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De-Googling: My Progress

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Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#251

Post by jiveturkey »

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).

obviously untrue since you can't be "objectively better" on subjective criteria, of which there are many.

i'll tell you though, the #1 subjective thing i hate is that single-click in the Chrome (Chromium) omnibar doesn't honor OS selection convention. unless you're on windows, where single click selects-all. having this behavior forced on Mac is jarring and awful and no amount of pleading would convince the dictatorial "my way is the right way" attitude of the gatekeepers. they refuse to even have a hidden flag to control this behavior. it's actively hostile.

the incongruity can be seen by clicking in any form field. eg chrome://flags search field. Note that single-click merely places the cursor on mac in a form field. then go to the omnibar. single-click selects-all. ARGH!

I had hoped Edge would fix this, but alas, no. (Also Opera keeps this behavior.)

Fast forward to newer behavior of hiding the protocol from the omnibar, until you click on it. Now when you click (or click-drag, the "proper" way to select less than the entire URL in one stroke, thank you oh overlords), as soon as you release the text changes and your mouse is no longer at the selection point. ARGH!! so awful.

I can't tell you how much I hate this poor implementation choice. However it's not enough to push me to FireFox, which is subjectively very much worse than Chrome.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#252

Post by newscracker »

vinay427 wrote: post #245
newscracker wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Out of curiosity, what don't you like about the UX? Not GP, but I’ve railed against Signal’s stability and UX before. Apart from messages not being delivered sometimes (or taking very long) and getting unnecessary “device changed” messages when nothing has changed (this happened as recent as last year), within a year or two of use, Signal makes sure that the user realizes that it’s meant for ephemeral use. It does…

EDIT: As someone pointed out in a reply, iOS would in fact support this file functionality, so it would presumably be up to Signal to add it. > at least in iOS, you’d realize that you’ve permanently lost all your previous chats because Signal explicitly prohibits chat backup by iTunes and does not provide a way to backup chats and restore it either. This seems like an iOS limitation that Signal doesn't want to compro…

No, that’s not true at all. There’s been a Files app in iOS since iOS 11 (which was released in late 2017 and allows you to store the data on device or on the cloud, including creating folders), and before that there was iCloud Drive. Either of these could be used to save the file. The share sheet on iOS also exposes other apps that the user has. So for example, if someone has the Dropbox app, it can be used as a destination to save files.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#253

Post by exhilaration »

cuu508 wrote: post #61
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #6

> I’ve already pulled down my 2-300GB Google Photos archive How? I've tried several times and can never complete the download. Wired ethernet, not wifi.

Takeout doesn't work in practice for bigger collections (archive creation routinely fails, timeouts while downloading, 50GB max size results in many splits) I've used this 3rd party tool and it worked OK: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync/

Thanks! Quick question, does gphotos-sync download the images in the original resolution? One of the limitations of tools like this in the past is that they could only download the "high resolution" (compressed) images.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#254

Post by rgoulter »

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…

One more use case:

The result for copying the link of a search result item for e.g. "git book pdf"

from DuckDuckGo: https://progit2.s3.amazonaws.com/en/2016-03-22-f3531/progit-...

from Google: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

from bing: https://progit2.s3.amazonaws.com/en/2016-03-22-f3531/progit-...

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#255

Post by joshmanders »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #204
mrwesleycrusher wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before I say this, I would just like to say I run Firefox as often as I can and love love love it, but chrome is better, due entirely to the market share of the Blink web engine. Microsoft Teams' webapp only works in Blink. Hulu bitches about widevine until Firefox gives me the notification to enable it. Canvas (that thing all us students use) gets random rendering errors on gecko that makes the UI malfunction a lot.…

If you absolutely have to have Blink, use Edge. You get basically Chrome, but with Firefox's tracking prevention built-in.

Yes, if you really like Chrome as a browser but want to de-Google-ify, use Edge or Brave (Preferably Brave).

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#256

Post by [deleted] »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #204
mrwesleycrusher wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before I say this, I would just like to say I run Firefox as often as I can and love love love it, but chrome is better, due entirely to the market share of the Blink web engine. Microsoft Teams' webapp only works in Blink. Hulu bitches about widevine until Firefox gives me the notification to enable it. Canvas (that thing all us students use) gets random rendering errors on gecko that makes the UI malfunction a lot.…

If you absolutely have to have Blink, use Edge. You get basically Chrome, but with Firefox's tracking prevention built-in.

[deleted]

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#257

Post by joshmanders »

andrepd wrote: post #133

Moving from Google cloud to Apple cloud, from Google messenger to Facebook messenger... What's the point honestly?

Apple is not an advertising company, they are a product and service company. Google gives free services in exchange for your data.

Facebook Messenger I don't get, I'd use Apple Messages over Facebook, or Telegram, etc.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#258

Post by pixelbath »

cyrialize wrote: post #247
philjohn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for offsite backup (which seems to be the main use case of your use of Google Photos and now iCloud) then Backblaze if you're on Mac or Windows, or Backblaze B2 if you're on Linux is very affordable.

My co-worker is a big fan of Backblaze, I'll check it out!

I'm using Backblaze to hold my backups for both my home server and my production server. For almost half a terabyte of data I'm currently paying $1.89 per month for around 300 GB, which is down from the $2.04 I was paying when it was around 400 (fixed an exclusion directive in my backup script to store less files). It is absolutely worth that trivial price to know everything digital I give a crap about has an automated offsite and encrypted backup in addition to my other backups.

I'm using the B2 storage (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html) since I'm backing up multiple machines and arbitrary sets of files, and it works on a pay-for-what-you-use basis. You can get more storage (they say unlimited, and I couldn't find anything in their literature to contradict that assertion) in the basic backup plans, but you don't get as much choice: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#259

Post by dorkinspace »

newscracker wrote: post #243
pojntfx wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just prepend `!g` if you use DuckDuckGo and want to have a Google result. It's super simple ;)

You can put the bang commands anywhere in the query — in the beginning, in the end and anywhere in the middle. Startpage (!s) is another option to get results from Google without directly connecting to Google.

Thanks for this tip! I have a feeling DDG supports many more bangs than I (and most people) know about.

... 13k+ bangs available. Yep!

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

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