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De-Googling: My Progress

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Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#211

Post by bananaoomarang »

yachtman wrote: post #181

Firefox is now objectively better than Chrome in every way. I would recommend switching moral reasons aside. Chrome's memory management is abysmal. I now get the same shudder when I see someone with chrome on their machine that I used to get when I saw someone running Internet Explorer (which may even be better than chrome now too).

I wish this were true but certainly on Linux I don't find this to be the case. I periodically try switching to Firefox and always end up back on Chrome for performance reasons.

Features wise I prefer Firefox (containers are amazing, extra privacy features/blockers by default nice, the new picture in picture for video is nice, dev tools have a lot of cool extra features etc), but Firefox often struggles and stutters for me, whereas I rarely have issues with Chrome.

The devtools are a good example, sometimes just having them open on a page I am developing slows everything down. Closing/re-opening the tab seems to fix it for a bit but then it just starts to happen again, Chrome's devtools are always snappy. Similary if I want to inspect an element on a page Chrome never has a problem doing it instantly, Firefox has to think about it for a while.

In general everything that uses the GPU I find far faster in Chrome. The other day for instance I was working on a d3 SVG visualization that strained Firefox but was no problem for Chrome, canvas performance is similar but not as bad in my experience. The most common offender is trying to watch a video: in Firefox everything slows down and the fans spin up, in Chrome no effect.

It is also true that all Google services that I am unfortunately tied to (GMail, Maps, Calendar etc) are snappy in Chrome and like molasses in Firefox...

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#212

Post by kick »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #103
kick wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worcester has a higher population than England's Worcester, and as such probably has more backlinks to pages related to it. That is global. Expecting global results to be regionalized is silly; just use regionalized results.

That's a very engineer-focused way of looking at it. I don't care about backlinks or population or whatever weighting DDG uses: I want relevant results. DDG is a user-facing search engine, not a tech demo. Showing a UK visitor three pages of results about Worcester, MA is simply bad UX.

Then use regional results! I, personally, am not an engineer. I'm a person who has an actual use for 'global' results, and my main reason for using DuckDuckGo is the ability to not have regional results.

If you want relevant results, don't use the global weighting. Use the UK weighting. That's why it's there. Literally so people with your preference of localized results can have localized results.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#213

Post by GoblinSlayer »

lowdose wrote: post #206
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if this is true, there's a significant difference in that Google would lose nearly every single one of GCP's customers if it was ever proven they were mining data of their customers' cloud services. And at the very least, it is much harder for Google to correlate a competitors' account systems and user data with their own profiles they use for ad targeting. And of course, most importantly: Apple collects a lot l…

What is the difference between Apple and you as a customer paying for Google Cloud? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

The difference is between you being Apple's user and you being Google's product.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#214

Post by have_faith »

yachtman wrote: post #181

Firefox is now objectively better than Chrome in every way. I would recommend switching moral reasons aside. Chrome's memory management is abysmal. I now get the same shudder when I see someone with chrome on their machine that I used to get when I saw someone running Internet Explorer (which may even be better than chrome now too).

Firefox is at least objectively equal from a perceptive performance perspective. Chrome still has some wins that mostly stem from market share and what benefits come with that (people test in chrome first). I still main FireFox and promote it to anyone that cares to listen but as a web developer even I test in Chrome first because usually that is where most of my audience is.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#216

Post by unethical_ban »

harha wrote: post #8

I actually think the results on DuckDuckGo are better than on google for many topics especially technical: - there’s less ads (you can turn them off completely, but I’ve only seen one ad on the front page at most which is ok for me) - not as SEOed (still not great though) - the box on the side is often more useful, e.g. Wikipedia instead of shopping ads - on mobile Safari I use the bangs [0] which have a sort of Omni…

I use DDG as my default, and I do like the bang syntax - in fact, it wouldn't be my default otherwise.

I find when searching for manuals on devices, for example, there are lots of garbage results or PDF spam sites that I would not recommend people click.

The other night I searched a question (I forget what) and the entire first page was Quora links to possibly the same question over and over, and not the question I asked.

tldr: I use !g, !i, and !usps a lot.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#217

Post by mschulkind »

yachtman wrote: post #181

Firefox is now objectively better than Chrome in every way. I would recommend switching moral reasons aside. Chrome's memory management is abysmal. I now get the same shudder when I see someone with chrome on their machine that I used to get when I saw someone running Internet Explorer (which may even be better than chrome now too).

I tried to switch to Firefox, in large part because of the contianers, and I still use it in some places, but the thing that really got me was battery usage. I switched my desktop at work to Firefox, and it was great, and I still use it there, but then I switched by work laptop to Firefox, and (according to powertop and htop) the battery and CPU usage of Firefox was probably 3-4x Chrome. This is a total deal breaker on a laptop.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#218

Post by kgwxd »

_piif wrote: post #210
yachtman wrote: post #181

Firefox is now objectively better than Chrome in every way. I would recommend switching moral reasons aside. Chrome's memory management is abysmal. I now get the same shudder when I see someone with chrome on their machine that I used to get when I saw someone running Internet Explorer (which may even be better than chrome now too).

I occasionally have Firefox freeze due to some site's script freezing, forcing me to end it through task manager as Firefox won't respond to any button clicks. Also (unless I missed something) there's still no way to get hardware video acceleration on Firefox on Linux outside of Wayland. When I'm on Linux I'm also installing Chromium (with the VA-API patches applied) entirely for YouTube as my CPU usage ramps up imme…

I've notice a bit of this on Linux but it never bothered me, however, I feel like it's gotten considerably better lately. For example, I use to have to keep Twitch open in it's own browser instance or else the stream would become very low quality, or even die completely, when I went to another tab. That doesn't seem to be a problem anymore, but I don't know if it's anything FF did.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#219

Post by lowdose »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #213
lowdose wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the difference between Apple and you as a customer paying for Google Cloud? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

The difference is between you being Apple's user and you being Google's product.

I never read Google discriminates between paying customers before. That's such a wild accusation that it requires serious evidence.

Edit: I can reply anymore but just supply a link of data handling discrimination between paying customers because that's what you imply by "there is not difference between GSuite customers and normal gmail".

It's bullshit

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

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