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Are they trying to promote Firefox or something? Chrome seems to be trying quite hard to annoy people enough to actually uninstall it.
by NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Are they trying to promote Firefox or something? Chrome seems to be trying quite hard to annoy people enough to actually uninstall it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- smt88 8y agoOnly a small fraction of Chrome's user base will notice, and not even all of those will care. There are likely tech-savvy people reading this on Chrome 69 right now.
- diakritikal 8y agoOffice of 20 here. Now almost everyone's in agreement that we'll move off Chrome. And we'll recommend our families and friends do the same. 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.
- phire 8y agoI'm slightly annoyed. 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?
- akie 8y agoWith regards to privacy I trust Apple more than Google, if only for the fact that their business doesn't operate on the principle of violating your privacy.
- kkarakk 8y ago>I trust Apple more than Google 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)
- ardfie 8y agoI started using an iPhone, partially to get away from google services. 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.
- mike22223333 8y agoSame here. Recommending my family, team and relatives to either use Edge or Firefox. Of 70 of them, 15 switched to FF, 32 to Edge, just after 2 months of me saying.
- kryptiskt 8y agoMaybe, but what if this crosses over into mainstream news? Is Google prepared for that battle?
- sbr464 8y agoI agree and disagree. They didn’t get to where they are now by playing games and leaving major design decisions to seemingly the intern marketing dept. I think it’s safe to assume that information/sentiment moves much more quickly in these modern times. I second the recent HN comment that mentioned why Google chose this particular hill to die on.
- pnenp 8y agoWorked for me. Switched to FF because I just can't trust Chrome anymore. FF feels like a breath of fresh air.
- ux-app 8y agoYup, same. Switched to ff and bing. Was surprisingly frictionless. Next week I'll be off gmail too. Up yours google. The week after, I'm getting rid of my android phone. 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.
- danielecook 8y agoWhat will you replace gmail with?
- jakecopp 8y agoFastMail looks like a good option!
- ux-app 8y agoTesting proton mail. If mail delivery is solid then that will do, otherwise outlook.com will be good enough. I'm ungoogling my life and strangely enough, MS is the less bad option right now.
- calv 8y agoIf you have your own domain I recently found Migadu from HN like a day or two ago in another discussion. (and I love them already)
- CaptainJustin 8y ago
- nailer 8y agoIt's hubris. Right now Google know they have the power to shape things the way Google want. That's true, but it's also true that users are more powerful than Google, becoming increasingly aware of the value of their privacy, and that Chrome is paid for with their data.
- KeitIG 8y agoIn the the end, it is just a problem of privacy VS features. And to be honest, unfortunately, I think most of the average users just want features.
- beavis2 8y agoPossibly. Their gain? - Less of a monopoly status. Their losses? - The privacy concerned. - Ad-blocker users. - Over-opinionated users. Good move, for them.
- troels 8y agoI'm sure Microsoft had the same reasoning about IE.
- beavis2 8y agoIE lost users because it was abysmal. And the reason for that was they wanted to keep people on the desktop. Who knows... if IE was already as good as early Chrome, perhaps there would be no Chrome.
- tjoff 8y agoIE 6 was superior in every way, there truly was no competition at the time. 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.
- beavis2 8y agoNot really. IE's "killer feature" was ActiveX. Which meant that any browser limitation could be worked around. 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.
- tjoff 8y agoActiveX wasn't really used outside of enterprises. It was also used for creating wave-effects on an image, cool stuff. 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.
- GuiA 8y agoDo you think they care that techies get annoyed at Chrome? If you’re browsing google.com - which most people on the internet outside of China are doing - without Chrome, you get an intrusive notice telling you that installing Chrome is the best thing you can do. Approximately 99.99% of those people do not know what cookies are, nor do they care.
- pmlnr 8y agoThey don't care directly - they care because it's still the same old world where techies install and configure the browser for them on their computers. Handhelds are different, but computers are just like back in the ol' days. This is how IE lost.
- beavis2 8y agoIf that where the case, FireFox would have overtook IE.
- snaky 8y agoAnd that was the trend clearly. Back in 2008 Firefox had 33%, and IE 59.4%. Basically, Firefox was unstoppable before Chrome started. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers 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%.
- Lio 8y agoIMHO When you've got a company as large as Google that is able to do things like openly use dark patterns to trick users into giving up their location data and 99.99% of people aren't aware or use their dominant search page to nag users into using a browser that won't respect privacy setting or remove Google's tracking cookies that's the point you need to start thinking about government intervention. 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.
- amelius 8y agoNope, they are just finding the theshold at which 5% of people gets annoyed to the extent that they will switch browsers.
- napolux 8y ago90% of people won't care / aren't able to understand the issue. That's were google is heading its efforts :)
- laichzeit0 8y agoThis doesn't matter. 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.
- someone454 8y agoMS? Not! There’s too many of us older geeks that still remember MS and their attacks on Linux.
- manigandham 8y agoMicrosoft is anything but dead... where did that statement come from?
- Bartweiss 8y agoFor that matter, Apple aggressive marketed to the techie-and-designer crowd for years, even while everyone knew aiming products at programmers was far lower margin than mass-market stuff. The payoff wasn't bottom line profits, it was cachet and technical support and useful software that ran nicely on Macs. 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.
- Steve44 8y agoI'd say 95% of people are happy that their accounts are all synchronised and follows them around. They pick up any device and carry on where they left off, similar to how Kindle bookmarks are synchronised across your devices. 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.
- Daniel_sk 8y agoI switched to FireFox yesterday with zero issues and works like a charm (including 1Password and uBlock Origin integration).
- Svenskunganka 8y agoTheir mobile app also has support for extensions such as uBlock Origin, which is lovely.
- Daniel_sk 8y agoI went with Safari browser on iPhone + 1Blocker X(one time payment of $5?).
- christophilus 8y agoYup I switched to FF, despite its poorer performance (on Mac, anyway). My personal mail is Fastmail. My search engine is DDG. I do use Chrome for debugging web applications, as I just haven't been able to get myself accustomed to the FF dev tools... That's probably what I'll work on next.
- yoran 8y agoUnfortunately, the average user (I'm picturing my mom) doesn't give two shits about Chrome not deleting Google cookies when clearing data.
- your-nanny 8y agoit looks like they are deleted. just immediately recreated.