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Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#421

Post by mdekkers »

I have been using Google for pretty much as long as they have been around. I was one of the first gmail users, one of the first Android users, one of the first gsuite users.

And I'm done.

I really don't like the whole Apple experience for many reasons, and not for lack of trying. The Apple IOS system just doesn't do it for me and the whole walled garden approach just isn't my thing. Having said that, I am fed up with Google waging this relentless war on their own users, and I'm done with them. I am ordering the new iPhone Xs Max, and given that I am just as tired with the impossibility of dealing with disabling all the crapware in Windows 10, and the very ominous messages from MS that "windows is a service" (no it isn't, you greedy fuckers, it is an OS) am eyeing up the options replacing my surface pro (new model) with a mac.

Again, I am no fan of the Apple experience, but they appear to be a lot more committed to privacy and security. Google, you used to be awesome. Not anymore though, so bye.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#422

Post by fogetti »

I am also planning to leave for partly similar reasons. Other reasons would be that their shipped product is a heap of sh#t. Removed loading indicator, blank pdf pages, removed html5 video control buttons, broken network traffic inspector in dev tools, frozen and crashing html pages, broken password manager. Not to mention that they also allowed to make the browser a managed instance by your company's administrator when you are logged in with your company's gsuit address which turns the browser into an absolutely miserable experience (and for this reason the new signin process is really vile). I am not saying that all of this started with the latest release, but all of these are present in the latest release. It's a s###ty product just like IE6 was back in it's heyday.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#423

Post by jakecopp »

clarkmoody wrote: post #408
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 Goog…

Might just be more web pages about profitable products?

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#424

Post by hcs »

atombender wrote: post #420
hcs wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Container tabs are a similarly interesting idea with a weird implementation that requires you to micromanage your tabs, which I certainly don't want to You might want to take a look at the Firefox Multi-Account Containers Add-on, it lets you set domains to always open in a given container, which cuts down on the micromanagement a lot once you get it "trained". [edit: This is not well-advertised, it's accessed throu…

I still think that "container tabs" shouldn't need to exist. They fail the "grandma test", for one.

Sure. Might be nice to have an adblocker-style filter that says what domains should be considered a single origin, plug that into containers.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#425

Post by noncoml »

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…

I stopped trusting Google the day they announced they would use Gmail email content for displaying ads. Sometime in the late 00’s it was I think.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#426

Post by cnst »

To be frank, I think the ship has already sailed.

* Where were all these cryptography engineering folk when Google decided that it didn't have to ask any permissions to install autoupdates to Chrome?

* Subsequently, instructions were published on how to disable the autoupdate — published by Google itself, mind you — yet somehow after some time has passed, the same versions of Chrome that were supposed to have stopped looking for updates were somehow able to magically automatically update themselves in the end after a number of releases anyways — so much for the browser being secure against remote execution attacks by a powerful-enough party!

BTW, if you think Brave is any better, they refused to disable the autoupdate. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/1877 TBH, between the lines, I got the impression that it's part of the business plan, where an outdated browser is basically worthless to them as an investment anyways, so, spending any engineering resources on such causes is fundamentally not worth it. Who cares about the good-will of the user if there are so few alternatives anyways?! So, I basically stopped using Brave at that point, as I didn't feel like being the product.

Mozilla may have gone away with asking for your permission to download and install the update as well, but at least there's still a clear setting in the interface which lets you be the boss, and, compared to the quirks that Brave may offer, at least once configured, you do know they won't go behind your back to do the dirty work anyways.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#427

Post by djsumdog »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #10

Firefox is a truly fantastic browser now. I've been using it again for about 2 years and haven't regretted it at all. There have been a couple of weird feature hiccups but generally Mozilla seems to get things right.

I recently moved back to Firefox from Vivaldi. It's been a good move.

I feel like Firefox is back in the same boat it was in the 90s, but this time fighting Google Chrome instead of IE. But it's a bit different since you have to explicitly download Chrome. It's a bit different since you see an ad to download it right when you hit Google.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#428

Post by trolleyhacker »

everdev wrote: post #383
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…

> Luckily agencies act as a middle man, if not for that, the abuse would be so much more widespread I ran such an agency. As someone who is proficient in PPC, the AdSense sales team was inexcusably poor at their jobs. They'd offer to setup campaigns for free with thousands of barely relevant keywords and would push upping the budget past what was reasonable. Their tactics were so bad for my clients that I stopped acc…

You seem to mean AdWords (now Google Ads). AdSense is for publishers.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#429

Post by vezycash »

mgkimsal wrote: post #401
partiallypro wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>i too would love to see ms take 'phone' seriously

Nadella won't because of MS hate.

Lots of naive developers are drunk on the false open source android story and won't apps for their OS - e.g. snapchat founder refused to build an app for WP. And kept sending take down notices for community built clients. This is why MS keeps pursing web apps and "universal apps."

Ms spent at billions in payment (bribes) to developers to build WP apps, yet.

Microsoft of today would never have created Windows. They have tried and failed multiple times to turn Windows into a store only OS.

Their OS was unjailbreakable far more so than IOS. WP's inability to share apps is the major reason why WP failed in my own country. Even till today, people still beam android / windows apps.

Windows 10 auto updates is another clue that MS is clueless about data costs. I'll bet, more people left Windows for autoupdating than for being insecure.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#430

Post by JoshMnem »

teddyfrozevelt wrote: post #394
JoshMnem wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happened to “do no evil”? It was considered "stupid" so they dropped it: https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/13/4326424/eric-schmidt-once... I thought that even if "evil" can't be well-defined, its general meaning probably encouraged a culture that tried to focus on ethics. When your leader says that trying not to be evil is "stupid", it has a different effect on the culture.

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html Don't be evil is in the last line of Google's Code of Conduct.

It was dropped, but they must have added it back after the publicity.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

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