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22·3 months agoI feels like they either badly copy (see Gemini) or don’t think about what they’re offering (see Stadia’s busted business model) they’re content to milk the existing services they’ve already got and make them worse by cramming in more ads (see YouTube, Google’s search result pages) and they cut out or dictate the web through their monopolies (see AMP and Chrome) rather than working with other parties to make good products.
They feel like Hooli in Silicon Valley, basically the definition of a fat tech giant who doesn’t do any innovation of their own.
I feel the original Chromecast was probably the last truly great original Google product, it was simple, it was inexpensive and it worked - you just plugged it in, joined your network and you were off, there really wasn’t anything like it at the time.
I really hate what they’ve become.
Cool, now do Chrome!
I’m currently using the iOS 18 beta and - during an earlier beta (3 I think) - Screen Time was broken in that it didn’t let you change the settings or extend a session, it would just crash.
This actually made the feature useful! You could no longer just click a button to skip the warnings, you had to actually stop when the time was up. Sure it was a bit annoying but that’s the whole point.
So yea, I’ve been thinking of getting my partner to change the PIN for it so I can’t skip the warnings in the future.
It’s not a bad feature, it’s just often poorly configured and badly implemented.
Apple Maps and Fastmail.
Fastmail is paid but the 1Password and disposable email address system makes it worth it for me.
I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.
The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.
As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.
Arc is weird but pretty good once you get used to it.
DuckDuckGo is good if you want a minimal browser and don’t really care about extensions
Brave is OK if you want a slightly more private version of Chrome
Honestly though, just use Firefox.
The problem was that people weren’t really interested in any of it.
The UI was cluttered and messy to look at, none of it was as polished or natural to use as iOS or Android.
Plus there was no Google Maps, no Google Docs (and Office 365 wasn’t around to replace it), even that apps that were in the store felt pretty bad quality. I had Spotify on my iPhone and it was nearly flawless, when I switched to Windows Phone it kept cutting out or crashing or disconnecting from the mobile connection, it just wasn’t fully baked.
the more traditional style of forums are still around too.
They’re very rare these days though. It’s a whole lot easier to keep all your interests in one place rather than heading off to one forum for gaming chat and another for programming chat and another for gardening chat.
Keeping it all in a single feed means your interest can be piqued at random times and you’ll be more likely to interact.
In the UK at least, switching banks is super easy, I’ve done in twice in the last 2 months because they offered free cash to do so, there is enough competition that the banks have to make it easy to move or else they lose customers.
For government, generally most systems are built to be as accessible as they can be because there has been [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps ](whole raft of legislation) written up to cover this.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t be a problem (power companies etc could prove to be sticky) but there are legal requirements that entities above a certain site have to meet.
The best time to leave Twitter was when Elon took over, the second best time is right now.
I think would be a step too far for most
Oh yea, you could do 1080p or even 800p like a Steam Deck in handheld mode and I think that that would be fine, on a TV it should be > 1080p tho
I can’t be the only one thinking finally…
The Switch was reasonably powered at launch but now feels positively antiquated compared to the Steam Deck and the like, there is no way I would buy any third party games on it right now when I’ve got a PS5 sitting right next to it.
All I need is a good spec bump to get games running at 1440p / 60fps in docked mode to make me happy!
I’m guessing Linus’s investment is safe then :)
Normally I would agree with you, but I often need to use the Postman Interceptor extension which is only on Chromium browsers
Yea, I really liked Edge when it was first launched, clean fast and simple. These days there is so much shoe-horning of Microsoft integrations it just feels like they’re desperately trying to steal all of your personal information
Arc could be amazing but there are some features which just don’t work as I would expect.
As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:
- Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
- Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
- Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
- Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
- Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
- DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
- Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
- Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.
I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!
Tab groups are coming but in the mean time containers work well enough for me with the added benefit that they’ll also block tracking from the sites that are within them.