post #392
GW150914 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google bullies hardware vendors, Apple is its own hardware vendor. That is the essential difference. If MS had done their thing only with hardware they made and sold, instead of twisting the arms of third parties they’d have been OK. There is a qualitative difference between dictating the terms of something you alone build and sell, and using your market dominance to dictate terms to everyone else.

I don't disagree. I really would love for Microsoft to make the "Microsoft Store" accept Android apps and launch a Surface Phone line that only they control...and if it takes off maybe OEMs could join in, if not, fine. I feel like they are the only company that can successfully do it...but even then Google services are so coupled with Android games/apps...and it doesn't solve the "walled garden" problem. Microsoft wo…

i too would love to see ms take 'phone' seriously, and do a surface phone line similar to iphone. own the hardware stack top to bottom. we need a third major force to offset apple/google, and MS is one of the few that could fill that gap.

they did finally start to take ownership of experience with the surface stuff, and I'm tempted to move back to that world in 2019 with a surface book of some stripe.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#402

Post by mgkimsal »

EpicEng wrote: post #395
zeth___ wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think the coverage of him is bad now, wait till you see what happens when the digital monopolies are fighting for their lives. One only has to look at what the Murdoch paper monopolies did to any politician who dared stand against him: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/cancer-eating-the-he...

>If you think the coverage of him is bad now He could solve that problem by simply ceasing to say and do dumb things. I'm not convinced the media is out to get him, he just shoots himself in the foot about 20 times / day. I wish the news were focused more on policy than politics (though not sure that would help him), but people like drama and news orgs like money.

> he just shoots himself in the foot about 20 times / day

as much as I dislike trump, i do think some of the negative media coverage of him is over the top, and does its part in destroying credibility of real issues. my own gut would be on those '20 times/day' things, probably 5-10 of them are overblown or taken out of context (the 'fist bump' on 9/11 was overblown, imo, when you look at the complete footage and context).

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#403

Post by epicide »

jwr wrote: post #389
hellofunk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could use it but it has serious performance problems on macOS. I tried and it was just terrible. (thought not all Mac users have problems, quite a number do, and Mozilla has an open issue asking for debugging logs from Macs to find the reasons).

If you are on MacOS, why don't you use Safari? I'm puzzled as to why people seem to dismiss the "built-in" browser. It's the fastest, smoothest, best integrated, and least power-hungry browser on the platform. I regularly use all three major browsers (for testing, I write web applications) and I consistently switch back to Safari for all my non-special browsing.

I keep trying to use Safari as my main browser. I want to use it so bad.

I keep switching away from it due to lack of favicons and lack of extensions. I don't personally mind paying for a dev license to release an extension, but it definitely takes a toll on the extensions that get released.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#404

Post by RobertRoberts »

qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #336
partiallypro wrote: post #248

Google started going down the path I would describe as an "evil" path years ago. I'm glad people are starting to notice. I used to be a huge Google advocate, up until about 2008. So many things have changed since then. Adsense was the first breach in trust for me, when they banned my account for no reason and ruined any chance of every monetizing my content...since they are basically a monopoly in that area. Getting…

AMP was what did it for me.

When Gmail came out, I said to people "as long as it stays on gmail.com then they can't use email scraping with your search history. No privacy issues." (or minmal ones)

Within a few months of Gmail going public it changed from gmail.com to gmail.google.com or google.com/gmail or some such thing, and I knew instantly they had bamboozled everyone.

That was years ago, the rest has been the expected trend.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#405

Post by valleyer »

epicide wrote: post #403
jwr wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are on MacOS, why don't you use Safari? I'm puzzled as to why people seem to dismiss the "built-in" browser. It's the fastest, smoothest, best integrated, and least power-hungry browser on the platform. I regularly use all three major browsers (for testing, I write web applications) and I consistently switch back to Safari for all my non-special browsing.

I keep trying to use Safari as my main browser. I want to use it so bad. I keep switching away from it due to lack of favicons and lack of extensions. I don't personally mind paying for a dev license to release an extension, but it definitely takes a toll on the extensions that get released.

Safari shows favicons in tab titles in macOS v10.14 Mojave.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#406

Post by zeth___ »

EpicEng wrote: post #395
zeth___ wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think the coverage of him is bad now, wait till you see what happens when the digital monopolies are fighting for their lives. One only has to look at what the Murdoch paper monopolies did to any politician who dared stand against him: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/cancer-eating-the-he...

>If you think the coverage of him is bad now He could solve that problem by simply ceasing to say and do dumb things. I'm not convinced the media is out to get him, he just shoots himself in the foot about 20 times / day. I wish the news were focused more on policy than politics (though not sure that would help him), but people like drama and news orgs like money.

Google et al can't focus on his policies because they benefit from them. Or their owners at any rate.

The rich will not save us from themselves. But they will put a nice rainbow flag up with the wages they stole from us.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#407

Post by horsawlarway »

craftyguy wrote: post #299
CydeWeys wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mistaken include in a build file, most likely. I've removed all sorts of dumb stuff slowing down the build that was included by accident or unnecessarily on my project at work. Never attribute to malice ...

> A mistaken include in a build file, most likely. Yea, "whoops we accidentally downloaded a surveillance device on your system!"... If that sort of negligence can happen, what else is the browser currently doing, or capable of doing in the future, "accidentally"?

Not to make light of the point you're making, but by far and large customers actively want this.

There's a large market opportunity right now for voice controlled systems. Controlling those systems with your voice means they have to be able to listen to you. Full stop.

While I think it's going to take a long time before we truly understand the repercussions of those systems (and I want to be clear, I say that not as an omen of fear and doom, but as a literal statement: We don't understand exactly what level of monitoring we're ok with or is appropriate as a society) I think complaining that google is acting in a solely nefarious way by attempting to incorporate voice control into the browser is disingenuous.

Windows (the literal glass ones) also allow people to see into your home. They let any random stranger on the street walk right up and view the things you own, as well as yourself and your family. But by far and large we've decided we like windows enough that the privacy loss is worth it.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#408

Post by clarkmoody »

partiallypro wrote: post #248

Google started going down the path I would describe as an "evil" path years ago. I'm glad people are starting to notice. I used to be a huge Google advocate, up until about 2008. So many things have changed since then. Adsense was the first breach in trust for me, when they banned my account for no reason and ruined any chance of every monetizing my content...since they are basically a monopoly in that area. Getting…

Search for "gun rights" in Google, and the Wikipedia feature box on the top-right of the results page is the Gun Control article.

I've noticed the straight search results making a marked decline in quality over the past few months. If one of the keywords within your search is anything remotely profitable, it will drown out all other terms. Then the search results ended after ~4 pages.

Definitely changed from the Google I "grew up on."

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#409

Post by SquareWheel »

rictic wrote: post #286
skndr wrote: post #120

For those who've switched over to Firefox recently and find Youtube inexplicably slow, it's "because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome." [0] The YouTube Classic extension will speed things up: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class... [0] https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185

I'm on the Polymer team at Google. We've been helping the YouTube team, who's been doing a ton of work to update to the final v1 version of the webcomponent specs. So far it's a bit neck and neck between Firefox launching version 63 with native web component support (eta October) and YouTube switching the main desktop app over. These are new standards, and there were a number of breaking changes from the v0 specs to…

Thanks for the update.

Shame about all the conspiracy theories regarding this topic. It seemed likely enough to boil down to a logical explanation.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#410

Post by SystemOut »

thrower123 wrote: post #387
slededit wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you around back then? It’s realy hard to describe how much MS was hated. There’s nowhere near that animosity towards Google today.

I was, and it seemed absurd at the time. Bundling IE with windows is no different than the current status quo, where Apple defaults to Safari, or Android defaults to a Chrome version. Google's incredible monopoly in search looks like a large target.

There are other search engines and one can easily just type bing.com into their browser and set it as the default. Even on Chrome.

I'm not sure why you remember MS the way you do. There was a much much larger barrier for consumers to move to a different OS. If you owned a PC you pretty much had to run Windows. And MS made it extremely difficult to use a non-IE browser in the OS.

That doesn't mean I think they're innocent in all things but I don't see how their search market share is a monopoly target.

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