821–830 of 848 posts
You have to be able to trust your tools. Imagine if “rm” just decided to occasionally set aside files instead of removing them. The “star” in “rm star” means “remove everything”, not “remove, asterisk” where at the bottom of the page the asterisk lists exceptions like some kind of marketing weasel. Sheesh.
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Logging into your browser is not the same as logging into all the sites you use. And you certainly don't need browser login to enable it - just use OAuth. This is a solved problem.
I suggest you try spending a few hours in my support channels. The problem is that users are confused by the fact that "logging into your browser is not the same as logging into all the sites you use". You can literally sign into chrome with one google account and then sign into google with a totally different google account. Futhermore chrome has different "people" (browsing profiles) which confuses them even more;…
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Not everyone is in a position to walk away from a job in hopes to land a new one in a week. People have families, bills, obligations.
No, but most everyone at Google is in a position to be financially responsible and put aside a bit of money each paycheck for emergencies and/or decisions like this.
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I suggest you try spending a few hours in my support channels. The problem is that users are confused by the fact that "logging into your browser is not the same as logging into all the sites you use". You can literally sign into chrome with one google account and then sign into google with a totally different google account. Futhermore chrome has different "people" (browsing profiles) which confuses them even more;…
It seems to me like you provided no arguments how is login-into-browser feature clarifying things. You even mentioned people being _confused_ about it. People don't need to understand oauth to use it. (and before you pull that one again - I am supporting technically-illiterate people quite often)
I should also mention, there's another place it gets used - in Chrome extensions. That should use the same identity.
Google login then becomes one reasonable choice for "log into the internet". Right now it's too fractured to be a coherent identity.
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This is one thing that I genuinely have never understood: if it's this challenging (and effectively impossible for non tech savvy users) to make android devices safe / private / secure and also feature-complete - why, oh why are so many people still using them? This is not me fanboying Apple, it's just sort of mind boggling to me. This is from someone who used a nexus 6p for two years, and some older stuff before tha…
Coming back to iOS from Android can be painful - there's too much "you're holding it wrong" mentality in the platform and its UX. If your use cases fit the design, everything's great. The moment they don't, it's extremely frustrating. (This is very similar to Windows vs macOS, by the way.)
And very similar to Linux vs. Windows for that matter. :)
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This is one thing that I genuinely have never understood: if it's this challenging (and effectively impossible for non tech savvy users) to make android devices safe / private / secure and also feature-complete - why, oh why are so many people still using them? This is not me fanboying Apple, it's just sort of mind boggling to me. This is from someone who used a nexus 6p for two years, and some older stuff before tha…
If you think it's "challenging" to use Android devices without Google, you should try using your iPhone without Apple. At least with Android you have the option of installing a custom ROM based on AOSP with no Google services.
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I'm not OP but I've been an Android user since the release of the T-Mobile G1 and have been trying to get rid of Google stuff for a while: > All android devices? No, not all Android devices. Only the ones with the Google Services Framework installed (or, if you're as paranoid as I am, any other Google service that is running as root). To give you an overview, Google's power over Android users basically rests on the f…
Damn, that sounds like a lot of work and still easy to make a mistake and let something through.
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I'm not generally a fan of the privacy hysteria around Google/FB, etc. But I think the solution here is pretty clear: Don't build a login system for your browser. It's inherently confusing.
It's inherently confusing. Rubbish. What's confusing is having a zillion usernames and passwords for every site on the internet, and "doing it right" (which only a tiny percentage do) requires installing password manager extensions in your browser. In practice billions of users use the same insecure password everywhere including their banks. You may or may not like the implications of centralizing authentication to a…
That should be OS level. The fact that the OS does not provide good, lightweight ways for mortal users to whip up additional user-accounts for guests and family-members without breaking a lot of things should not mean that Google makes their own into the browser and adds yet-another-layer-of-login.
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No, but most everyone at Google is in a position to be financially responsible and put aside a bit of money each paycheck for emergencies and/or decisions like this.
Not really. People could be in debt, people could be taking care of their parents or other family members. You are making a lot of assumptions because you think everyone who works at Google is rich.
"I have to do something immoral or I won't be able to feed my family" is not a position they're likely to be in.
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Everybody at Google, for anything they do, should ask a simple question on any proposal ... how does this impact user privacy for those that care? Given Google's size and power it's irresponsible for them to not do so. And given that there are really smart people working for Google, including a whole department working on analyzing the threats and preserving user privacy, I won't believe for a second that nobody thou…
This idealism reminds me of a post I saw here a long time ago about a software developer union. One of their stated goals was "to advocate for people whose job was displaced by automation". Both read to me immediately like high octane, weapons grade, 200 proof naiveté. "Everyone at UPS, for anything they do, should ask a simple question on any proposal ... how does this impact bicycle couriers?" "Everyone at Amazon,…
This to me is the social contract that binds our relationship as consumers with these companies.
If I cannot trust them, it means I can no longer recommend Google. And I already stopped recommending Google's products a while ago. What changed now is that ... I'm actively recommending against them to everyone I know and that is using a Google product that I happen to notice.
Of course, I'm a single individual, I can only influence my friends and my Twitter followers maybe, and I'm sure most of the time I'm preaching to the choir.
But I felt that way when I was recommending against Microsoft, since 2005. And guess what, enough people started to do it and it started eroding on their influence and market share, coupled with their own blunders of course, the classic "inovator's dilemma".
And as a datapoint, I think one of the primary reasons for why Windows Phone was a failure was because developers rejected it, due to it coming from Microsoft. Now you can talk all you want about market share, monetization and tell people that developers go where the money is, but I remember people hacking for Android phones ever since they hit the market and it took a really long time for Android to become barely profitable for app developers (it still isn't actually), not to mention a worse experience compared with Apple's APIs, yet developers embraced Android. Thus that lost sex appeal and trust that Microsoft had back in the days of Windows 95 was lost and they still haven't recovered, which prevented them from getting a foothold in a market that really matters for their future.
Nowadays Microsoft is doing fine, but they had to make some drastic changes to regain the lost trust, as they were going downhill, even if it wasn't necessaril and please notice that in spite of their best efforts, they still haven't regained that trust. Notice what happened when they acquired GitHub. Not the kind of reaction you expect when you buy something for 7.5 billion. Although I'm sure people will get over it soon, if they don't screw it, like they screwed Skype that is.
So you know ... I might be idealistic, my colleagues too, but judging by HN's reaction and the reaction of people I follow on Twitter, to me it's clear Google's image has changed and it does matter because we can influence their future.
Companies can choose to not care. But that's how they eventually become irrelevant.