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De-Googling: My Progress

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Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#291

Post by user00012-ab »

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 containers are amazing! Being able to have a work set of tabs that open all the google services correctly, and a set of personal tabs that open google services correctly is the best thing ever. Not to mention containing all the sites that try to track you into their own little playground.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#292

Post by bananaoomarang »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #250
bananaoomarang wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

My experience is exactly the opposite. When forced to use Chromium on Linux, I find it slow. The dev tools are lacking basic functionality that I came to depend on, and they are unreliable (missing requests in Network tab). When testing CSP protections about a year ago, Chromium allowed many of the requests that should have been blocked (and were, in Firefox). I think it comes down to what one is used to. We probably…

Interesting... It has gotten a lot better over the past few years. The Google issue is not a deal-breaker for me, want to move away from GMail/Calendar for my personal account anyway.

Will probably try to make the switch again at some point.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#293

Post by AsyncAwait »

shockinglytrue wrote: post #263
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'm a diehard Firefox fan, but I will be honest: its JS and rendering performance is garbage compared to Chrome. I play games and use complex web apps (GCloud, Office 365) exclusively in Chromium

It's worth pointing out that Google cripples its apps in Firefox intentionally and since Edge is now basically Chrome, MS probably, (perhaps unintentionally?), follows suit.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#294

Post by lyndons »

dublinben wrote: post #186
niemenmaa wrote: post #104

My De-Googling process: *Search(1) -> DuckDuckGo *Gmail(2) -> Fastmail *Android -> SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) *Maps -> OpenStreetMaps *Youtube(3) -> Youtube-dl, "subscriptions" with rss-feeds *Drive -> Self-hosted Nextloud & Syncthing *Calendar -> At first Fastmail, but nowadays back to paper calendar *Chrome -> Brave & Firefox (1) When having problems finding I sometimes check Google Search with bangs. (2)…

Concerning Youtube, you may be interested in https://www.invidio.us/ which is an alternative front end. There are also extensions for Firefox which will automatically redirect any Youtube links you happen to come across to open on Invidious.

Invidio.us seems unusable.

I tried to do simplest thing: create playlist - the only thing I'm really missing not having YT account (beside commenting).

1. First of all, it forced me to create Invidio.us account. Why it can't store everything in my cookie?

2. Next, I searched for a video typing its YT code "fVCAFvIq_F8" - no results. After several attempts I figured out that sometimes it does find it and sometimes it doesn't. Weird.

3. Alright, I copied full address of a video into search box, clicked on result - and got an error: "The uploader has not made this video available in your country." Umm... What? I have no problem watching it on YT itself, why would Invidio restrict me? But even if it was country-restricted, why would Invidio reproduce this stupid Google-imposed geographical restrictions/discrimination?

3. Very irritated, I went for another video (OlNC6gK2y0I) - only to get another error: "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported" ...

4. It was getting boring, but for the sake of experiment I went for yet another video - Invidio found it and played, but... there is no "Add to a play list" button? Turned out, first you need go to a settings, scroll down, find and click "View all playlists" link, on the next page click "Create playlist" link, on the next page create it, then go back to a video you wanted to add and add it. Thats... a clusterfuck.

5. Alright I go to a front page - where can I see my playlist? Nowhere. You need to find and turn on separate setting just to get "Playlists" link on the front page. (Isn't it obvious that I need playlists from the very fact that I created it?)

OK, maybe at least Invidio has additional functionality compared to YT, like downloading video? No, "Download is disabled." Why?

To all of that I must add that Invidio.us worked very slow, sluggish and unresponsive. Occasionally I was getting "Rate limit exceeded" error just trying to open front page.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#295

Post by lucb1e »

TheArcane wrote: post #289
lucb1e wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for Deepl. Google Translate's quality is very close to Deepl and for a long time I couldn't tell which is better, but I recently discovered that Deepl does German brainfuck sentences correctly and Google and Microsoft Translate both mess it up. (In German you can say "the ball has the dog" and by conjugating "the" correctly ("der ball" and "den hund", iirc, or the other way around, I can never remember) it can mea…

Is there a reliable DeepL based addon for Firefox?

I just go to their website so I don't know, sorry.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#296

Post by jlarocco »

Naac wrote: post #31
jlarocco wrote: post #23

I'm a little bummed out that I just switched back to Chromium after several months on Firefox, but Firefox has some very annoying bugs that were driving me crazy. On the plus side, it's the only Google software I use on a regular basis.

What bugs specifically have you encountered?

The most annoying is the way it handles updates. There's no easy way to turn off auto-update (I get updates via my package manager), and the functionality in Firefox is completely broken. It downloads the update and then refuses to open any pages until the browser is restarted, but the restart functionality is broken, and it just exits, losing all of the tabs that were open.

It happened again one day, and when Firefox exited I just started Chromium up instead.

It feels, to me, that Firefox and Mozilla have a very annoying "We know better than you" attitude towards a lot of things. That's great for people who want that, but I don't.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#297

Post by AsyncAwait »

leephillips wrote: post #281
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).

On my xubuntu laptop, I observe the opposite. Firefox leaks memory until I need to restart it, several times a day. However, Chrome reliably releases memory, and I never need to restart it.

On my Arch laptop, it's exactly the opposite - Chrome can become supper sluggish even as I have 16GB of RAM, while Firefox stays snappy.

I assume there are more factors that go into this than just the browser itself. For example, I find Ubuntu to be one of the more sluggish distros out there in general, while Fedora and Arch feel way snappier, but am sure this isn't the case for everyone.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#299

Post by _-david-_ »

joshmanders wrote: post #257
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.

>Apple is not an advertising company

Except when they are

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#300

Post by abtinf »

pkamb wrote: post #275
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 would absolutely switch to Safari or Firefox except for the fact that I find Chrome's tab system to be so good. Chrome tabs load and appear instantly. As you add more tabs they shrink down to a tiny but still usable favicon size. As you close tabs they resize well and with nice little UX behavior like the next close button always appearing directly under your mouse. They close and re-open instantly. When you press…

Firefox with tree style tabs is on another level. Firefox also supports lazy loading tabs when restarted, so only pinned tabs and tabs you view consume resources.

I have nearly 1000 tabs open in Firefox and navigate them extremely efficiently. Does chrome do that?

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