I stopped using Chrome a while back, but still use Gmail because I’m lazy. Every time I crank open Gmail in another browser, Google whines at me to use Chrome. That grizzling pop-up is now the main reason I don’t use Chrome, and it will eventually drive me to migrate away from Gmail. DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!
Gmail was so handy because it did a good job at filtering the spam and offered customization. But it’s doing a worse job at the spam and not a good enough one at customization. Where should I go?
Proton mail? Some similar platform?
I’m terrible at maintaining my email but I check it often enough.
I’m trying both Outlook and Proton. I’ll probably go with Proton, but aaaaargh, the thought of all the tedious work involved… I’ve got better things to do!
Until google announces that adblocks will be blanket removed from chromium as well. The truth is the only company big enough to maintain a fork this different, is Microsoft, the question is will they feel like they should, or will they side with Google, since this is by their interests as well…
A browser is not like a social network though. There’s barely any difference in practical terms between Chrome and Firefox. Once you’ve switched there’s no reason to go back.
As long as there is suddenly a new pinned tab with irrelevant info or an unskippable pop up about the new color schemes or data grabbing websites pinned to the top sites or the company firing half their developers even when their CEO gets another pay raise or…
Desktop runs great, but Firefox on Android seems to be noticeably buggy here and there sadly. I still use it, but I can imagine that might drive people out of the ecosystem.
Many people get used to the synchronization of their passwords / bookmarks cross-channel. More advanced users have a separate password management for this I’d figure, but that’s not the default for 90% I’d guess.
I’ve never had a single issue with Firefox for Android and I’ve run it on all my phones for like 6-7years at least, probably more but I don’t remember.
It doesn't play super nice with foldable phones. The UI doesn't adapt correctly without restarting the app and you end up with a very dense interface of overlapping buttons if you try going from open to closed. The address bar becomes completely blocked by all the extra buttons from the tablet layout, so the app is unusable.
You may think so but there’s always a bunch of posts about why people can’t switch out of chromium in every other Firefox related posts. There are few significant differences and some don’t wanna make any compromise for something better.
I heard from someone who uses a shit ton of tabs in Chrome which Firefox doesn’t do as well apparently. But I’ve been a FF guy for as long as it’s been around and i hate open trans so
Agreed, I think they’re hedging on the amount of people who leave will be less than the increased revenue of those who stay. Considering the ones leaving were never going to allow as revenue anyway what do they really lose?
This is why I don’t understand why anyone tech savvy isn’t using Firefox. There’s literally no cost. From a user standpoint they’re basically the same thing. The one that isn’t made by an evil monopoly is just the obvious choice.
And thus, entropy is presented. Even if only 10% go to Firefox, thats still 10% that aren’t going back to Chrome. And if this repeats with similar results, as you imply, that 90% going back to Chrome is gonna be a lot smaller a few iterations from now.
Until they use their multiple monopolies to further cripple the experience for competitors, entrenching their dominance, and allowing them to force their proprietary standards on the internet, killing any remaining pretence of Internet freedom.
There were people back in the day who thought that the internet was that fancy E on the desktop (internet explorer) and would have their brains melt when trying to explain alternatives. I think that people now have this problem with a fancy G.
Not sure they understand the flow on effects. Those of us being affected and work in the corporate IT space who have a lot of say in what browsers are used will simply replace chrome with Firefox on our thousands of machines nationwide without a second thought. They are digging their own grave.
You can script that i believe. We had multiple fuckup in our company due to poorly missmanaged browser migration.
Im in a top500 and they swapped browser to like 30% of the population without informing local IT as a test. Many people lost bookmarks I always run a firefox in parallel (against company policy but they are too bad to find out)
It won’t do anything to their market share. At work my colleagues keep asking me “Why don’t you use chrome?” or saying things like “Isn’t Firefox slow?”. They simply don’t know or don’t care to know. Also Firefox IS slow or just doesn’t work, not because it’s a bad browser but I’ve been seeing a trend of websites being designed to make it appear slow, like YouTube takes 5 extra secs on Firefox to load videos Clipcham and Adobe outright not supporting Firefox on their websites. The internet is a clown show.
This is now a balancing act to see how much they can cripple the internet for their own benefit without affecting market share enough that it hurts long-term profitability.
They won’t make people disable uBlock. They’ll just make it stop working, and people will just think the ads have gotten better or uBlock has gotten worse.
I guess the idea is that if a person is giving you zero ad revenue, then them switching to a diff browser instead of removing ad blocker doesn’t change your equation.
But if any of them do just turn off the ad blocker it’s a win…
However I’m not sure if they lose other revenue because they don’t use chrome (like data tracking info)
Ublock is so good at being 'set and forgettable I’ve gone beyond just suggesting it to friends and family who aren’t very tech literate, and just installed it for them. I’m sure I can’t be the only one. But these people would likely go straight back to consuming ads rather than try to figure out why their ad blocker stopped working. That’s sad but it’s true.
Back before web browsers had ad-blocking extensions, we had programs like Web Washer. It was a local, ad-blocking proxy program that you ran along side your browser. To use it, you just changed your browser’s network settings to point to Web Washer. And the ads would be filtered before they even reached your browser. It would be no problem to implement this again.
It’s a proxy though, so it could inspect the actual content, detect ads and do something about it. Peertube, Grayjay etc bypass ads just fine so I guess it could be done with the webapp?
If I learned one thing, when talking with people about stuff like that: Most people unfortunately don’t care. Many don’t even have an ad blocker to begin with.
The people who don’t care and don’t have an adblocker aren’t and weren’t ever the target. The people who are being targeted have an adblocker, and they’re all moving to FireFox.
What Google is getting out of this most of all is future compliance as new users coming to Chrome will never know a world in which ad blockers were freely available on Chrome, as well as dog whistling this to other corporate browser vendors.
Don’t forget they’re pushing chrome on the whole internet. Websites are already telling Firefox users to fuck off if we aren’t spoofing chromium and it’s only going to get worse after this.
Look, I was among the glorious warriors who installed Firefox on his parents/grandparents PC and replaced its shortcut’s image with IE’s one (because old people hate changes and won’t accept it easily)
Oh again! They keep changing my Google internet!
Yes grandma, it’s Windows… (« It wasn’t Windows » says the narrator in a deep and mysterious voice) Do you want me to install Linux? It’s free and open source and…
Keep that commie thing away from me, I like that meadow picture…
You know you can change th…
Don’t you dare!
Anyway. We did it. We killed IE hegemony. It’s up to the new generation to take the baton and fight against the tyranny of Google.
The idea of installing Linux on a grandparent’s computer is just asking for trouble. I convinced my father in law to give a Chromebook a try since he mostly just uses his computer to get online and boy, was that tricky. The average person has no idea what an Operating System is and will call you the minute they can’t install a new program for some reason.
I had a very successful experience! My grandmother had no idea how computers worked at all, so I set up a very stripped-down Ubuntu that didn’t even allow multiple windows open. I could easily remote in whenever she had an issue.
She used it to check her email, read the news, and watch Obama’s weekly address until the week she died. (Unrelated to the computer)
I feel like there’s a curve of where this could work. For the extremely technically illiterate or technically literate, you’d be ok. But for the middle chunk of the population, it’d be more confusing than it’s worth.
I know you are right about all of this, and yet I will still watch shows like the old Addams Family while I’m doing something else just to have a distraction
I still have a couple shows I enjoy despite the laugh track… Just in general I would prefer not to watch them, and I’m unlikely to give a new show half a chance if it has one.
“rolling laughter” is a technique you have to learn as a live performer for a reason. TV shows at the time had to bridge the gap as the 80s/90s invention of stand up as an art form set the tone for how comedy should be.
It’s not that it was always bad, it’s just that culture changed. Same as how a Jacobite audient would find it real weird we watch theatre inside(!), sitting down(!!) and not talking during the show(!!!).
An episode of the IT Crowd had a B story that was kinda transphobic. It was minor enough and the show was popular enough he probably could’ve easily just apologized and that would’ve been that. But instead, in 2013 after said episode was brought up and criticized for being transphobic to the creator, said creator tripled down and became a full on anti-trans “activist” who makes even JK Rowling seem benign by comparison.
It doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere, so anyone who doesn’t have an excessive amount to spend on a TV series won’t be giving any profits to the creators.
Google used to be like “we have found 10 quadrillion websites with your term” and you could click page 173 and it would give you the list for as many times as you wanted to click
Then they went to giving you several pages but if you clicked past page two they would be like hahaha psych there are actually only two pages of results for “starcraft two newbie tips”
Now I’ll search for specific phrases I know I read somewhere and I’ll get like, three god damn results.
Which makes this even more annoying. Like you have good chunk of the world using your browser with ads, but you still want even more and are still taking these types of scummy actions.
A big enough hit if 42% of Chrome users switch to a different browser.
However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that people with adblock are more likely to use something other than Chrome. And some people will stay with Chrome and deal with the lack of adblock.
Nah, there’s a big difference between what and how much you’re allowed to block in V2 vs V3 - the current status V2 adblock is way outside the range of V3’s version.
I’d say V3 blockers can probably block at best 30% of what V2 can block. Which means it has to be selective. It essentially nuders the extension, making it worthless - an adblocker that only blocks some ads is not an adblocker at all. It’s more of an ad restrictor, and in heavily monetized sites it might not even be that.
Random article I found said about 26% of people in the US use adblocking services. Working on the assumption that’s reasonably accurate, that’s a pretty big chunk of ad revenue.
What platforms does chrome come as default on? I know it’s on google products like pixel, but mac and pcs still have safari and edge, right? What kind of people know enough to get a non-default browser and not enough to get adblock?
The majority of people on Chrome at this point are the same people that only ever used Internet Explorer until like 2015. They aren’t even using Ublock, they don’t even know what it is. The kind of people who have their nephew set their computers up for them.
The last straw for me was about a decade ago when an update completely broke Chrome on my machine. It would open and immediately crash, even after reinstalling. Everything else worked fine, virus scans came back clean and everything, it was only Chrome. I spent the next 2 months playing browser roulette before settling on ol’ reliable Firefox once again.
They have done shitty things to Gmail before, such as forced Google+ integration, with backlash as expected. They are shutting down the basic HTML version soon, too.
The IMAP support has been more or less broken since the very beginning. Their custom labels make folders behave in a non-standard way and the IMAP itself is terribly slow compared to every single other provider I've used. I used to have dedicated workarounds in my email automation scripts for their weird folder semantics, for even such trivial tasks as actually deleting an email as opposed to merely removing a label from it.
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