Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Expunging Google

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 175 posts

Re: Expunging Google

#111

Post by robotmay »

ebbv wrote: post #35

This is not conscious consumerism. This is a childish temper tantrum. Chrome has better developer tools. If your job is being a web dev and you purposely make your job harder because you're mad at Google for shutting down Reader, you're not being rational.

I've never found Firebug to be lacking; what do the Chrome developer tools have that make it impossible to stop using Chrome?

In my experience Chrome is a PITA for web development due to its weirdly aggressive caching. I thought people were just making it up a few months back, but I experienced it recently and it's infuriating.

Re: Expunging Google

#112

Post by guard-of-terra »

zalew wrote: post #2

> Bing Maps looks like a potential alternative why not openstreetmaps?

Second that. Google maps are surprisingly bad in a number of first-world countries like France or Israel; OpenStreetMap are very very detailed. I don't think Bing maps would be better than either of those.

Re: Expunging Google

#113

Post by duncan_bayne »

exterm wrote: post #99
duncan_bayne wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I strongly suspect that very few people would be willing to > pay what it would cost to build and run a service like > GMail without ads. What do you think the problem would be? I'm using Fastmail now, and not missing anything from Gmail. All for $50 / month.

Personal account costs 4.95$ / year. What kind of premium account do you have to pay 50$ / month for?

Ooops, sorry, make that per year. I've got the plan with 10GiB storage, many (unlimited?) aliases, etc. The tech. support is very impressive too.

Re: Expunging Google

#114

Post by duncan_bayne »

mtgx wrote: post #102
duncan_bayne wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, farsighted :) Seriously, you just wait. If you're a user on a commercial system you didn't pay for (Google, Facebook, etc.) then you're not a customer, you're cattle. Your value is directly proportional to how much the company running the system knows about you. I don't like where Facebook is going, and I think Google is following in their footsteps, albeit helped along by an excellent reputation for quality and…

99% of websites make money from ads. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Imagine if everyone even asked for $1 per month to sustain themselves. That would be unfeasible. Ads are here to stay.

And that's 100% alright for many things. But important infrastructure like email and contacts? I'm not so sure any more.

Re: Expunging Google

#115

Post by dchest »

jxi wrote: post #62
duncan_bayne wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll still happily use Chromium for web development, as and where necessary. Just not signed in to Google for sync, etc. etc. I do wonder though ... would you have described the formation of the FSF as a childish temper tantrum? I remember the days when to use Linux as a development OS was painful ... it worked out well in the end though :)

FSF is an ideal. The ideal that all software is open source so that it's more secure and has all the other benefits of open source. What you're doing is being childish. "Boo hoo, big bad Google killed a product I liked, so I'm going to make some bullshit arguments to stop using ALL their products." I don't use all of Google's products, but I use a subset because they get the job done well. If you think killing off re…

FSF is an ideal. The ideal that all software is open source so that it's more secure and has all the other benefits of open source.

FSF is not about open source or security: https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

Also, calling something/someone "childish" is not a good way to make your point.

Re: Expunging Google

#116

Post by alexmuller »

cageface wrote: post #70
duncan_bayne wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I strongly suspect that very few people would be willing to > pay what it would cost to build and run a service like > GMail without ads. What do you think the problem would be? I'm using Fastmail now, and not missing anything from Gmail. All for $50 / month.

I tried Fastmail last year and maybe my impressions are out of date but it can't compete on features at all. The web interface is stone age compared to gmail, search is far slower and less sophisticated, spam filtering was not as good etc. No native apps are available for mobile. Fastmail isn't bad but I don't consider them to be in the same league.

The new Fastmail webmail interface is actually massively on-par with Gmail. It's very slick and I'd encourage everyone to give it a(nother) go.

Re: Expunging Google

#117

Post by fafner »

jrockway wrote: post #73
tikhonj wrote: post #56

Even assuming Google is not being malicious--and I think that's a broadly safe assumption--I'm still concerned. I'm am significantly over-reliant on Google's serviced: my email, my calendar, my OpenID, my web search, my videos, my phone, my maps, my web browser... (Well, I do use Firefox now.) It's a single point of failure. A rather scary one at that. Some of these things do not have good alternatives. My phone? I c…

Diversification is a good idea, but the cost seems higher than the benefit in this case. Let's say Google becomes evil and makes Android and Chrome evil: the solution is simple, fork Android and Chromium and continue on without the evil additions. Or, don't upgrade. If you "diversify" now , though, you miss out on cool Chrome features, or you spend your weekend maintaining a web browser fork when you could be at the…

> If you "diversify" now, though, you miss out on cool Chrome features, or you spend your weekend maintaining a web browser fork when you could be at the beach.

Sorry but what you are saying doesn't make sense. It is your proposal (fork when Chrome turns evil) which could end up with him maintaining a web browser fork on the weekend. "[M]iss out on cool Chrome features" ... well you miss out on cool Firefox features if you don't switch now ... I think switching the browser is really the least complicated thing to do of all those things.

> This lets you defer the cost of switching until you actually need to switch. If that happens to be never, you win. If that happens to be tomorrow, you still win.

No. Because now you have the time to slowly migrate and adjust. When you are with your back a against the wall the "costs" can be much much higher.

Re: Expunging Google

#118

Post by tobr »

dalks wrote: post #95
onemorepassword wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have not been paying attention. A long list of evidence has been posted here on HN on several occassionas, including dropping CalDAV, of Google turning against the open web. It's nothing new either, it has been going on for years. They've even dropped their support for net neutrality years ago. In the mean time Google has been heavily pushing the Google+ walled garden, their anti-privacy and anti-anonymity a…

> HN on several occassionas 3 if I count correctly: Reader closedown (which, in my opinion, not a hit to open web at all), XMPP Federation issue (It's fixed now) and CalDAV whitelist (Not closedown, whitelist).

Several is "more than two but not many" according to Oxford Dictionary, so three should count as several.

Re: Expunging Google

#119

Post by sergiosgc »

dalks wrote: post #97
vidarh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is not claiming an opposition to open standards, but that open standards are secondary , and will get thrown under bus if it conflicts with the primary goal of making money, and that it seems Google believes social in general and Google+ is the way to make more money, and that this puts open standards at risk. Reducing your dependency on Google's support for open standards then becomes prudent. Personally I'm stic…

No he is arguing that because Google closed down Reader, using any other service offered by Google is poor judgement while also stating that they don't innovate in many if not all product areas.

I can't read that from the original comment. In fact, he didn't even mention Google Reader specifically.

If you are referring to the original article, the article makes it fairly obvious that the GReader event was the proverbial last straw, not the main motivator.

Re: Expunging Google

#120

Post by woe »

mtgx wrote: post #100
dalks wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> de-factory monopoly Not really: - Video: Till Oct '12, youtube's market share peaked at ~52%. [1] - Email: Gmail surpassed Outlook in market share only in Oct '12. [2] - Search: Google Search 67.5% as of March 15, 2013. [3] > many of these services have stagnated And when they attempt to get out of markets so that other new companies can perform better, we get Reader like response. > Google does not seem to care mu…

>Email: Gmail surpassed Outlook in market share only in Oct '12. Sorry, you can't say "Outlook" when it's actually "Hotmail". Just because Hotmail had 400 million accounts, doesn't mean Outlook will have, too. Outlook only had 10 million accounts last I checked.

You need to check again, then. Hotmail no longer exists.
Post reply on HN