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Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#751
post #743
post #742

I'd strongly suggest people create separate users in the browser, one for daily, one for Google, one for Facebook. This way in my regular browsing there's no Facebook or Google cookies reporting on what websites I visit. And with this new change, presumably in your daily profile, your browser remains signed out also. It's really easy and doesn't impact at all on workflow, if you want your Gmail you just click the use…

Firefox has a feature called "Containers", which is kind of this concept but with perhaps a better UX. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

I've tried containers, and I really want to switch to Firefox because I support their aims, but I found containers really clunky.

It might have been the fact that they were tabs in the same window, and it made it harder for me to control/organise/understand what was in what container.

Especially when opening new tabs.

I can't remember the details but I remember finding it fiddly. Maybe I'll give it another go.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did Google leadership call to subvert democracy? At no point in the video do they instruct or encourage employees to do that. They're discussing what Trump means for their employees, not for their customers

I said Google staff had, and I didn't say they did that in this video. But then to be fair, I don't have any hard evidence for this. EDIT: As it turns out, sources for this are pretty easy to come across online: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-travelban/google-s...

Your source doens't back your claim of:

"Their staff have openly called to subvert democracy,"

The key here being "openly" and a specific call to "subvert democracy". None of this happened, and your source does not back up this claim in any way. These are apparently in internal only threads, and they were merely talking about tweaking search results.

Internal, private emails threads are objectively not "openly calling" for something and merely "tweaking search results" is not "subverting democracy" in any sane world.

You are spreading misinformation at best.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#753
Is it just me who wishes all the organisations supporting user rights banded together and hit the market as a viable 3rd ecosystem of products?

All the Linux vendors, all the distributed social media (PeerTube, mastodon, hubzilla), all the private search engines like duckduckgo, all the open source hardware like Purism...

Imagine them doing an EU and pooling all their resources to produce a coherent yet distributed, open and free ecosystem with a browser by Firefox, search by DDG, OS by Linux, phone by Purism, etc...

They could cross-support each other's efforts, promote eacother etc.

I'd live there instead of Google/Microsoft/Facebook world.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up on Firefox on OS X for performance reasons and switched to Safari a while ago and it’s a decent browser. It has support for extensions that I use (ublock origin and 1Password), uses less battery than any other browser, and is fast

I hear about "FF performance issues on Mac" and I just don't get it. I believe all of the people who report this, but it's not something I experience. Here's my usage pattern: - 50+ hours in a browser each week - Regular use of both FF and Chrome with very occasional use of Safari (I'm a developer of web apps) - FF has been my primary browser for 15 years or so - Used on a variety of Macs (2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, and…

Well, the last update to Adwords aka Google Ads is now a clunky piece of shit on Chrome and FF.

I don't know if Google has gone too far with the A/B split testing and are picking winners solely on a most ad revenue metric or if they abandoned UX testing altogether. I suppose it could be a bit of both. May be their decision making AI is secretly optimizing Google in a destructive direction.. who knows.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#755
post #746

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…

Gun control = gun rights. Just a different, and more popular and common, way of looking at it.

Perhaps in Europe, but not in the US. If someone is searching "gun rights" in the US, it is very unlikely they are wanting to know about gun control.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn't that somewhat related to the trademark dispute? The domain gmail.com became unavailable in Germany due to trademark disputes [...] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Germany

If the Germany trademark issue was relevant to the moving from gmail.com to google.com/whatever is the case, why were we all allowed to have @gmail.com email addresses?

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#757
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.

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…

Also privacy and security, since today's Mojave release.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#758
post #753

Is it just me who wishes all the organisations supporting user rights banded together and hit the market as a viable 3rd ecosystem of products? All the Linux vendors, all the distributed social media (PeerTube, mastodon, hubzilla), all the private search engines like duckduckgo, all the open source hardware like Purism... Imagine them doing an EU and pooling all their resources to produce a coherent yet distributed,…

The missing piece IMO is funding, but that may be something that the crypto-currency world could fill.

Not sure what the road to that world looks like, but we definitely need a contender because all of the major tech companies have become disturbingly anti-consumer.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#759
post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google already bullies hardware vendors that don't package Google services with Android devices...which is what Microsoft did in the 90s. They also bundle all their services...which is essentially the very thing that Microsoft ended up getting slapped for. Google gets a way with a lot. Apple does too, but Apple's reach is limited to when you leave their hardware, Google's is always with you. You can't escape unless y…

>Apple is so locked down that I essentially have to use their services I want to touch on this because in my experience this is less true than it seems on the surface. The contacts app and calendar app support carddav/caldav respectively- photos use the standard camera interface (mpd?) the things that suck are that you need to use Xcode to develop for it, and you need iTunes to put music on the default music player a…

My biggest complaint is that I have to use Siri and can't change it to another AI assistant. I can't use a different launcher, etc. I will openly admit to being a Microsofty (just a user, not an employee) and want to use Microsoft based services like Cortana since all of my information is synced that way. Yes I can use Cortana on iOS, but Siri is always there as the default. With Android I can turn the Google assistant off entirely and make Cortana the default.

I'm fairly annoyed on Android that I can't uninstall some stock Google apps.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#760

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.

Apparently this has been going on at least since 2016: http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-i...
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