Are they trying to promote Firefox or something? Chrome seems to be trying quite hard to annoy people enough to actually uninstall it.
I'm a high school IT teacher and have some influence over hundreds of students each year. I've already started to sprinkle in some discussion about privacy and will be sure to inform my students about the issues. Of course I won't brow beat my students, but i will encourage them to make informed decisions.
In aggregate, over time this kind of behaviour by google will hurt them. No such thing as too big to fail in tech.
If you're going to the hassle of actually switching, at lest don't do it from one big corp to the next.
Personally I use https://www.webfaction.com and am very happy with it. Also heard good things about FastMail, but Australia has some crazy laws coming so not sure about that. ProtonMail seems solid as well.
However.... re-decentralization resonates quite well these days when it comes to the web. I wonder what it would take to be re-applies to email.
It's trivially easy to get blacklisted as spam that way...
I don’t know where this myth comes from that running your own mail infra means your mail will be marked as spam. You’re not the first (or second or third) person to mention it though.
Aside from Yahoo though, we generally haven't experienced any blacklisting or deliverability issues. It does require time to setup properly and maintain however, you can't just set it up and forget about it.
Can any random adversary easily have you blacklisted just for fun?
Can some Wordpress or other such service you run with your own email get you in trouble?
What about any when viruses (and botnets) in any PCs you have in your company go bezerk with your account?
And so on...
Sure, it's 'easy' to get around, by throwing more money and complexity at the problem, but it isn't some made up tale.
Granted you can't set up your own Google Mail domain for free today like you once could, but some of us are grandfathered in... I am, and I'm still looking at this as a better alternative to Gmail because even though it is Gmail, I can take my address with me if I do ultimately change my mind about Gmail.
(That's the first step, at least. You can never take @gmail.com with you, but if you want to start moving away, you could forward to your own domain and start thinking about where you would host it.)
I've been running my mail server for 10 years now, I got on blacklists 2 times: once due to a worm that got in through PHP, the other was a client's laptop that got a virus and used outlook express to send mail.
So how's that an argument that "it's fine"? Sounds like 2 times more than a regular person would want to deal with such issues within a decade, much less a small company. And it can take long to clear those things out if you're small fish...
But before switching email services, do yourself a favor and ditch webmail interfaces first. Pick up a desktop/native email client and switch to IMAP / SMTP.
On MacOS a solid option for us power users is MailMate (https://freron.com/) ... markdown composer, GMail shortcuts, useful bundles, fast, uncluttered, it's basically what I wanted Thunderbird to be. Development on Thunderbird is apparently ongoing too and they just released version 60. Apparently Web Extensions are in the works too.
Transitioning to a native client is painful at first, but it's worth it.
GMail's web interface is a piece of shit lately anyway.
What kind of emails need markdown composing?
And for formatting in general, the resulting email (composed in MailMate) will be very friendly to clients that prefer to display emails as plain text, since the text version is going to be very clean.
There's also a browser extension working with GMail's web interface too, but it doesn't work as well as MailMate: https://markdown-here.com/
But there's a certain amount of irony that people are ditching Chrome, while still using an OS which literally does spy on you.
When accessing web-sites over a public network, I sort of expect (not necessarily like or agree) to be tracked and others to know what I'm doing. I'm always in the mindset of "what ever I do within this window, others will see" (regardless of browser).
For what I do on my local desktop? No. Not at all.
All this so that I could have an OS that isn't actively spying on me, and play games on it. Thank goodness valve is making progress on linux...
it might be my filter bubble, but if I google "hacker news mac vs windows" the only results I get are posts where people are moving away from Mac to something else[1].
[1]: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/969743/46010063-fa... (that's just the top of the page, but the whole first page is like that).
It's just that. All talk. Including the usual empty threats of "don't piss of the technical people".
Meanwhile, they're still logging into Facebook using Chrome on their Windows machines.
However when someone says "I am moving away from windows because of X" it never hits the frontpage since most people don't care since they are not on windows.
This is obviously not great quantitative research. But if I go into any co working space or coffee shop where people work on their laptops. I find a lot of people on macs, and all the technical ones are on HN. Whenever I meet technical people with a windows laptop they are never on HN.
I thought this was quite well established that HN is very apple'y, so I'm having a hard to come up with proper data to back this up.
What about you? You think the opposite?
I mostly agree with everything you said.
But I speculate, a good collection of today's "chrome leavers" here already use another browser - and are just adding fuel to the fire.
Or, they're not actually leaving chrome - just threatening, because they care.
Haha you got me! I did leave Chrome (for privacy reason) for Firefox. Not during this big debate, but during a previous one (when Firefox came out with the big Quantum update and it started to perform on the same level as Chrome). Though I haven't stated I would leave today.
It's not a big change like migrating to another country. Most plugins have add ons for all big browser platforms. I do think that you'll see a decent amount of people in this discussion on HN change browser. But for Google this is just a blip in the graph.
I'd agree with that assessment, macOS probably first, Linux second, but then you have to remember how many Windows users there are. The HN regulars are probably mostly on Mac/Linux, but I'd imagine just the drive by Windows traffic would put it at the top spot.
Those who leave comments are a small fraction of the total HN traffic.
If you saw the a recent thread which asked people why they stalk HN, you'd understand that many visitors aren't start up guys, programmers or even technical in nature.
In other words, I bet HN's actual traffic log will show mobile devices and Windows as the predominant OS.
10% of their monster revenue is selling your data to advertiser backchannels.
And if you happen know user Y matches user earenndil in a data set you control, now you know user earenndil belongs to demographic Z.
I want to go to an iPhone because Google is starting to really piss me off, but the year with the iPhone keeps turning me away. I wish there were other options.
Anyone knows if Telegram/Signal etc exists for KaiOS or similar?
https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000649/WhatsApp-for-JioPhone-on-...
Wouldn't we expect Bing to log/analyze/correlate user behavior as hard as they possibly can? Or are you betting that Firefox at least won't cooperate with Bing in such an endeavor because it's not a Microsoft product?
It's MSFT, they don't collaborate w/ anyone anyways. Even if they do, it's unsuccessful. /s
Thank you for your service.
https://www.qwant.com/?q=Remove%20firefox%20tabs%20tree%20st...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Remove+firefox+tabs+tree+style+tab...
https://www.bing.com/search?q=Remove+firefox+tabs+tree+style...
How so?
But then hubris and greed have done their usual job now that Chrome is the default.
Personally browse using Safari + FF on macOS.
I personally recommend Bitwarden as a good compromise between security and usability. It's totally open source, so you can run the API and webservice on your own hardware if you want.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-data-a...
I just have to find a Windows computer then :p
Is 1Password able to provide passwords and credit card information inside other apps?
Passwords sync just fine to Firefox on iOS too. No need for a dedicated password manager.
I'd suggest to just try it, it's completely free and pretty straightforward to install after all.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
Or after they (ab)used systems intended for testing features to inject, what's basically an ad? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/lookingglass
And to be honest, unfortunately, I think most of the average users just want features.
That's were google is heading its efforts :)
The people who fix your computers or help you over the phone are the family friends who are geeks/programmers. Once the geek herd has moved on to something else, then the mass follows whatever they're currently using, because they're the ones that advocate the change. It will take a few years, but once Google has lost the geek vote, they will die a slow death like Microsoft did. At this point my money is on Microsoft taking the geek mindshare back.
This looks exactly like what happened when Chrome started killing IE.
For something like Chrome, one price of alienating devs is, among other things, that everyone who thinks "damn, I wish I had an extension for X, I guess I'll make one!" develops it for Firefox instead.
IMHO the vast majority are not interested in understanding in the technology, they just want their stuff to work.
80 years ago if you had a car then generally you'd need some understanding, 30 years ago spark plugs needed changing every 5k miles, points needed cleaning etc etc. Now anyone can hop in a car and without doing anything the first problem you'd probably have is the tyres wearing out.
People don't want to know how or why, they just want it to be reliable and easy to use.
I actually really like this feature and find it really convenient for my usage habits.
I also don't really care that Google is tracking me, I give them my data and in return they provide some really useful services for me. They only thing that bothers me about the privacy issue is the off-chance that an individual will be able to browse my personal data but as long as it's mixed with everything else I don't really care (I understand it's a slippery slope though).
We geeks love to complain about Google invading our privacy yet we eagerly devour their services (search, maps etc...) which are very much as good as they are because of all of the data Google has. If privacy advocates want to keep the moral upper hand they should avoid using Google services altogether (logged-in or not) because at the moment we, the "ignorant masses", are helping Google improve those services with our data.
No, but they _are_ able to better catch spam, categorize your emails for you, highlight the emails that are most important to you, suggest pre-written responses for you, and more -- by incorporating your data into the service.
>Google doesnt need to track me 24/7 to tell me where XYZ restaurant is on the map.
No, but they _are_ able to suggest restaurants you'd probably like, compare them to other places you've been/rated, warn you about traffic on your commute, show you photographic places you might be interested in, and more -- by incorporating your data into the service.
I don't think anyone is arguing that Google _could_ provide these services without using your data. Obviously, they could. I think the debate stems from whether those services are worth the data they depend on.
I wouldn't (and don't: see Google Apps) use any Google service that costs $5/month. In the same vein, if the features of those services got gutted in the name of "we won't use your data anymore", I wouldn't use the services either (assuming I could find a competitor that provides a better service... probably with my data).
I want personalized search. I want the ads I'm forced to see to be things I'm actually interested in. I want Chrome to log me into everything automatically. I want my data synced across all my devices. I want technology to just work for _me_.
Their gain?
- Less of a monopoly status.
Their losses?
- The privacy concerned.
- Ad-blocker users.
- Over-opinionated users.
Good move, for them.
Who knows... if IE was already as good as early Chrome, perhaps there would be no Chrome.
Then they didn't bother to do anything for close to a decade and "suddenly" everyone had passed them.
Google on the other hand seems to be actively making things worse. Might not take so long time for chrome.
One can hope.
But there was competition, that's why they made the original effort. Once the competition was killed, they stopped.
Sure, they wanted it to be the best browser - but not better than desktop.
The desktop was never threatened, most people were on dialup. Javascript was about changing link colors, not creating "software".
Since IE was so much better than the competition it didn't really matter that it got monopoly. Until it stagnated. Same as today, since Chrome was so superior it didn't really matter that all other browsers faded into niches. Until google started abusing it.
Maybe we should start prioritizing open software rather than waiting for a monopoly to be formed?
The reason for why Fusion 360 is "free" isn't because autodesk are nice guys, it's because that's an effective way to ensure that they won't have to deal with competition in the future.
Websites get less money from Firefox users per user then Chrome users. If Firefox users make less money, going to future, devs will not optimize for it.
If the only remaining Firefox users block Ads and block analytics, I do not think google or some other search engine will pay to them to keep their default. There is literally no benefit of having such people on your platform.
Yep.
I have been a FF user since.. well, Netscape. Yet, FireFox-specific bugs have always been a lower priority.
Because, it's "a bug effecting 100 users" vs "a bug effecting 900 users"
When you consider FF users are harder to monetise (admit it, we generally are), you can start saying "a bug effecting ~50 potential customers, vs ~800".
*(fortunately, now that IE/Edge is out of the picture, those types of issues are rare)
I think the main problem with Firefox is the tiny user share, not the composition of said share. We need to make Firefox more mainstream and the problem will solve itself. Unfortunately it's an uphill battle, Firefox is not cool anymore.
This is how Firefox (pre-bloat) gained traction at the expense of IE, and this is how chrome gained traction at the expense of Firefox/IE.
And now this is how chrome's market share will decline as tech leaders, journalists and then the public find out how much of a privacy nightmare it really is.
I just made the commitment to move back to Linux from Windows 10 last week.
I was hoping to at least stick with chromium, now I'm reconsidering that.
Now that I think about it, should I really be trusting Android? Is iOS any better? Apple does appear to show some commitment to privacy, but their anti repair stance is crazy. Will I have to switch to custom Android ROM with all the Google services neutered?
trust apple to make you pay 500 dollaridoos for broken glass back repair when Samsung makes you pay 50 dollars at max. the apple support tax you have to pay is really insane. doesn't help that they basically want every company to follow their model so they can go even more insane(Right to repair laws)
I don’t know for sure if I can trust Apple with my data, but on the balance of probabilities I feel slightly safer with the company that makes its revenue from hardware sales, vs the company that makes its revenue from advertising.
Approximately 99.99% of those people do not know what cookies are, nor do they care.
Handhelds are different, but computers are just like back in the ol' days. This is how IE lost.
By another stat counter, for 5 years from 2004 to 2009, Firefox raised from 2% to 20%, while IE fallen from 95% down to 67%.
Google is behaving like a malware company.
We were in this situation with Microsoft in the late 90s-early 00s. I was glad when they got a slap on the wrist and told to stop taking the piss. I hope the EU will do the same for Google.