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Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#721

Post by tumetab1 »

kwijibob wrote: post #349

A minority view: I do care about privacy but this behaviour is what I expect from Chrome. We have a number of profiles on our shared family PC and people expect logging into chrome or gmail will also log into the other. For me it's the price of entry for using the google ecosystem. I was already using gmail/gdocs/chrome sync daily, so it just makes life easier. If I really need privacy I go to incognito or another br…

I do think your use case is common in family PCs and this is a nice solution for that. The issue is only on non-shared browsers.

The rant, which I agree, is against the trend. Google Chrome recent versions contain poor quality changes which seem to be incorporated only because they support Google end goals.

Most of the times people tolerate bad things if they get good quality products. I support Google Chrome data collection because I get the best browser. If I get bad UX changes (WWW removal), behavior change without UX information (this case) then my patience for the bad things quickly disappears.

For Windows 10 is also going this path. The trend for Windows 10 is bad quality and also dislike the privacy options so I'm moving to Ubuntu.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#722

Post by MrEfficiency »

nadont8 wrote: post #575
clarkmoody wrote: post #408

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…

Search for "american inventors" if you want to have some laughs.

wtf whyy

EDIT: To clarify, why is that list so bad?

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#724

Post by pcunite »

sergiotapia wrote: post #35
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 switched to Brave - not looking back :)

Brave shows promise, but the windows installer won't allow you to run it outside of appdata, a deal breaker.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#725

Post by sct202 »

auto wrote: post #712
sjwright wrote: post #627

Oh come on, that's just an absurd example. Gun rights and an article about gun control are literally the same thing. The article surfaced by Google's algorithm is the more relevant and comprehensive one when it comes to gun rights. I suspect anyone who disagrees is taking a provincial, American view on the subject, and is being triggered by the phrase "gun control".

But there is a wikipedia article for gun rights, or at least a separately titled one that is redirected from gun rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms Why wouldn't that get autofilled on the front page of the search results instead?

And right under that there is a suggested link for "Right to keep and bear arms." What is most likely happening is that the Gun Control page is more popular than the Right to keep and bear arms page, so the algo picked that one for the single card that they load. IDK what they use for ranking, but I would imagine that the fact that 'gun' appears in the title of one and not the other is impacting the matching and also the Gun Control page is much longer so it probably seems like a higher quality page versus the other one.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#726

Post by wild_preference »

wodenokoto wrote: post #705
wild_preference wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has the worst UX. It doesn't show favicons on tabs. It has the worst selection of extensions: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/safari/ . Everything just seems to be worse than Firefox/Chrome from the developer tools to extension development (you need Xcode). To use Safari, you pretty much need to decide that performance / battery life are more important than anything else which only describes my needs when I nee…

It does have some ux benefits too. The "back gesture" works much better than on other browsers. Firefox gives no feedback, and chrome gives very poor feedback. Safari lets you peek at the previous page, and makes it very obvious that you are about to go back, without any performance hit. It also comes with reading mode, which chrome doesn't. Even with an ad blocker, many pages are still layed out in ways that can onl…

We all care about about battery life performance. This comments section is filled with people like me who want to use Safari and give it a serious try every once in a while for that exact reason.

But it needs more than that when my battery already lasts 6+ hours under heavy use and my laptop is plugged in almost all day anyways.

Perhaps you can see how a reading mode that we already had extensions for in other browsers and sexier prev/next gestures damn it with weak praise.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#727

Post by rovr138 »

dhimes wrote: post #714
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an owner of firearms and in favor of the second amendment and I still agree with parent, Gun Control being highlighted as a relevant article makes complete sense, since Gun Control is fundamentally about rights related to firearm ownership.

It's not absurd, but there is a page that fits the search term better in the same domain. That's what makes it "suspicious."

The title and domain is not the only thing that matter for Google’s ranking.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#728

Post by patates »

Aeolun wrote: post #653
patates wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google was collecting extra information without me even being aware of it I think the point is that you should be aware of it. It is your application after all. Yes, what Google does is weird, but the app developer needs to be more careful in general what 3rd party code they load. On the other hand, I understand you. Probably you do your due diligence when you load some random dependency but you (like everyone else…

I mean, if you use a google library that uses a specific google feature, it’s kind of fair to assume that it’s not a violation of their privacy policy.

You don't get to act clueless if one of the libraries that you added to your application collects data without asking the user. I already said what Google does is weird.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#729

Post by andrepd »

chinhodado wrote: post #511
ktta wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that the UX is no where near as polished. The history and bookmark features still look like they're from 10 years ago, and subtler things that are just given thought to because there seem to be dedicated UI/UX designer on the chrome team.

> The history and bookmark features still look like they're from 10 years ago It's actually a selling point for me, I just can't stomach all the material design craps that Chrome forces on me where a page lost like 70% of usable space to useless whitespace.

I agree with both of you, really, both interfaces are shit. Chrome has that hideous whitespace that's wasteful even for touch interfaces, let alone for mouse+keyboard, and Firefox has a cumbersome and too basic interface. I can't even do an advanced search on my bookmarks.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#730

Post by staktrace »

lh7777 wrote: post #543
staktrace wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reordering tabs via touch should work, it was fixed in Firefox 59 ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1362065 ). And yes, pinch zoom is not supported (we do text/reflowing zoom, but not mobile-style pinch zoom). It's something that's being worked on but there's a lot of dependencies in order to get it done.

Thanks -- I didn't realize that reordering tabs had been fixed. It only works on the active tab[1] and I guess I've only ever tried moving inactive tabs before. It's not perfect, but so far seems better than in Edge (which allows reordering of inactive tabs but is often rather janky) and Chrome (which has no ability to scroll the tab bar, so tabs quickly get uselessly tiny). [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.…

Ah, good point. You should still be able to reorder background tabs using the double-tap-drag gesture (touchdown, touchup, touchdown, touchmove). I haven't tried it recently though.
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