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“Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

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Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#141

Post by TwoBit »

roblabla wrote: post #50
klondike_ wrote: post #39

I wish I could use Vivaldi, it seems like a nice browser for power users. Unfortunately it's closed source (besides the Webkit parts). Considering how much sensitive information goes through a browser nowadays, I would never consider something closed source. I'm sure Vivaldi has no intentions of becoming "evil" like Google, but because of its closed source nature it wouldn't be hard to slip a tracker or two in the br…

I don't know what browser you're using, but assuming chrome : it's not open source either. Chromium is open source, but Google Chrome is proprietary, much in the same way vivaldi is. If you want a truly open source modern browser, the only options are chromium or firefox these days, AFAIK ? (If you know an alternative I'm interested !)

Why assume Chrome? Most likely he uses Firefox.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#142

Post by cbhl »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #139
cbhl wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the part they didn't tell you was that you should put more users first before putting fewer users first. (This is what "impact" means on the job ladder.) Given two otherwise equal tasks, if one helps 60M users and another helps 12M users, you are usually expected to work on the one that helps more users. And if a product develops too many bugs of the latter type (affects too few users to ever be priori…

The issue with this, that you have to focus on the largest group of users so you can "improve the lives of millions of people" is that it doesn't make sense: Google has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash they literally can't decide how to spend. Clearly, they have enough money to "improve the lives" of more people, so that answer doesn't satisfy. However, the idea that Google is first and foremost a business whi…

In my opinion, the engineers that work on Chrome are the saddest about Alphabet products that are Chrome-only, because it makes it harder to cooperate with Firefox, Edge, and Safari engineers on open web standards.

I disagree with the idea that it is unprofitable to not support competing browsers. Just look at United States v. Microsoft Corp.

But, as you say, Google is first and foremost a business. As a business, it has a process where, if you don't have impact, you get fired. There are lots of people who, if forced to choose between "deferring work on Firefox bugs" and "getting fired", would choose the former. I would rather that they didn't have to make that choice in the first place.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#143

Post by fuck_google »

forapurpose wrote: post #44
nostrademons wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I used to work on the webserver for Google Search. Left Google several years ago, have no more vested interest in them.) The reason for the browser-sniffing in search is a combination of ease of testing + latency reduction. By supporting a known set of browsers, you can write a test plan for each and shard it out among contractors (or ideally, automate it with a Selenium config). Manual tests run on every release (2…

> you can see how adding additional browsers to the testing matrix can consume significant resources Google has the resources to test all the browsers it wants to. Perhaps part of the reason that companies with their market power tend to act this way is that serving other browsers becomes a low priority, and why should we help the competition anyway?

Why the downvotes? Because its obvious?

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#144

Post by amk_ »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #82
Steeeve wrote: post #67

Isn't vivaldi just another branded chromium? Seems a bit disingenuine for them to be complaining about the company that built their product.

Isn't Chromium just a repackaging of KHTML from the KDE project?

    KHTML -> Webkit -> Blink
             \_ Safari   \_ Chromium
              |_ Epiphany  |_ Opera 15+
                           |_ Vivaldi

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#145

Post by eps »

zmmmmm wrote: post #120

A lot of words, but it seems to boil down to: In exchange for being reinstated in Google’s ad network, their in-house specialists dictated how we should arrange content on our own website and how we should communicate information to our users. It's impossible to evaluate this without more details. If their web site actually broke reasonable elements of Google's terms and conditions then it sounds like this is complet…

Most likely a variation of their favourite "must provide Terms & Conditions and Uninstallation instructions immediately next the Download button" b/s. There are a lot of stories going around about this being used to drag undesirable AdWords customers through the pleasure halls of Indian-accented Google support hell.

It's not the requirements per se (though they are complete bullshit and their own Chrome does not in fact follow them), it's how they are "communicated" by the support. This certainly looks like a passive-aggressive way to drive people off AdWords.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#146

Post by _tulpa »

studentrob wrote: post #121
_tulpa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the stupid 'vote with your wallet' argument again. Which is stupid because 1) the average user/consumer wallet is 3/10ths of nothing in terms of economic voting power. 2) the average user/consumer can only vote for stuff which exists, and google has done a great job of making sure that there are no competitive alternatives In this case you're "paying" with your data, which has even less voting power beca…

> In this case you're "paying" with your data, which has even less voting power because you can't even opt out of that payment just by not using their services. You'd pretty much have to stop using the internet entirely. Huh? You can use Firefox, Bing and another email provider.

Okay, so you want to opt out of all google services and data harvesting.

In addition to replacing chrome, search, and gmail, drive, maps, calendar, youtube, allo, duo, keep, hangouts, etc, etc you must also:

- Never send/receive email to/from anyone else with a gmail address. You're still providing your data even if this one won't affect you directly.

- Block third-party tracking on websites and advertisements which are basically everywhere now, or somehow avoid the websites with tracking. That's assuming this is even possible, and remains possible. Yes there's uMatrix/uBlock et al, but there's also Admiral and Instart Logic et al, and no way to confirm that the measures you're taking are working.

- Settle for alternative services with different and/or inferior experiences. This is hard even if the alternatives are perfectly usable and of comparable quality. Google wins because it has stuff that is more convenient than the alternatives, and usually better quality.

- Don't use Android, the mobile OS with something like 80-90% market share which also happens to be the lowest cost option for a decent smartphone. Oh, you use a ROM without play services? Captive portal detection still contacts a google server to check for internet access and I don't know if there's other stuff like that baked in.

- Know enough to question your trust in google in the first place.

So through a buttload of effort and some domain specific knowledge you can exercise some percentage (probably less than 100%) of your wallet vote which was worth 3/10ths of nothing to begin with. You have to be a tech-savvy idealist to go through with it, and that demographic is never going to be big enough to force a massive corporation to self regulate against their own best interests.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#147

Post by rrix2 »

Steeeve wrote: post #92
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Chromium just a repackaging of KHTML from the KDE project?

Is it really? The last time I played with that it was almost unusable. (must've been more than a decade ago).

WebKit was originall a fork of KHTML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#148

Post by ocdtrekkie »

cbhl wrote: post #142
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with this, that you have to focus on the largest group of users so you can "improve the lives of millions of people" is that it doesn't make sense: Google has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash they literally can't decide how to spend. Clearly, they have enough money to "improve the lives" of more people, so that answer doesn't satisfy. However, the idea that Google is first and foremost a business whi…

In my opinion, the engineers that work on Chrome are the saddest about Alphabet products that are Chrome-only, because it makes it harder to cooperate with Firefox, Edge, and Safari engineers on open web standards. I disagree with the idea that it is unprofitable to not support competing browsers. Just look at United States v. Microsoft Corp. But, as you say, Google is first and foremost a business. As a business, it…

When I say profitable, I'm assuming someone factored in antitrust risk (an all-time low given our current policies here in the US, mind you), as well as the lost customer satisfaction, possibly revenue from users of those other browsers, etc. weighed across the cost of man-hours to support other browsers. Obviously, Google supports iOS quite well, because that platform brings with it a massive amount of users, and hence a massive amount of money.

And FWIW, I recognize that the engineers are usually not the same as the businesspeople who make the business decisions. :)

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#149

Post by mentando »

studentrob wrote: post #119
exikyut wrote: post #112

> It is also fair to say that Google is now in a position where regulation is needed. I sincerely hope that they’ll get back to the straight and narrow. Hah. Even before I read any of this article, just reading the post title as submitted here made me think of something I ponder often: The Microsoft antitrust regulations happened ultimately because Microsoft read the situation wrong and pushed too hard. It's sad to s…

> My suggestion is stifles laughter requiring that Chromebooks provide the option to install Firefox. :D Google should take that upon themselves. I was prepared to refute your suggestion until a quick Google search told me Chromebooks have 58% marketshare in K-12. It's probably much lower across home devices and much lower still across the world, but popular enough that, like Android, it should allow installing compe…

Do Chromebooks actively block you from installing another browser?

I mean I have a Chromebook and I can install crouton and run Firefox.

Or would Google have to provide a "supported" way to install other browsers?

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#150

Post by elihu »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #113
elihu wrote: post #108

It would be great if Google changes their policies and acts responsibly from here on out, but whether they do or not, I think we would all be better off in the long run if there were more competing services. Maybe it's time for a new search engine? (Or a new video sharing site, or a new email service, or a new online ad delivery system, or a new news aggregator, or a new cell phone operating system vendor, or a new I…

> I'm not sure when exactly the PageRank patent expires (people seem to be saying 2017 or 2018), but it will be soon and that should open up some interesting possibilities. You could use it right now. In fact, many do. Google doesn't sue companies for using PageRank or much of their published research. Much more interesting things have come out since then like BigTable (led to Hadoop + NoSQL databases) and Word2Vec (…

Patents are a pretty big threat to have hanging over your company -- Google might not sue other companies for using it now, but they could in the future. At least, until the patent expires.

I realize Google has created more than PageRank, but PageRank is pretty fundamental technology. If you can't use it for legal reasons, that's a big impediment. I don't know how Bing gets around it.

I've never tried using Baidu, but if my main concern is that I don't want a search engine censoring the Internet, then using Baidu is at least as problematic as using Google.

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