Life finds a way
Yarr
I hope **chrome **fails terribly. Just like Internet Explorer(IE). Firefox all the way
Anyone still using Google products is a fuckin idiot, IMO
Removed by mod
I wholeheartedly agree. I’m a technical person, I run Linux as my primary OS and use FOSS software. But I also have a full time job and 2 small kids, and frankly I just don’t have the time or patience to be a full time sysadmin. Proton has come a long way in providing alternatives to Gmail, GCalendar, GDrive, etc., but like you said if you want to replace ALL of Google you practically have to self host a gazillion Nextcloud instances or whatever.
Why does it have to be Mozilla everything? I want Mozilla to continue doing what it does best: build browsers and (maybe) mail clients.
Not everything has to be unified. I’d be quite content with Teehee Photos, Hoho Notes and Huehuehue Assistant as long as they’re decent tools.
deleted by creator
Fully automated or fully integrated? And how do you know? Not trying to be confrontational, but whenever I think a tool doesn’t exist, it totally does. It just isn’t popular enough.
There isn’t. Closest there is is NextCloud, but you need to self host it, since it isn’t E2EE so using a provider would just put you back in square one. Proton is a close second but its still miles away, they have a lot of products but their devs seem to be spread thin between then.
I kinda agree with you. Before my exams I had lot of time. I used to self host nextcloud, email and invidious etc. But during exam had no time to manage instances or update my packages, one after than another they kept showing error and they went offline.
I stopped my VPS and started using Google Drive(it was already available on my android) to share my notes temporarily with friends, soon I kept using it. I hope protonmail becomes better so I can start using them instead of other products
This is how they do it. They wedge themselves in via convenience with the hopes that we’ll stay on their ecosystem eventually.
I hope you’ll soon find the time to regain your independence from them. Best of luck.
What I don’t like about Proton is that I can’t combine Mail Plus and Pass Plus. I don’t need a 500 GB Proton Drive or Proton VPN, but I like their Mail and Password Manager. Now I use Mail for free and Password Manager for €12/year. I would like to pay €3.99/month for the Mail offer, but for that I would have to upgrade to the much more extensive Proton Unlimited.
deleted by creator
I would pay 7.99 for Proton Unlimited. But I can’t pay alnost 200 Euros for it all at once. I’m not a big fan of the huge cost difference between monthly, 12m and 24m subscriptions.
It’s a hard fight between all the time maintaining your own stuff takes and the utter resistance by other users who just won’t learn anything new or use any real security.
Microsoft is arguably worse than Google. They make you pay for the software they use to harvest your data for free.
These businesses should be paying for the data, the raw materials, they collect and use to build their products. You can’t assemble a car without paying for the nuts and bolts, but that’s what they do.
I’m sorry but this sentiment is so utterly detached from the technical capabilities and general engagement of the average layman that it bears a response.
Tech savvy people have this awful habit of calling anyone not in our specific field an idiot when they don’t do things our preferred way, and it’s not a good look. Those people aren’t the weird ones, we are. And if you’re the sort of person who thinks you’ve elevated yourself above the commoners because you don’t use Google’s stuff … yeah, that and 5 bucks will get you a latte. There are oceans of professional expertise you’re not privvy to, and unless you really think you’re doing better than everyone at everything, a little humility, temperance, and grace for others is warranted.
I have to agree with this.
I’m basically “the idiot”. Decently tech savvy, but non-IT. Very capable of learning what I need to know, but I haven’t really had the time or mental capacity to learn how to do a lot of the things I need to to get away from corporate overlords.
I’m working on it, and have been for a while, but in the meantime I do use several google services, because that’s what I’ve been using for many many years and change is really hard. Especially when you have to initiate the change yourself, and especially when you know if you switch to a stop-gap solution you’ll loose all impetus to actually keep making the change (which I will).
The biggest challenge is learning what is worth it to self-host, what hard/software to use for the configuration I want, what’s compatible with devices I own (windows, Linux, iOS and android), etc. I’ve been running Plex for like 10 years now (windows then Linux), but it’s a very basic setup on a host pc I don’t use for much else. Beyond that, I need to learn almost everything from the bottom up, and that’s a lot to learn -just- to avoid an existing company and their existing products that I’ve been using for years. Unlike my Plex content, I would actually care if I lost my other self-host data, so not something to fuck around half-ass with.
I can’t blame people for not wanting to/knowing how to do it. I like learning this shit (because of the end result, not because I have interest in it, sorry not sorry) and I still don’t actually want to do it.
OK, then let’s check my idiocy.
-
Web-browser? I’m using Firefox since the beginning of this year.
-
Email? I’ve an account on ProtonMail for serious stuff, and Gmail for garbage, less serious stuff and spam collector.
-
Cloud storage? Well, unless anyone can gift me a Raspberry Pi, a hub and an ELI5 Nextcloud manual for dummies, I have to keep using Google Drive.
-
Videos? That depends. I’m watching videos on Youtube, but I’m uploading my own content on Peertube.
-
Phone? I need another ELI5 custom rom manual for dummies, and it has to be specific for my device. Otherwise, I’ll keep using Android, but with most minimum usage of Google apps.
I think that’s all.
Can’t fix everything, but Google drive is easily replaced by proton drive. Google notes/keep or any kind of note taking is easily replaced (and improved) by Obsidian, and on android you can install f-droid as an alternative store.
Downside is that these thinks cost money. But everything has a cost, and at least here the cost is clear, and upfront.
-
So basically every software/front-end web dev? Lol ok.
I agree, as I reply on my pixel6 pro
So you don’t have an android phone I suppose?
Pixel phones.
I just wish Firefox would improve their UI and add a few features without needing to rely on extensions (tab groups, vertical tabs, sharing tabs from mobile to desktop, etc.).
Are we seriously sitting here, in the shadow of the open internet’s apocalypse, complaining yet again about Firefox’s UI?
It’s like Superman trying to rescue you from a fire and you complaining about his breath.
There’s no UI in the world that will make the internet bareable without functional ad blockers.
Hey, I switched to Firefox because I liked its UI better (after Quantum though)
I switched back from years with Chrome then new Chromium Edge, haven’t noticed an issue. But everything I do is Ctrl+W, middle-click, and typing into search fields. If I’m using a browser’s UI, it’s for the menu or a bookmark folder.
I can’t really fathom what a browser UI is used for beside this and the less there is of one on-screen, the better.
I left it because their “new” UI, but that was just thelast straw (after 20 years) Won’t go back.
Yes. Because the UI and UX of a tool that you use everyday matters. The average user will hold ease of use over privacy 9 times out of 10. In my case though I wasn’t able to use FF for a while due to the lack of debugger support for a project I was working on. Now it comes down to me having to work on multiple projects at once so tab groups and organization are key. Now don’t get me wrong, once Chrome totally kills adblockers I’ll drop Chromium browsers like a bad habit, but the point still stands though, FF could use some UI improvements.
Id argue on mobile for instance, firefox is easier to use. One of the LARGEST differences between chrome and firefox from a UI standpoint is bottom search/site box over top one, especially for larger phones.
This of course doesnt consider anything related to addons yet.
deleted by creator
Or Mr. Incredible being sued for saving a guy commuting suicide…
Well, super bad breath is not your ordinary bad breath. It would possibly melt your lungs faster than the fire. Bacteria that can thrive in superman’s body is not to be messed with.
Removed by mod
I’m glad to see that even when we’re about to get robbed, there’ll still be humor about it. Grim, but I like it.
I literally swore off Firefox for half a decade because they removed and broke Panorama with their engine rewrite, so yes.
I can send a tab from my mobile Firefox to my desktop Firefox by default, so that’s at least one of those that doesn’t need an extension.
Yeah I thought it had that feature already but I wasn’t seeing it. I’ll have to look again.
On mobile: Hit the three line menu button -> “Send link to device”
On desktop: Right click on a tab -> “Send tab to device”Kind of odd that they’re not the same language, actually. For what it’s worth I’m on iOS so it might be different for FF on Android.
You can also send either direction via the share menu, so long as you have your Firefox account signed in to them.
Is it possible to use it without syncing all browser tabs? I tried to read about it on their website since I want to know exactly what they collect and how they store it but couldn’t find anuthing other than instructions on how to set it up.
I don’t know anything about tab syncing, so I don’t know. Sorry!
Firefox already natively supports most of the features you listed.
Which ones? Besides sending a tab from mobile to desktop it doesn’t have tab groups or vertical tabs. Those features rely on extensions and/or custom css.
Hey you have genuine wants and needs from a web browser and I respect that.
I’ll say though that this sort of attitude (well Chrome has this little thing I like so I allow them to take control of what was once the independent internet) is what is going to screw us.
I use FF. But I also use Chromium based browsers out of necessity. I understand where you’re coming from but what’s also going to screw us is Mozilla not keeping up with the latest features which is something they’ve struggled with. At the end of the day they have to give people a reason to switch and use FF as their main browser. Simply saying “better privacy features” isn’t enough for the average user.
Any tab group extension recommendations? Having issues finding good ones
IMO there are none. They are all janky. Your best bet, (and what I may start doing), is to make separate folders in your bookmarks bar and add any tabs you want in there as a group. Not ideal but it works.
Mozilla I think gets millions from google. At least they did at one point in a deal to set google as a default engine.
They do. The majority of Mozilla’s funding is from Google. That said, they’re still our best hope. I’m sure Firefox has constant internal conversations about how to handle their relationship with Google, and they probably have standing offers from many others to switch to a different search engine.
Except when it doesn’t. That saying never made sense (far more species have gone extinct than exist today) and it doesn’t apply here.
Piracy will continue, obviously, but what we’re seeing here is the creation of an internet we can’t even fathom yet. This is just where it starts.
Also consider how much more difficult it will be for the average person to participate in piracy. Remember a few months back when Microsoft floated they were basically looking to lock down windows? No unsigned apps, no win32, etc. People will get around that, of course, but fewer people will. Especially if they continue with this trend towards stripping options and de-admin-ing all users unless they pay for an enterprise license.
Then there’s the dangerous trend toward encryption being broken by regulation and possibly even VPNs being rendered useless for anyone but businesses. There goes secure torrenting.
The trends don’t look good, across the board. We can’t just sit here and hope it all works out and the loopholes are found, like it always has before.
I am by no means saying we should passively hope that things will work out. What I am saying is that we have no reason to be defeatist. In the same time that we’ve seen aggressive pushes for a more locked down internet, we’ve seen dozens of open source projects to fight back.
It’s my right to have my personal computer display what I want it to display. It’s my right set my device to reject internet traffic I don’t want to receive. It’s my right to instruct my machine to download the data I want, and refuse to download the data I don’t want. If you make something publicly available online, then the public can consume that or refuse that, in part or in whole, as and when they wish. If a company or a browser wants to try and interfere with that, then they’ve chosen their fate.
Monzo? Hmm
And then the plan to force everyone to abandon Firefox whether they like it or not.
- Implement the misfeatures.
- Movie and music websites will be the first to announce requiring DRM to be able to watch movies or listen to tunes.
- The banks will be next. “For your safety, you must use an Official Approved Browser™ to be allowed access to your money!”
- Then ecommerce sites. “You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything.”
- Then comes the social media sites. For your safety, of course…
At that point, the userbase of anything that’s not Chrome or not DRM’d to death will be so eroded that virtually everyone else will abandon Firefox support, DRM will get enabled by default. Also, comes the lobbyists to Congress demanding changes to the DMCA to throw users in prison who dare to try to crack the DRM to block ads. “Ad-blocking is stealing!”
Just means I’ll have the shittiest Chromebook I can buy used, for access to the sites you just listed, and my Linux laptop for everything else. If their non-financial, non-commerce site won’t let me in with my adblocking Linux machine, I just won’t go there. There will be lots of site still, run by us, that don’t do this shit, and they’ll get my traffic.
And I can bet that Google will spy on your home network from that shitty chromebook
Vlans babe!!
They already do that from my Android phone, and I’m sure as hell not going Apple. Linux phones aren’t there yet, maybe in a few years, but I’ll still need an Android phone for the same reasons I’d need a Chromebok, bank apps will never support Linux phones. And yeah, like everybody said, VLANs. I already have one for untrusted IoT devices, I’ll just spin up another for Chromebooks.
Not mine. I have a VLAN for that.
Yeah VLANs seem like a viable option for the average user. ;-)
It’s true, but you can say that about almost anything. For example, for the “average” user lemmy is confusing compared to reddit.
Besides, I’m just talking about how I tackle diseases inside my network, not what the average user should do.
Creating an account on lemmy.world is not much more difficult than creating one on reddit. Configurating VLANs is another story.
I have a router that can do it. Then I realized it felt like work to learn it so I stopped.
Just means I’ll have the shittiest Chromebook I can buy
Google Exec: “But you did buy it, yes?”
Not from them! They don’t make a dime when I buy yours.
Also gotta make sure it doesn’t “expire” or be the sucker buying ewaste that’s “no longer supported”
This right here is what has always scared me. The internet is getting more and more controlled and locked down as the years go on. The general population will not take up for, Linux, Firefox, etc. Neither will the services we now rely upon like banking etc. So we will be forced.
I think it was always sketch from the beginning that governments and educational institutions used proprietary software. Too much money changing hands. Too many opaque business dealings. Too many cogs who don’t care to understand, though they’re not unreachable. Louis Rossman, the Mac repair guy from YouTube has done a lot of pro-consumer, pro-freedom videos lately and a few of my non-nerdy friends have really had light bulbs go off for them.
I don’t think any of this would stop me from using FF for day to day browsing.
2 - At this point I’d just pirate it. I don’t care. If you’re going to be hostile to paying customers, I’m going to be a non-paying customer again.
3 - Separate banking app. Not bothered about desktop banking
4 - Fine I’ll support local businesses where possible, and use dedicated apps or if necessary Chrome (preferably sandboxed) specifically for shopping where not.
5 - Social media was a mistake anyway, already deleted Twitter, I need very little excuse to get rid of Facebook as well.
Honestly I think this is just the end phase of “Web 2.0” as I remember all this shit being labelled at the time. We managed fine with independent forums etc before and will manage again.
Edit: I love the irony that people are killing off Reddit due to API access but the only way I’ve been able to post on lemmy.world is via the website. Connect app? Nope!
Pretty much on board with this plan and already moving that direction step by step. Last year I started my deGoogling process again including switching to Firefox and working towards a gApps free phone. This year I mostly left Reddit. When the YouTube adblock stuff started coming up I’ve been waiting… show me one un-blockable ad, I fucking double dog dare you YouTube.
We’re ripe for a video revolution because content creators might be the only people more pissed at YouTube than the users. I kind of disengaged when everyone started having to imply controversial topics or use similar sounding words. That was too far for me and if I can’t speak freely, or I have to listen to a bunch of people constantly self-censor, I will freely find my way to the door in search of greener pastures.
Facebook popped this shit up on me the other day that said “Your AdBlocker will prevent you from seeing important updates from your Friends! Disable it now.” Important updates from my friends you say? Like the ones where my naive friends like a random super-popular post and get inadvertently subscribed to a page and later that page takes out an ad and my friends name gets put under it like “Billy Bob likes this corporate swill” Never gonna happen. If I can’t use it without an ad blocker I’m deleting what I can and moving on. If I’m paying for a product, I’ll pay for one that puts the benefit to the user as their first priority.
Thanks for letting me rant on your comment. Here’s to hoping the internet somehow gets less shitty. :)
Then ecommerce sites. “You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything.”
I’m actually not sure about this one. Money is money. If I’m a vendor, and a bunch of bots want to give me money, I say bring it on. Why would any ecommerce vendor add that layer of friction, which could actually prevent a user from buying something from them? What’s in it for the vendor?
Seems to me the more likely anti-consumer hell is a points dystopia leveraged by monopolistic companies. Like apple, microsoft, or disney moving to some sort of loyalty points system where you can only buy their products using a currency and credit system that they control. Like, ‘stream this movie using your disney points card’. We’re not far off from that really.
Hi. I finally have the balls to ask, what is DRM? I am kind of a neophyte in all tech matters. But I managed to get out of Reddit because it was full of baits and ridden with apple ads. And so I like this new platform, reminds me of the good old gamefaqs forums days. Hope all this slicker simpler UI from and for users never die…
Digital Rights Management. AKA the stuff that’s supposed to prevent unauthorized copying and suchlike, but in practice just means the pirates have a better experience than legit customers.
deleted by creator
To all of mentioned above from the bottom of my heart
Google is such a bad company. People should discontinue use of all their software and at the very least stop using chrome or chromium. They’ve got the internet by the balls.
I still remember old days, when most coders used to praise google. Their services were amazing and I think one of their old principle was >“Develop good products first, think about monetisation later”
And now it’s later.
I wish google was as good at procrastinating as I am.
Their old principle was ‘don’t be evil’. The fact they no longer say that tells you everything
Somewhere, sometime, there was a meeting at Google where they decided that value would be dropped.
Google sucks for sure, but I keep seeing this claim that they’ve removed “don’t be evil” from their code of conduct.
It’s still there, it’s just no longer the main motto and has been moved from the preface to the conclusion.
You can read it yourself; “don’t be evil” is literally in the last sentence verbatim, lol: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
I stand corrected!
When Gmail debuted and it was invited only 😊
That’s before they went public
The year is 2023, every single major tech companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No. 1. And the only Hero we have is the EU, will it be able to save the day?
We warned you about Chrome. We told you bro.
Google and Chrome really need to be broken up. Maybe people should start writing (physical) letters to the FTC asking to review Google’s recent actions as monopolistic behavior.
It wouldn’t be the first time. But showing the interest is the best way to get the ball rolling that we can do.
Honest curiosity on your answer to this.
Google is the developer of Chromium and the Chrome browser which uses Chromium. Chromium is free and open source (though owned by Google).
I’m not sure how you break up Chrome and Google. That’s literally their product. Who are we giving this to? There are browsers that do not use Chromium (e.g., Firefox and Safari being the big ones).
Companies have gotten broken up before, like AT&T once did many years ago. In this case, a Google breakup would probably separate some of their services into different companies. At the very least Google (the “advertising” company) should be separate from Chrome (the “browser” company), because it creates a conflict of interest and creates monopolistic behavior.
In any case, trying to do something is better than doing nothing and hoping it turns out all right.
Removed by mod
I think the poster is making a good point though- In this split, google the advertising company can freely contribute to the open source chromium. You need some model that leads the chromium maintainer to reject changes like this.
I’m sure there’s some mechanism in antitrust to prevent the broken up companies from doing things like that. Otherwise, a “primary” company would just contract out the old other pieces and they’re basically whole again.
That’s true, I just wonder if open source changes anything, legally. Unless one term of the breakup is “will not contribute to chromium”
Google isnt Google anymore. It’s Alphabet. Alphabet includes Google domains, Android, Gmail, YouTube, chrome, Google search, search ads, play store, fuscia, Google maps, authenticator, chat, classroom, assistant, meet, nest, pixel, waze, Gboard, messages, google tv, Google photos and the rest
Each one of these have their own presidents, their own boards, their own teams. They are all directed by Alphabet.
Removed by mod
Spin it off on their own and survive like Firefox. Browsers make money putting links in the homepage and adding search engines.
How does one do that?
I didn’t include details because I still had to research after the comment, but this page details several methods of contact. The antitrust email looks like a good place to start if you don’t want to mail anything. But physical mail is harder to ignore, it actually has to get into someone’s hands and be dealt with. So I’ll try to write up a letter and send that to maybe the regional office nearest Google’s HQ.
Have people not been trying that for years already? How do we know if there’s a good chance that’ll even do anything beyond get tossed in the trash? ~Strawberry
“Google engineers want…”
No. Google executives want this to happen. Google’s CEO wants this to happen.
They want to change the internet and remove any little bit of freedom for their own corporate profits.
Fuck “do no evil” Google.
The internet is unusable without adblockers.
I’ve tried internet without adblock and it’s almost unusable.
Use Firefox.
Support Firefox.
Using alternative Chromium based browsers is not it.
Alright, today is oficially the day I switch to Firefox
Why’s everyone blaming the engineers lol, pretty sure they’re just doing what they’re told right?
Exactly, headline should be more like “Google executives want Google engineers to make ad-blocking (near) impossible”
Isn’t Google famous for giving a large amount of creative freedom to their engineers (and having a lot of dead published products as a result)? Also, Google engineers are not exactly stuck at their job with little hope of finding anything else to survive.
a decade ago.
I believe that policy was reduced or removed many years ago. Around the time when all the cool new projects stopped, and Google scrubbed “don’t be evil” from their site and company philosophy.
Just following orders is not the ironclad excuse some of you seem to think it is.
Look dude, I hate advertising as much as anyone. I don’t want any TV and most streaming services have wedged in some form of advertising nowadays and I avoid all that.
But equating engineers trying to solve a problem like engineers figuring out how to block ads isn’t really equivalent to murder.
People only get held accountable for their actions and choices when the consequences are equivalent to murder? Their bosses hold some of the blame, sure, but they are not blameless and pretending they are just enables shit like this to keep happening.
They’re still bad people, but this kind of blame has to run uphill. The devs only have the option of quitting, not necessarily of not doing what they’re told.
That being said, I bet there are some Very Good Boys who enthusiastically and proactively suggest some evil shit to the execs.
I mean shit, they aren’t launching nukes here
Doing what you’re told does not relieve you of responsibility for the results of your actions
deleted by creator
Ah yes, because “just following orders” has worked out so well in the past.
That’s right, I just godwin’d this bitch.
The engineers are not blame free, and can do super shady shit too. For example, the issues with the WebHID “broswer” APIs.
Because it is still unclear if this is an official project requested by Google or just some engineers working alone until Google adopts the project.
The chances that a swashbuckling crew of rogue engineers organized a secret skunkworks project to implement their heartfelt, idealistic vision of an adblocker free web are… low.
This is exactly something an engineer who works at Google would want to work on, finding new ways to enrich Google is literally their job and there would be great personal benefit from coming up with the best way to implement this DRM crap for profit
True, but it’s not zero
Software engineers have ethics classes, I’d imagine this would fall highly under unethical, just under building software for the military which google employees have protested in the past.
Software engineers have ethics classes
We do?
It was required for my degree, I’m sure it is required at more than just my university lol
deleted by creator
Sure, its not taught everywhere, it is still something discussed among peers and taught at some institutions. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be seeing engineers doing walkouts and protesting companies decisions.
Not my university. Outside of the engineering classes and prequisites for engineering classes, we only had to take rhetoric and a foreign language.
That’s disappointing to hear. Talked about ethics throughout my courses and one was half the class. Hopefully more professors and instructions sprinkle it in there at least.
deleted by creator
Losing your ad blocker on chrome is “just under” software designed to kill people? Lol really? Oh the oppression
Sure it won’t kill people like programming drones, but it is still unethical and would affect ~5 billion people negatively.
Right, but you said “just under”. There’s a preeetty fuckin wide gap between blocking ad blockers and dropping bombs guy.
- It’s not just ad blockers that is m issue with this. Read Mozilla’s post for a bunch of valid concerns.
- If you read my reply there is a comma prior to the just which makes a pause if it makes it better you could read it as [it’s] just under… Either way I am not trying to make the wide gape you are referring to, I was simply stating it as a matter of fact more ethical then programming for military use but still unethical.
I’m not saying concerns aren’t valid, I just took your comment to be calling it almost comparable to military software.
“…, it’s just under…” means the same thing, but I think you mean “it’s just under” as in “although, it’s under” rather than “just” being a measurement?
Yeah not intending it as a measurement; this comes to mind in situations like this
We waste intelligent minds on this rubbish when we are facing an existential crisis in climate change.
A few decades ago I gave a manager 2 options to solve a problem for the company.
1st was to take a simple engineered approach with a dash of automation to keep our lives simple but I would have to push out previously set deadlines
2nd was to just ignore it until it gets so bad that his managers finally give in to hire someone else to do it and hope that it gets done right after I leave the project
He chose the 2nd. It never got solved. They ended up hiring a vendor who screwed it up and it took a volunteer using unpaid hours on threat of being fired to resolve it.
It was only a few years later he became CIO for a major tech company and I lost all hope in humanity.
Because our economic system is broken. It simply does not allow us to do what is best for humanity in the long run. It’s completely absurd the more you think about it.
Just when I thought the idea of DRM internet couldn’t be any more depressing…
News headline, October 2078
Google finds users are covering their ears and closing their eyes; releases nanobots to force eyes open and lock hands behind back.
I find it disturbing that there are people out there who spend much of their time thinking about new ways to get people to see adverts. Surely it falls under the “bullshit jobs” category that David Graeber once wrote about.
