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Why I’m done with Chrome

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Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#642
post #389

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.

Because I can't sync history and bookmarks to my Android phone or my Windows gaming PC.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#643
post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure I could define it as intentional and nefarious but I definitely find Google search results to be markedly worse over the last few years. It used to be really competent at finding specialist/technical results but lately it's gotten more generic and less useful. It's possible that's actually the nature of content creation these days, with everyone hyper optimising to please the Google search algorithm. But…

I believe a major reason for the widely observed decline in Google's SERP quality is that SEOs got too good at gaming the system. The Panda and Penguin updates a few years ago kicked off a trend of prioritizing content from highly authoritative domains (e.g. big brands) even when that content is less relevant to your search query.

Google has been doubling down on this direction progressively--their justification being that people game the long tail by producing a lot of low quality, highly niched content.

There may be no real solution to this within the context of Google's PageRank-inspired algorithm and this may be an opportunity for disruption.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#645

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.

Except, by default their primary product was the interface by which may of their users got targeted. They've sat on their hands on privacy for years, offering features for the informed minority, not protecting the majority of their users. It's been Safari and Brave that have started to show proper leadership in protecting users.

Recent attempts I've been making to help teach web developers about the dangers of referers, before they add more tracking pixels or leak reset password links get deleted by Mozilla technical writers because

" We don't think it's appropriate to have a red warning banner at the tops of the pages. That kind of design element is one we try to avoid on MDN unless it's highlighting the very first thing you need to know about the item, which we don't think it is in this case, although we do appreciate that it is important."

Great idea, let's leave the wet floor warning as a note at the end of the corridor.

See here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/im...

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#646
post #611

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).

I wanted to ditch Chrome, so I tried Firefox on macOS and it took 3-5 seconds to load most sites while they load in 0.5-1.0 seconds in Chrome. I tried uninstalling (including deleting all profile data) and re-installing to see if that helped. This is as far as I got in trying to install uBlock Origin: https://gyazo.com/5850d1b0955c42b857de4ab302c8149b Tried viewing source, but that page just came out blank too. I rea…

Yeah, this is specific to macOS. I also use Firefox on my Linux machine, where it's supper snappy. Kind of strange, considering a lot of Mozilla employees seem to be on MacBooks.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#647
post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Regarding the "Gun Rights" fact box, the different results Bing and Google use here looks to be the results of an edit war[1] over how the page should redirect. Judging by the text in the box, Google appears to be using a snapshot possibly around June 2018[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_rights&action... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_control&oldid...

I don't see a redirect to "Gun Control" in the page history. It is currently a redirect to "Right to Keep and Bear Arms", yes; but before that, it was a disambiguation page that had a brief explanation of various meanings, and links to several other, more detailed pages. So if Google captured that, shouldn't it be linking to that disambiguation page?

Even then, one could imagine that the Google could somehow detect that it is not a particularly informative page, and pick the most likely disambiguation link out of it. Logically speaking, that would be first link in the list. But before the page was changed to be a pure redirect, it had the following blurb at the very beginning:

   The term "'''Gun rights'''" may refer to:

   * The legal concept of the [[right to keep and bear arms]]

   * [[Gun control]], the set of laws or policies that regulate the
     manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use
     of firearms by civilians.

   ...
So, why would the algorithm pick the second link, specifically? And why hasn't it re-indexed the page since?

FWIW, I don't think this is the case of deliberate changing of search results. But I suspect that their algorithm is inadvertently picking up bias from somewhere else, and applying it here.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#648
post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do they really use email content for ad targeting or are you spreading misinformation?

Yep.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what I've been told by people that used to work on those very Google Adwords teams, it's not that they are "bad" at their job, it's that they are meant to meet a certain quota of spend and nothing like ROI etc matters. What's the solution to campaign doing badly? Up the budget! They know it's not optimal, their managers know it's not optimal, but the goal is for Google's bottom line. This stops once you reach a ce…

Yes, I figured as much. I'm sure the reps were "just doing their jobs", but the result was poor service/advice as you mention.

Doing there jobs basically entails increasing your spend: whether by broadening your keyword phrases, adding irrelevant keywords, expanding your geo-location region, or increasing your bids.

Worse is when you get billed for clicks for inactive campaigns, even ones that were never enabled.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#650

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…

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