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You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternative

You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own server. Not to mention, I would tip my hat to Google for forcing every one of these "alternatives" to be better, because before Google, these services sucked. AOL sucked. MS sucked. OSS sucked. Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome. These are not the alternatives you're looking for. People should definitely care about their privacy, and they should definitely live on platforms that encourage interop. However, these articles focus far too much on trying to frame Google as some evil actor, when we could be championing everything Google has done well and how their competitors -- alternatives -- should be doing better.

J_Darnley 13y ago
> Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome. Sorry but the influence of Chrome on Firefox has been universally negative perhaps with the exception of performance.
- jmgrosen 13y ago
  Such as?
  - J_Darnley 13y ago
    Hiding protocol in the URL bar. Fading the server "file path" after a domain name. Tabs in the title bar. Non-native look. No menu toolbar. Status bar. And those are just the ones I'm aware of.
    - richardwhiuk 13y ago
      Tabs in the title bar is a better UI decision. The URL box belongs to the tab, so it should be part of the tab. Your objection here seems to be 'Firefox mimicked Chrome and this is a bad thing', rather than these things being objectively bad.
      - barrkel 13y ago
        Tabs in a treeview is better again, and is not possible with Chrome. I also object to the lack of a menu bar, for bookmarks in particular. I have an extension that emulates it, but nothing that can properly emulate treeview tabs - I can't imagine ever going to a browser without this.
        Kerrick 13y ago
        > I also object to the lack of a menu bar, for bookmarks in particular. It does have a menu bar, with bookmarks in particular. http://i.imgur.com/awPDYp4.jpg http://i.imgur.com/awPDYp4.jpg
        jasonlotito 13y ago
        While Chrome has a menu bar for bookmarks, your screenshot does not in any way show that.
        barrkel 13y ago
        I'm using it on Linux and Windows.
    - mwfunk 13y ago
      Those things are all subjective, plenty of reasonable and clueful people will disagree as to whether any of those are good or bad things (or neither). When you say something like... "the influence of Chrome on Firefox has been universally negative" ...that's saying a whole heck of a lot more than, they made some UI decisions that were personally disagreeable to you but not necessarily to other people.
    - xwei 13y ago
      Lookup, did they hide the "https:// https://? And why NOT hide the "http:// http://? Oh, I see, You are kidding right? :D
      - J_Darnley 13y ago
        Sorry, you are right. Firefox does not hide https. My bad, but in my defence I've only used new Firefox occasionally.
    - riquito 13y ago
      What operative system are you using? On GNU/Linux - http / https are visible in the url bar - tabs are under the url bar (and under any other bar you activated) - menu is still there - status bar can be toggled on/off
kenkinder 13y ago
As the OP, let me respond. I'm not suggesting that Google is evil. What I am saying is, these products don't work for me and the reason they don't work is that they aren't interoperable with my own desktop software, or the rest of the Internet. I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer. I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk. I used to use Listen and Reader. I'm only looking to migrate off Voice because it's not going to be available. I was pretty perturbed when all of a sudden, anyone I ever emailed appeared as a pre-approved contact on Talk. So, it isn't about Google being evil or not. Google has a responsibility to its shareholders to make money, and I trust that they're trying to fulfill that mandate as well as possible. In doing so, they've shifted their portfolio of properties into a closed ecosystem that does not appeal to me as a consumer. At this point, I imagine most alternatives suck because there's really no point in going up against free and awesome. Case in point: Reader. Reader really was awesome, and it had no competitors because no one would bother competing with it. I imagine that as Google does offend more of its users, some competition might heat up, but I'm well aware that for most people, none of this matters in the slightest. It's a narrow cross section of geeks who notice or understand any of this.
- magicalist 13y ago
  > I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer. What's the software? Google CalDAV support isn't actually going away, it's just switching to a whitelist, so depending on your client, it should be fine. I don't know how that's going to work exactly (is it just an API key? how will that work with open source calendaring software like Lightning?), but if it's even moderately actively maintained software, it's likely that they've already applied for access. > Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection (from the article) Just FYI, they turned federation back on shortly afterwards. Of course, it's being dropped for the new chat system, but it's worth getting that right. > Fastmail is owned by Opera Software and operates both free and paid tiers of service As others have pointed out, there is no free tier, just a free trial. And if you're going to pay for it, I don't really see the difference between that and going full Google Apps, but that's just me. (edit: ah, apparently there used to be a free tier, but no longer) Regardless, paying for the services you use is a good thing, both for getting better guarantees for service, and for teaching the market that ad-supported services aren't the end-all be-all, that we can have other business models, and maybe even a diverse market of them to support different uses and different requirements.
indubitably 13y ago
That's charitable but Google really has been behaving as an evil actor lately. Just because they have essentially unlimited resources doesn't mean that they should be immune to critique.
- thezilch 13y ago
  No, it's not evil to make or ask for money to use your product; it's not evil to discontinue services, especially not with 6-24 month advanced warning; and it's not evil to literally want to be the omnipresent center of everyone's lives. How exactly is Google evil? Their resources have not stopped lesser alternatives from doing business, even with a core product (eg. search) of their's, so it's not that. DuckDuckGo is doing quite well with search; those conversations usually talk about quality and speed of results, not on how Google is the new Altavista and how you should switch before Google deprecates HTTP for GTTP.
  - nsmartt 13y ago
    Google used to support openness, and now it is being less open, and therefore less "good". A step in a direction that is less "good" is a step towards "evil". It's not unreasonable to say that Google is being more evil. It's not a stretch to say that Google can't be trusted not to be evil if they've moved in a more evil (or less good) direction.
    - tomkarlo 13y ago
      I think you're applying a a value judgement to a technical issue. "Open" pertains to the nature of certain software and standard. It's not inherently good or evil; you're just choosing to assign that value based on how it correlates with the world you'd like to see. I'd prefer things be more open too, but I don't agree that being less open is somehow inherently "more evil." You can have an entirely non-open company that's totally "good" - good/evil is about the actions of the company, not the wording of its license.
      - nsmartt 13y ago
psbp 13y ago
No one has enough interest to simply leave a pretty compelling ecosystem, so you have to couch it in a way to makes it sound like an ethical imperative. You know, for blog views.
- magicalist 13y ago
  That's probably partially true, but that's not really true on HN. Every thread on "Google shutters product X" has at least one person asking for alternatives to gmail et al. I almost wish we could pin a story like this just to cut some of those comments. There are days when there will be multiple stories on the front page at the same time with comments asking, "what are the alternatives to gmail?" with the inevitable, "well, fastmail is a good choice" and then someone will bring up running your own server, and then someone else will respond about spam and blacklisting and downtime, and someone else will say something about they've been doing it for 5 years and it's not that hard, etc etc etc
  - brongondwana 13y ago
    I ran my own mail server for 5 years, and it wasn't that hard - but then I didn't do much with it. A system with 3 users and not corresponding with anyone outside a few systems it easy. Running fastmail's servers is some orders of magnitude harder.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
6d0debc071 13y ago
> Not to mention, I would tip my hat to Google for forcing every one of these "alternatives" to be better, because before Google, these services sucked. AOL sucked. MS sucked. OSS sucked. Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome. Opera was pretty awesome before Google turned up and release Chrome.
Spearchucker 13y ago
MS sucked This is not going to be a popular view, but here goes anyway... Depends. I've been using Outlook Web Access since it was first released. Granted, you need Exchange, but these days Outlook.com provides similar functionality (or so I'm told - I use Exchange Online now). That said, the most useful calendar I've found is Family Room on Windows Phone. I share it with my girlfriend, who has an iPhone, and it works insanely well for us. I have to use Gmail at work, and find it to be the most obtuse email UX I've ever encountered.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- thezilch 13y ago
  Buy and run a server, Windows Server, Exchange, IIS, in 2003? Did you just tell me to go fuck myself? [0] I think MS has made up a lot of ground and is comparable to Google, for online services, in a lot of ways, but they're not better and would probably be on the same end of the stick, if they commanded the same lead Google does for these services. [0] http://browsertoolkit.com/fault-tolerance.png http://browsertoolkit.com/fault-tolerance.png
  - Spearchucker 13y ago
    I had MSDN and TechNet subscriptions, and because I was doing a lot of work from home had an old desktop set up as a server anyway, so the cost was low. DynDNS made it easy to host out of my house. Microsoft's online services are better than Google's. I could list a million and one reasons ranging from being ad-free, document fidelity in Office and the fact that I can't sort my Gmail inbox by sender. And while it has its faults, I have not found a better email client (UX and functional breadth) than Outlook. Here.com is better than Google Maps (true offline being a big deal for me), and Here.com's Transit app is the best public transport app I've found[1]. I don't know how SkyDrive stacks up against competitors, because SkyDrive is good enough for me. Why exactly do you think Google is better? [1] It amused me to see Google's transit implementation in Google Maps - it's a horizontal version of the vertically oriented Windows Phone app from Nokia, which's excellent and has been around for ages.
bad_user 13y ago
> Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome. That's pretty harsh. Firefox has always been for me the most awesome browser available. It's true that Chrome delivered some niceties for user experience and performance, forcing Firefox to follow suit in some areas. However, Chrome stands on the shoulders of giants, like Firefox and it wouldn't be a good browser without such shoulders. Google should be really thankful to Firefox and I'm sure they are. Also, Firefox is improving by leaps and bounds lately and after several months of Chrome, I realized that I cannot live without Firefox. (yes, I'm typing this from Firefox)

J_Darnley 13y ago

> Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome. Sorry but the influence of Chrome on Firefox has been universally negative perhaps with the exception of performance.

jmgrosen 13y ago
Such as?
- J_Darnley 13y ago
  Hiding protocol in the URL bar. Fading the server "file path" after a domain name. Tabs in the title bar. Non-native look. No menu toolbar. Status bar. And those are just the ones I'm aware of.
  - richardwhiuk 13y ago
    Tabs in the title bar is a better UI decision. The URL box belongs to the tab, so it should be part of the tab. Your objection here seems to be 'Firefox mimicked Chrome and this is a bad thing', rather than these things being objectively bad.
    - barrkel 13y ago
      Tabs in a treeview is better again, and is not possible with Chrome. I also object to the lack of a menu bar, for bookmarks in particular. I have an extension that emulates it, but nothing that can properly emulate treeview tabs - I can't imagine ever going to a browser without this.
      - Kerrick 13y ago
        > I also object to the lack of a menu bar, for bookmarks in particular. It does have a menu bar, with bookmarks in particular. http://i.imgur.com/awPDYp4.jpg http://i.imgur.com/awPDYp4.jpg
        jasonlotito 13y ago
        While Chrome has a menu bar for bookmarks, your screenshot does not in any way show that.
        barrkel 13y ago
        I'm using it on Linux and Windows.
  - mwfunk 13y ago
    Those things are all subjective, plenty of reasonable and clueful people will disagree as to whether any of those are good or bad things (or neither). When you say something like... "the influence of Chrome on Firefox has been universally negative" ...that's saying a whole heck of a lot more than, they made some UI decisions that were personally disagreeable to you but not necessarily to other people.
  - xwei 13y ago
    Lookup, did they hide the "https:// https://? And why NOT hide the "http:// http://? Oh, I see, You are kidding right? :D
    - J_Darnley 13y ago
      Sorry, you are right. Firefox does not hide https. My bad, but in my defence I've only used new Firefox occasionally.
  - riquito 13y ago
    What operative system are you using? On GNU/Linux - http / https are visible in the url bar - tabs are under the url bar (and under any other bar you activated) - menu is still there - status bar can be toggled on/off

kenkinder 13y ago

As the OP, let me respond. I'm not suggesting that Google is evil. What I am saying is, these products don't work for me and the reason they don't work is that they aren't interoperable with my own desktop software, or the rest of the Internet. I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer. I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk. I used to use Listen and Reader. I'm only looking to migrate off Voice because it's not going to be available. I was pretty perturbed when all of a sudden, anyone I ever emailed appeared as a pre-approved contact on Talk. So, it isn't about Google being evil or not. Google has a responsibility to its shareholders to make money, and I trust that they're trying to fulfill that mandate as well as possible. In doing so, they've shifted their portfolio of properties into a closed ecosystem that does not appeal to me as a consumer. At this point, I imagine most alternatives suck because there's really no point in going up against free and awesome. Case in point: Reader. Reader really was awesome, and it had no competitors because no one would bother competing with it. I imagine that as Google does offend more of its users, some competition might heat up, but I'm well aware that for most people, none of this matters in the slightest. It's a narrow cross section of geeks who notice or understand any of this.

magicalist 13y ago
> I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer. What's the software? Google CalDAV support isn't actually going away, it's just switching to a whitelist, so depending on your client, it should be fine. I don't know how that's going to work exactly (is it just an API key? how will that work with open source calendaring software like Lightning?), but if it's even moderately actively maintained software, it's likely that they've already applied for access. > Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection (from the article) Just FYI, they turned federation back on shortly afterwards. Of course, it's being dropped for the new chat system, but it's worth getting that right. > Fastmail is owned by Opera Software and operates both free and paid tiers of service As others have pointed out, there is no free tier, just a free trial. And if you're going to pay for it, I don't really see the difference between that and going full Google Apps, but that's just me. (edit: ah, apparently there used to be a free tier, but no longer) Regardless, paying for the services you use is a good thing, both for getting better guarantees for service, and for teaching the market that ad-supported services aren't the end-all be-all, that we can have other business models, and maybe even a diverse market of them to support different uses and different requirements.

indubitably 13y ago

That's charitable but Google really has been behaving as an evil actor lately. Just because they have essentially unlimited resources doesn't mean that they should be immune to critique.

thezilch 13y ago
No, it's not evil to make or ask for money to use your product; it's not evil to discontinue services, especially not with 6-24 month advanced warning; and it's not evil to literally want to be the omnipresent center of everyone's lives. How exactly is Google evil? Their resources have not stopped lesser alternatives from doing business, even with a core product (eg. search) of their's, so it's not that. DuckDuckGo is doing quite well with search; those conversations usually talk about quality and speed of results, not on how Google is the new Altavista and how you should switch before Google deprecates HTTP for GTTP.
- nsmartt 13y ago
  Google used to support openness, and now it is being less open, and therefore less "good". A step in a direction that is less "good" is a step towards "evil". It's not unreasonable to say that Google is being more evil. It's not a stretch to say that Google can't be trusted not to be evil if they've moved in a more evil (or less good) direction.
  - tomkarlo 13y ago
    I think you're applying a a value judgement to a technical issue. "Open" pertains to the nature of certain software and standard. It's not inherently good or evil; you're just choosing to assign that value based on how it correlates with the world you'd like to see. I'd prefer things be more open too, but I don't agree that being less open is somehow inherently "more evil." You can have an entirely non-open company that's totally "good" - good/evil is about the actions of the company, not the wording of its license.
    - nsmartt 13y ago

psbp 13y ago

No one has enough interest to simply leave a pretty compelling ecosystem, so you have to couch it in a way to makes it sound like an ethical imperative. You know, for blog views.

magicalist 13y ago
That's probably partially true, but that's not really true on HN. Every thread on "Google shutters product X" has at least one person asking for alternatives to gmail et al. I almost wish we could pin a story like this just to cut some of those comments. There are days when there will be multiple stories on the front page at the same time with comments asking, "what are the alternatives to gmail?" with the inevitable, "well, fastmail is a good choice" and then someone will bring up running your own server, and then someone else will respond about spam and blacklisting and downtime, and someone else will say something about they've been doing it for 5 years and it's not that hard, etc etc etc
- brongondwana 13y ago
  I ran my own mail server for 5 years, and it wasn't that hard - but then I didn't do much with it. A system with 3 users and not corresponding with anyone outside a few systems it easy. Running fastmail's servers is some orders of magnitude harder.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

6d0debc071 13y ago

> Not to mention, I would tip my hat to Google for forcing every one of these "alternatives" to be better, because before Google, these services sucked. AOL sucked. MS sucked. OSS sucked. Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome. Opera was pretty awesome before Google turned up and release Chrome.

Spearchucker 13y ago

MS sucked This is not going to be a popular view, but here goes anyway... Depends. I've been using Outlook Web Access since it was first released. Granted, you need Exchange, but these days Outlook.com provides similar functionality (or so I'm told - I use Exchange Online now). That said, the most useful calendar I've found is Family Room on Windows Phone. I share it with my girlfriend, who has an iPhone, and it works insanely well for us. I have to use Gmail at work, and find it to be the most obtuse email UX I've ever encountered.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
thezilch 13y ago
Buy and run a server, Windows Server, Exchange, IIS, in 2003? Did you just tell me to go fuck myself? [0] I think MS has made up a lot of ground and is comparable to Google, for online services, in a lot of ways, but they're not better and would probably be on the same end of the stick, if they commanded the same lead Google does for these services. [0] http://browsertoolkit.com/fault-tolerance.png http://browsertoolkit.com/fault-tolerance.png
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  I had MSDN and TechNet subscriptions, and because I was doing a lot of work from home had an old desktop set up as a server anyway, so the cost was low. DynDNS made it easy to host out of my house. Microsoft's online services are better than Google's. I could list a million and one reasons ranging from being ad-free, document fidelity in Office and the fact that I can't sort my Gmail inbox by sender. And while it has its faults, I have not found a better email client (UX and functional breadth) than Outlook. Here.com is better than Google Maps (true offline being a big deal for me), and Here.com's Transit app is the best public transport app I've found[1]. I don't know how SkyDrive stacks up against competitors, because SkyDrive is good enough for me. Why exactly do you think Google is better? [1] It amused me to see Google's transit implementation in Google Maps - it's a horizontal version of the vertically oriented Windows Phone app from Nokia, which's excellent and has been around for ages.

bad_user 13y ago

> Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome. That's pretty harsh. Firefox has always been for me the most awesome browser available. It's true that Chrome delivered some niceties for user experience and performance, forcing Firefox to follow suit in some areas. However, Chrome stands on the shoulders of giants, like Firefox and it wouldn't be a good browser without such shoulders. Google should be really thankful to Firefox and I'm sure they are. Also, Firefox is improving by leaps and bounds lately and after several months of Chrome, I realized that I cannot live without Firefox. (yes, I'm typing this from Firefox)