I think google has been starting to help people in getting investment and money in returns rather than helping people gain important information just like before. It's become monopolized in a way people will think of having money rather than gaining knowledge.
Why I’m done with Chrome
581–590 of 876 posts
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#582Google started going down the path I would describe as an "evil" path years ago. I'm glad people are starting to notice. I used to be a huge Google advocate, up until about 2008. So many things have changed since then. Adsense was the first breach in trust for me, when they banned my account for no reason and ruined any chance of every monetizing my content...since they are basically a monopoly in that area. Getting…
Search for "gun rights" in Google, and the Wikipedia feature box on the top-right of the results page is the Gun Control article. I've noticed the straight search results making a marked decline in quality over the past few months. If one of the keywords within your search is anything remotely profitable, it will drown out all other terms. Then the search results ended after ~4 pages. Definitely changed from the Goog…
Regarding the "Gun Rights" fact box, the different results Bing and Google use here looks to be the results of an edit war[1] over how the page should redirect.
Judging by the text in the box, Google appears to be using a snapshot possibly around June 2018[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_rights&action...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_control&oldid...
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#583Google started going down the path I would describe as an "evil" path years ago. I'm glad people are starting to notice. I used to be a huge Google advocate, up until about 2008. So many things have changed since then. Adsense was the first breach in trust for me, when they banned my account for no reason and ruined any chance of every monetizing my content...since they are basically a monopoly in that area. Getting…
> the video that leaked out [...] of the Google town hall also baffled me Which video?
I think it was after the US election results, senior leadership was discussing with employees what it could mean for them, and what Google's stance would be. Quite reasonable for a company that is open to diversity to reassure their diverse workforce when a president who is explicitly against diversity is elected.
Typical Breitbart trying to create much ado about nothing, I've had similar "town hall" discussions in the UK since Brexit - "what does this mean for our employees? etc"
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strange. I almost exclusively use OSX (El Cap) and haven't had performance issues asides from needing to restart the browser once a month or so. Hopefully they get those problems resolved soon, the browser is super quick when it's working right.
I find that I cannot watch a YouTube video on my MacBook in Firefox for more than 10 seconds without the fans coming on at full throttle. This is one of the few reasons that I start up chrome, as strangely I can watch the same video in chrome without performance issues. I haven't had this issue on Firefox on PC
Google properties are a lost battle.
Google Sheets and Google Docs have been horrible on anything than Chrome for a while as well, and I guess they have no incentive to make that situation change. Firefox is dealing with it better than before I think, but I won’t hold my breath for parity to ever come.
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Haven’t bothered to figure out what triggers Safari to do that Safari has a new extensions model and will be deprecating the legacy one in a year. Hence the push to migrate to newer extensions.
the new extensions model is ridiculously useless... You need to build your extension in Xcode now, and for anything other than content blocking, the APIs are non existent... for instance, you can't even close tabs! I made an extremely simple extension using the new model around 2months - before I try migrating an older "actually useful" extension. But theres just no way its possible to migrate. Apple doesn't care abo…
> Apple doesn't care about browser extensions now, it seems they want everyone to move to the new model, so they can collect revenue on sales on ad blockers.
The web is terrible without a serious adblocker and the available alternatives (paid or not) are unable to take away the same amount of junk. People will simply start using another browser.
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the video that leaked out [...] of the Google town hall also baffled me Which video?
I think it was after the US election results, senior leadership was discussing with employees what it could mean for them, and what Google's stance would be. Quite reasonable for a company that is open to diversity to reassure their diverse workforce when a president who is explicitly against diversity is elected. Typical Breitbart trying to create much ado about nothing, I've had similar "town hall" discussions in t…
I don't agree that the content of the leaked video[0] was reasonable. Google essentially controls information, so they have tremendous power. Their staff have openly called to subvert democracy, which I think most reasonable people find incredibly dangerous. And no, I don't like Trump.
[0]: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search for "gun rights" in Google, and the Wikipedia feature box on the top-right of the results page is the Gun Control article. I've noticed the straight search results making a marked decline in quality over the past few months. If one of the keywords within your search is anything remotely profitable, it will drown out all other terms. Then the search results ended after ~4 pages. Definitely changed from the Goog…
I'm not sure I could define it as intentional and nefarious but I definitely find Google search results to be markedly worse over the last few years. It used to be really competent at finding specialist/technical results but lately it's gotten more generic and less useful. It's possible that's actually the nature of content creation these days, with everyone hyper optimising to please the Google search algorithm. But…
Agreed - Particularly infuriating, is Google’s habit of returning search results with many missing terms, implying that they know whats best for me- ignoring a large part of my precisly crafted search input.
I know there is Verbatim option, but this is another slow step and does not work in combination with valuable time filter.
Wish there was an option to always use Verbatim and more default time filters such as 3 months, 6 months.
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might just be more web pages about profitable products?
Also the people selling things via their webpages are very much more likely to be investing effort in SEO than "non commercial" web pages... (And, as much as Matt Cutts might deny it, it seems inconceivable that Google do not use revenue generated by advertising as a search signal...)
That's part of the issue, but Google also automatically extends your search terms with words that it believes are relevant to your search. I will also give certain words a higher relevance based on what ti believes you are really searching for. Unfortunately this often leads to search result pages full of entirely irrelevant results, while pages containing the exact words in your search term are few and far between, if they are shown at all.
This is my biggest gripe with Google's search engine. It used to be that you could specify exactly what you want to get and it would find it for you. Now it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, so it refuses to show me things I know exist and that every other search engine will find with very simple, straight-forward search terms.
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are on MacOS, why don't you use Safari? I'm puzzled as to why people seem to dismiss the "built-in" browser. It's the fastest, smoothest, best integrated, and least power-hungry browser on the platform. I regularly use all three major browsers (for testing, I write web applications) and I consistently switch back to Safari for all my non-special browsing.
This past weekend I tried Safari again when I saw it updated to version 12. I was surprised to see that Apple deactivated my uBlock Origin plugin, saying it would slow the browser down. So now Safari is unusable and filled with ads, and there's nothing Apple provides to replace uBlock Origin. This is a total show-stopper for me.
You can get the Adblock Plus app, which using the new API.
This is a tradeoff Apple made valuing privacy and performance over user freedom. The new content blocking API is safer and faster.
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has the worst UX. It doesn't show favicons on tabs. It has the worst selection of extensions: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/safari/ . Everything just seems to be worse than Firefox/Chrome from the developer tools to extension development (you need Xcode). To use Safari, you pretty much need to decide that performance / battery life are more important than anything else which only describes my needs when I nee…
Safari 12 can show favicons on tabs now :o) This is how to enable it: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-enable-safari-favicons-on-mac-...
Sadly not for the favourites bar yet, which is the biggest thing holding me back so far. :(
(+ the UI just seems so clunky and old compared to Chrome)