As much as I would like to agree, as a user who has DDG as the default search engine, this is not my experience... DDG consistently gives me useless results when I search for less popular languages results (searching Dart, or the search-friendly dartlang, gives me crap every time, while Google finds stuff easily... sure, Dart is by Google, that may be a factor, but if I remember correctly, results for Groovy and very new languages like Unison are a lot better at Google) I unavoidably have to use !g to turn to Google. To the point where when I am at work and cannot afford wasting time, I use Google by default.
I just searched for "dart" on ecosia and the programming language showed up on the first page of results. I also have bad luck with duck duck go, but I think ecosia proves that the only reason bing is bad is because Microsoft is incompetent
Good point, it's possible to send a request to add a bang, but it would be better if there were an interface like in Chrome or Firefox to set up own searches.
I do prefer not leaving all my data with Google though to combine with other activities of which I may or may not know of and I think it's good to use alternative services as much as possible, especially when I use Google just as an interface to surface information from site like Wikipedia or Stackexchange.
(note I'm not affiliated with DDG, I just also went through the process of De-Googling after Inbox was shut down)
I'm sad to have to agree. I tried ddg as my primary search engine for about 3 months. By the third month I was just adding !g by default because I just wanted results without testing quality first. Then I realized how silly it was to use it for almost every search, which I'd been doing for about a week, and switched back.
Cannot reproduce this -- Searched DDG for 'dartlang' and all links on the first page relate to dart programming language.
Also google having more results you are looking for sometimes doesn't mean you can't have DDG as your default search. Just enter 'dartlang !g' when you want to search google.
Don't you guys use an ad blocker? I barely see any ads since I started using uBlock. Occasionally I browse without an ad blocker and the experience is horrible and intimidating. Actually ads and propaganda were the reasons I quit TV around 10 years ago and I have never regretted it. So much time and mental energy is freed up to do constructive and fulfilling things (e.g. reading books, sports, socializing, musing etc).
Been avoiding internet ads and tracking for 15 years now. I feel like the unibomber. Facebook and google probably still have a good fingerprint on me, though, due to iOS not letting you use good ad blockers.
Something uncanny happened recently in terms of the ads I do see that gave me quite a bit of paranoia. My SO recently bought a distinct pair of leggings. How am I seeing ads for that same exact pair of leggings, on my phone? I don't think I've ever typed out the word leggings on the internet before this very comment.
I use DDG as my default, and I do like the bang syntax - in fact, it wouldn't be my default otherwise.
I find when searching for manuals on devices, for example, there are lots of garbage results or PDF spam sites that I would not recommend people click.
The other night I searched a question (I forget what) and the entire first page was Quora links to possibly the same question over and over, and not the question I asked.
Firefox is now objectively better than Chrome in every way. I would recommend switching moral reasons aside. Chrome's memory management is abysmal. I now get the same shudder when I see someone with chrome on their machine that I used to get when I saw someone running Internet Explorer (which may even be better than chrome now too).
I wish this were true but certainly on Linux I don't find this to be the case. I periodically try switching to Firefox and always end up back on Chrome for performance reasons.
Features wise I prefer Firefox (containers are amazing, extra privacy features/blockers by default nice, the new picture in picture for video is nice, dev tools have a lot of cool extra features etc), but Firefox often struggles and stutters for me, whereas I rarely have issues with Chrome.
The devtools are a good example, sometimes just having them open on a page I am developing slows everything down. Closing/re-opening the tab seems to fix it for a bit but then it just starts to happen again, Chrome's devtools are always snappy. Similary if I want to inspect an element on a page Chrome never has a problem doing it instantly, Firefox has to think about it for a while.
In general everything that uses the GPU I find far faster in Chrome. The other day for instance I was working on a d3 SVG visualization that strained Firefox but was no problem for Chrome, canvas performance is similar but not as bad in my experience. The most common offender is trying to watch a video: in Firefox everything slows down and the fans spin up, in Chrome no effect.
It is also true that all Google services that I am unfortunately tied to (GMail, Maps, Calendar etc) are snappy in Chrome and like molasses in Firefox...
My experience is exactly the opposite. When forced to use Chromium on Linux, I find it slow. The dev tools are lacking basic functionality that I came to depend on, and they are unreliable (missing requests in Network tab). When testing CSP protections about a year ago, Chromium allowed many of the requests that should have been blocked (and were, in Firefox).
I think it comes down to what one is used to. We probably learn to sidestep problems with any browser we use, but using a different browser inevitably leads to frustration.
Of course, this is not true if you are using Google services. Google seems to put an extra effort in making sure that their pages are as slow as possible in Firefox... I don't care much myself as I don't use them, but it's a good reminder of how (non)non-evil they have become.
Before I say this, I would just like to say I run Firefox as often as I can and love love love it, but chrome is better, due entirely to the market share of the Blink web engine. Microsoft Teams' webapp only works in Blink. Hulu bitches about widevine until Firefox gives me the notification to enable it. Canvas (that thing all us students use) gets random rendering errors on gecko that makes the UI malfunction a lot.
People mention that more people should use Firefox because google controls the Blink engine and Gecko is the only real competitor, and if Blink has too high of market share, than google can add exclusive functionality to blink for developers to use, edging all other browsers out of the market.
I would absolutely switch to Safari or Firefox except for the fact that I find Chrome's tab system to be so good.
Chrome tabs load and appear instantly. As you add more tabs they shrink down to a tiny but still usable favicon size. As you close tabs they resize well and with nice little UX behavior like the next close button always appearing directly under your mouse. They close and re-open instantly.
When you press enter in the address bar Chrome always loads your Search, unlike Safari, which often requires second press, or weirdly loses focus. Even doing simple web search feels so slow and broken in Safari tabs. When you have a moderate number of tabs Safari switches to this horizontal scrolling mode where half of your tabs are no longer visible. Basically unusable.
Chrome tabs are so good compared to the standard macOS tabs found in places like Safari and Finder. I wish I could have them everywhere.
Firefox with tree style tabs is on another level. Firefox also supports lazy loading tabs when restarted, so only pinned tabs and tabs you view consume resources.
I have nearly 1000 tabs open in Firefox and navigate them extremely efficiently. Does chrome do that?
(To anyone who plans to try it, you may need to edit userChrome.css to turn off the top tabs; there's guides on this. I also recommend tweaking TST's settings, imposing a limit on nesting, and preventing auto switching tabs )
I tried to switch to Firefox, in large part because of the contianers, and I still use it in some places, but the thing that really got me was battery usage. I switched my desktop at work to Firefox, and it was great, and I still use it there, but then I switched by work laptop to Firefox, and (according to powertop and htop) the battery and CPU usage of Firefox was probably 3-4x Chrome. This is a total deal breaker on a laptop.
Firefox's JavaScript engine is still slower and large JavaScript apps become sluggish more quickly.
Also, I still haven't found a way to let users download files from JavaScript (e.g. through a button click that invokes a function) in Firefox, that wouldn't open another window and in the process close their websocket connection.
This was true (I no longer use Chrome and don’t know if it’s improved in the last two years). Chrome needed enormous amounts of memory compared to Firefox. Using RAM is not an issue as such, but it makes other applications running at the same time miserable (and the user too).
It's worth pointing out that Google cripples its apps in Firefox intentionally and since Edge is now basically Chrome, MS probably, (perhaps unintentionally?), follows suit.
I occasionally have Firefox freeze due to some site's script freezing, forcing me to end it through task manager as Firefox won't respond to any button clicks.
Also (unless I missed something) there's still no way to get hardware video acceleration on Firefox on Linux outside of Wayland. When I'm on Linux I'm also installing Chromium (with the VA-API patches applied) entirely for YouTube as my CPU usage ramps up immensely when watching videos. Watching videos in mpv (or equivalent software) is an alternative, but I like the convenience of watching videos directly through the browser.
Other than that though Firefox has been rock solid for me and has been my daily browser for years now.
I've notice a bit of this on Linux but it never bothered me, however, I feel like it's gotten considerably better lately. For example, I use to have to keep Twitch open in it's own browser instance or else the stream would become very low quality, or even die completely, when I went to another tab. That doesn't seem to be a problem anymore, but I don't know if it's anything FF did.
obviously untrue since you can't be "objectively better" on subjective criteria, of which there are many.
i'll tell you though, the #1 subjective thing i hate is that single-click in the Chrome (Chromium) omnibar doesn't honor OS selection convention. unless you're on windows, where single click selects-all. having this behavior forced on Mac is jarring and awful and no amount of pleading would convince the dictatorial "my way is the right way" attitude of the gatekeepers. they refuse to even have a hidden flag to control this behavior. it's actively hostile.
the incongruity can be seen by clicking in any form field. eg chrome://flags search field. Note that single-click merely places the cursor on mac in a form field. then go to the omnibar. single-click selects-all. ARGH!
I had hoped Edge would fix this, but alas, no. (Also Opera keeps this behavior.)
Fast forward to newer behavior of hiding the protocol from the omnibar, until you click on it. Now when you click (or click-drag, the "proper" way to select less than the entire URL in one stroke, thank you oh overlords), as soon as you release the text changes and your mouse is no longer at the selection point. ARGH!! so awful.
I can't tell you how much I hate this poor implementation choice. However it's not enough to push me to FireFox, which is subjectively very much worse than Chrome.
Firefox containers are amazing! Being able to have a work set of tabs that open all the google services correctly, and a set of personal tabs that open google services correctly is the best thing ever. Not to mention containing all the sites that try to track you into their own little playground.
I am spending more time in FireFox too and want to give it some love. It still has some catching up to do with Chrome. I find myself switching to Chrome for work related activities, namely developer tools, and that's pure habit. I didnt have time to experience the FF version. Is it comparable?? But since my company's only supporting Chrome I'll do development in Chrome. At home I am on FF and have been so far loving it. Some extensions have to do some catching up in FF as well.
When in FireFox I am still experiencing weird bugs but am willing to give her some slack and hope they get fixed. Come on Firefox, FireFix and Rock!
On my xubuntu laptop, I observe the opposite. Firefox leaks memory until I need to restart it, several times a day. However, Chrome reliably releases memory, and I never need to restart it.
On my Arch laptop, it's exactly the opposite - Chrome can become supper sluggish even as I have 16GB of RAM, while Firefox stays snappy.
I assume there are more factors that go into this than just the browser itself. For example, I find Ubuntu to be one of the more sluggish distros out there in general, while Fedora and Arch feel way snappier, but am sure this isn't the case for everyone.
Firefox is at least objectively equal from a perceptive performance perspective. Chrome still has some wins that mostly stem from market share and what benefits come with that (people test in chrome first). I still main FireFox and promote it to anyone that cares to listen but as a web developer even I test in Chrome first because usually that is where most of my audience is.
I use firefox and chrome today, and even after all the perf improvements firefox is still a slower browser. On my 2 core 2014 macbook, only chrome and safari run with enough performance. On my other 4+ core devices it runs fast enough to use as my main browser. On those 4+ core devices, chrome is still more responsive than Firefox :(
Is pinch-to-zoom native on Firefox yet? Last I attempted to switch, you had to install an extension to enable it, and even then it was far "choppier" than Chrome's pinch-to-zoom experience. I've got pretty bad eyesight and zoom consistently so it was a dealbreaker for me.
The only reason I have Chrome installed on any machine is for YouTube. I tend to get weird flickers when in full screen while watching on other browsers, and Chrome is the only one I’m aware of that will allow you to view YouTube content in HDR.
My main motivation is slightly different in that being a software engineer I am actually in a unique position to navigate this tricky path and therefore feel a responsibility to tread the de-googled path, so that it might make it easier for others to follow, should they so wish. At the very least we all need readily available choices.
Interestingly, although I went through all the steps to delete my Google account I got stuck at the point of wondering what to do with my Youtube videos. Although, since last time I checked, it seems now I can actually move them to another Google account, I'll look into that.
The problem with WhatsApp is that the other participants in a given chat are likely to back up the conversation to Google Drive of iCloud which defeats the purpose of E2E encryption. And, of course, the metadata.
> Out of curiosity, what don't you like about the UX?
Not GP, but I’ve railed against Signal’s stability and UX before.
Apart from messages not being delivered sometimes (or taking very long) and getting unnecessary “device changed” messages when nothing has changed (this happened as recent as last year), within a year or two of use, Signal makes sure that the user realizes that it’s meant for ephemeral use.
It does this by a few different ways. One is that if you change devices, you’d have to jump through hoops to rejoin groups you were a part of, and then see that you cannot see the list of members or the group’s name. Once you change devices, at least in iOS, you’d realize that you’ve permanently lost all your previous chats because Signal explicitly prohibits chat backup by iTunes and does not provide a way to backup chats and restore it either.
In terms of UX alone, Telegram > WhatsApp > Signal. FWIW, I use all these and Wire too. Signal gets the least amount of use because the people I chat with on it are also fed up with the poor UX and lack of features.
At the time Signal didn't have the swipe-right-to-reply behaviour, nor the ability to lock audio message recording so you can record handsfree. But it has both now!
As far as I know yes Whatsapp uses some of Signal's tech but doesn't implement it in exactly the same way.
You have a valid point on Facebook which may in fact be worse, but Apple's business case is not to hoover up every single piece of information about your life and then sell it to advertisers. They are there to sell hardware and a bit of software. That different motivation leads to different outcomes when a VP asks "should we do this with info we have?"
Having competition is good if only because it keeps companies thinking about the user.
Note I carefully said user not customer. Except for Spotify (and his email host) he is not the customer he is the product they sell. However in all cases he is a user.
I should have explained more here. This was only for family communication. Other communication is split up pretty much depending on where the friend is. Convincing people to up and shift is easier said than done. It could be argued it might be better that way because then my data isn't all with one message service.
For other communications I use Rocket.Chat for team collab, signal, keybase chat or sms(which if they do happen to have iMessage does convert). I definitely do not trust facebook any more than Google. And I would agree thats a sideways move not an improvement
Even if this is true, there's a significant difference in that Google would lose nearly every single one of GCP's customers if it was ever proven they were mining data of their customers' cloud services.
And at the very least, it is much harder for Google to correlate a competitors' account systems and user data with their own profiles they use for ad targeting.
And of course, most importantly: Apple collects a lot less data when you use their apps. For instance, Maps data is never associated with an Apple ID, and significant work is done to fuzz and scramble the anonymous data they store to avoid it being possible to turn it into data about a real person. In comparison, Google Maps logs your location to your Google account every five minutes.
*Search(1) -> DuckDuckGo
*Gmail(2) -> Fastmail
*Android -> SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/)
*Maps -> OpenStreetMaps
*Youtube(3) -> Youtube-dl, "subscriptions" with rss-feeds
*Drive -> Self-hosted Nextloud & Syncthing
*Calendar -> At first Fastmail, but nowadays back to paper calendar
*Chrome -> Brave & Firefox
(1) When having problems finding I sometimes check Google Search with bangs.
(2) Accounts still exist and forward to fastmail as I'm slowly changing my subscriptions etc.
(3) Youtube I feel is the toughest to get rid of, but nowadays I hardly ever go on the website as I hate all the clickbait that the algorithm tries to stuff into my face.
Concerning Youtube, you may be interested in https://www.invidio.us/ which is an alternative front end. There are also extensions for Firefox which will automatically redirect any Youtube links you happen to come across to open on Invidious.
I tried to do simplest thing: create playlist - the only thing I'm really missing not having YT account (beside commenting).
1. First of all, it forced me to create Invidio.us account. Why it can't store everything in my cookie?
2. Next, I searched for a video typing its YT code "fVCAFvIq_F8" - no results. After several attempts I figured out that sometimes it does find it and sometimes it doesn't. Weird.
3. Alright, I copied full address of a video into search box, clicked on result - and got an error: "The uploader has not made this video available in your country." Umm... What? I have no problem watching it on YT itself, why would Invidio restrict me? But even if it was country-restricted, why would Invidio reproduce this stupid Google-imposed geographical restrictions/discrimination?
3. Very irritated, I went for another video (OlNC6gK2y0I) - only to get another error: "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported" ...
4. It was getting boring, but for the sake of experiment I went for yet another video - Invidio found it and played, but... there is no "Add to a play list" button? Turned out, first you need go to a settings, scroll down, find and click "View all playlists" link, on the next page click "Create playlist" link, on the next page create it, then go back to a video you wanted to add and add it. Thats... a clusterfuck.
5. Alright I go to a front page - where can I see my playlist? Nowhere. You need to find and turn on separate setting just to get "Playlists" link on the front page. (Isn't it obvious that I need playlists from the very fact that I created it?)
OK, maybe at least Invidio has additional functionality compared to YT, like downloading video? No, "Download is disabled." Why?
To all of that I must add that Invidio.us worked very slow, sluggish and unresponsive. Occasionally I was getting "Rate limit exceeded" error just trying to open front page.
I ran into invidio.us as I started using straw-viewer[0] instead of youtube-viewer, and it uses individio.us api key. Didn't know that they had extensions to browsers though!
I use the free Freetube application, which uses invidious behind the scenes. Invidious does throw errors sometimes because it gets blocked (or rate limited) by YouTube.
I agree with your point about YouTube. I'll try out the combo you have.
I like YouTube for the videos on there and nothing else. I hate all the ads and how if you watch one video that is off topic from what you usually watch then the algorithm gets messed up and your recommended videos become way different.
Yea, Fastmail rocks! Only problem is that people don't know what it is and and as I don't live in english-speaking country I often have to spell it out.
I should buy "fastmile.com" and use that as an email alias - would solve a lot of problems, lol.
Can you elaborate on the Nextcloud&Syncthing part?
It would be awesome to have LAN local syncing (as Syntching does), while being able to share doc to the outside world (NextCloud's functionality).
Did you figure this out?
Anther topic: yeah, youtube is not something you can replace, but you can still use other frontends, thus the rabbithole recommendation engine doesn't affect you, nor the advertisements. On Android, NewPipe is a great client.
Apologizes from late reply. I have Raspberry Pi running Syncthing on LAN. I share my music, youtube-dl'd videos, podcasts etc. with my phone and laptops through it. Also sometimes I use it to share other documents, code etc. Works also as nice backup as the PI runs rsync with cron to store Syncthing contents to other HDD also.
Nextcloud runs on Digital Ocean droplet and I upload my photos there from phone, store contacts and share larger files with people. Currently Syncthing and Nextcloud do not communicate in anyway.
And yeah, youtube-dl has been lifesaver to escape that "rabbithole recommendation engine" as you awesomely put :D
I use a rpi4 running raspbian and resillio sync (https://www.resilio.com/) for my internal photo backups and data syncing. It also shares outside my local network well but the users need the software installed.
My list is: DuckDuckGo, Protonmail (tutanota also an option but want to self-host eventually, rather than switch to another provider), LineageOS (want to get to Linux phone asap, preferably NixOS), OSM, Youtube-dl and container tabs in ff, git, org-mode, qutebrowser and firefox.
Sounds good! What has been your experience with protonmail?
I have been looking into NixOS also, but not for phone - are there any ongoing projects?
Org-mode is also something I maybe one day learn to use especially if I make the jump into emacs!
I don't have anything against fastmail's calendar but I personally also regressed to a paper planner. I just find that I am more engaged with my planning this way, while the digital calendar sorta does its own thing and spits notifications at me for stuff I've forgotten about.
I still use digital for work since it's collaborative but my personal stuff is all inscribed on a dead tree, now.
I really tried giving DDG a chance but I always found myself having to go back to Google to find the right information. This would especially pertain to technical matters. The 'average-joe-browsing' (e.g. amazon, movies, songs etc.) worked fine, but when it came down to research papers or solving software problems, I was too often left disappointed.
A couple of weeks back I switched to Qwant[1]. Privacy focused, technical-matters-friendly, and most importantly, haven't had to look at Google once. Really enjoying it so far.
You could add !s before your search query to get Startpage results(google results without tracking) for that query. See the complete list of bangs here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html
You can put the bang commands anywhere in the query — in the beginning, in the end and anywhere in the middle. Startpage (!s) is another option to get results from Google without directly connecting to Google.
I have mostly de-googled myself. For search I mainly rely on DuckDuckGo, but as many people have pointed out sometimes DuckDuckGo doesn't cut it. When that happens I either use Google or Startpage.
I usually use Google when I want information about a business near me. I haven't tested this thoroughly but I think Google does a better job of getting and presenting phone numbers, accurate store hours, etc.
For email I'm a big fan of Fastmail. The service is great and the web UI is fast and easy to use. For storage I also rely on Fastmail - their standard plan comes with 30 GB of storage. They also provide calendars, notes, and contacts.
My personal phone is an iPhone. I didn't intentionally switch a while back - my android phone broke and my family had an iPhone I could use. I've stuck with it since then, I like the overall experience. I don't currently use any of the Apple Cloud services. It's been rough connecting my phone to my Linux laptop, but I've found the best way to handle it is to just have a Windows VM for uploading music to and downloading photos from my iPhone. I know there's https://www.libimobiledevice.org/ but it looks like it only works for images.
For music I either use Spotify, Bandcamp, or ripping CDs. I never tried out Google Music.
The one thing I haven't found a good replacement for has been YouTube. I'm definitely going to check out some of the suggestions people have made in this thread regarding that.
I have a quick suggestion for you, re: using Linux: rely on web apps. iCloud.com works fine on my Linux laptop using FireFox. Same with a Microsoft Office 365 (web apps, not native apps). I am a million miles away from being a security expert, but in my non-expert opinion, I feel safer using web apps than native apps, especially on my iPhone. I hate installing apps, and always resent prompts like “install our f@cking app...”
My biggest gripe with DDG is that if I search for a business, even when using the exact name, it will almost surely come back with a couple Yelp results (which is like getting a link to a 2005 MySpace page) followed by a dozen Facebook profiles that vaguely resemble the name of the business I was searching for.
This being said DDG was able to take over 99.99% of my searching needs for some time now. And when I have some query that doesn't seem to return anything useful on DDG it turns out Google doesn't really do much better (YMMV).
I still use Youtube and Google Maps heavily compared to alternative services. But for everything else I decided to "spread the joy" and not rely on a single provider of services.
If you're looking for offsite backup (which seems to be the main use case of your use of Google Photos and now iCloud) then Backblaze if you're on Mac or Windows, or Backblaze B2 if you're on Linux is very affordable.
The trouble with de-Google is you have to replace a highly integrated suite of apps with separate bits which lack integration.
Also, if you have hundreds of accounts where you used gmail to register and hundreds or thousands of contacts which might send you mail, it's hard to switch.
I switched away from Gmail after using it as a main email for more than a decade. I just went through all my accounts in my password manager and changed it. It doesn't have to get done quickly, little by little does it.
Also, you don't have to delete your Gmail account completely. Mine sits there mostly unused just in case, it's fine.
I didn't kill off my gmail accounts, but they all forward to my ProtonMail accounts for those contacts that haven't been updated to my ProtonMail accounts yet. Those get handled piecemeal, which is pretty easy.
Readit News
- there’s less ads (you can turn them off completely, but I’ve only seen one ad on the front page at most which is ok for me)
- not as SEOed (still not great though)
- the box on the side is often more useful, e.g. Wikipedia instead of shopping ads
- on mobile Safari I use the bangs [0] which have a sort of Omnibox experience
[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
(Edited formatting)
I'm asking because adding the "!g" takes about 6-7 screen touches so it's quite inefficient, and it basically keeps me from using DDG.
PS uh, rather the whole page is related to dart.
I do prefer not leaving all my data with Google though to combine with other activities of which I may or may not know of and I think it's good to use alternative services as much as possible, especially when I use Google just as an interface to surface information from site like Wikipedia or Stackexchange.
(note I'm not affiliated with DDG, I just also went through the process of De-Googling after Inbox was shut down)
Also google having more results you are looking for sometimes doesn't mean you can't have DDG as your default search. Just enter 'dartlang !g' when you want to search google.
Something uncanny happened recently in terms of the ads I do see that gave me quite a bit of paranoia. My SO recently bought a distinct pair of leggings. How am I seeing ads for that same exact pair of leggings, on my phone? I don't think I've ever typed out the word leggings on the internet before this very comment.
The result for copying the link of a search result item for e.g. "git book pdf"
from DuckDuckGo: https://progit2.s3.amazonaws.com/en/2016-03-22-f3531/progit-...
from Google: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
from bing: https://progit2.s3.amazonaws.com/en/2016-03-22-f3531/progit-...
Some non technical searches are more difficult though.
P.S. Bojler eladó.
I find when searching for manuals on devices, for example, there are lots of garbage results or PDF spam sites that I would not recommend people click.
The other night I searched a question (I forget what) and the entire first page was Quora links to possibly the same question over and over, and not the question I asked.
tldr: I use !g, !i, and !usps a lot.
Features wise I prefer Firefox (containers are amazing, extra privacy features/blockers by default nice, the new picture in picture for video is nice, dev tools have a lot of cool extra features etc), but Firefox often struggles and stutters for me, whereas I rarely have issues with Chrome.
The devtools are a good example, sometimes just having them open on a page I am developing slows everything down. Closing/re-opening the tab seems to fix it for a bit but then it just starts to happen again, Chrome's devtools are always snappy. Similary if I want to inspect an element on a page Chrome never has a problem doing it instantly, Firefox has to think about it for a while.
In general everything that uses the GPU I find far faster in Chrome. The other day for instance I was working on a d3 SVG visualization that strained Firefox but was no problem for Chrome, canvas performance is similar but not as bad in my experience. The most common offender is trying to watch a video: in Firefox everything slows down and the fans spin up, in Chrome no effect.
It is also true that all Google services that I am unfortunately tied to (GMail, Maps, Calendar etc) are snappy in Chrome and like molasses in Firefox...
I think it comes down to what one is used to. We probably learn to sidestep problems with any browser we use, but using a different browser inevitably leads to frustration.
Of course, this is not true if you are using Google services. Google seems to put an extra effort in making sure that their pages are as slow as possible in Firefox... I don't care much myself as I don't use them, but it's a good reminder of how (non)non-evil they have become.
People mention that more people should use Firefox because google controls the Blink engine and Gecko is the only real competitor, and if Blink has too high of market share, than google can add exclusive functionality to blink for developers to use, edging all other browsers out of the market.
Congrats, we live in that future.
I use Canvas every day in Firefox and have never had a single problem or error. Anecdata, I know, but that's my experience.
Chrome tabs load and appear instantly. As you add more tabs they shrink down to a tiny but still usable favicon size. As you close tabs they resize well and with nice little UX behavior like the next close button always appearing directly under your mouse. They close and re-open instantly.
When you press enter in the address bar Chrome always loads your Search, unlike Safari, which often requires second press, or weirdly loses focus. Even doing simple web search feels so slow and broken in Safari tabs. When you have a moderate number of tabs Safari switches to this horizontal scrolling mode where half of your tabs are no longer visible. Basically unusable.
Chrome tabs are so good compared to the standard macOS tabs found in places like Safari and Finder. I wish I could have them everywhere.
I have nearly 1000 tabs open in Firefox and navigate them extremely efficiently. Does chrome do that?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
(To anyone who plans to try it, you may need to edit userChrome.css to turn off the top tabs; there's guides on this. I also recommend tweaking TST's settings, imposing a limit on nesting, and preventing auto switching tabs )
Firefox just feels like a solid browser and how it should be.
Whenever I need to switch to chrome to browser test, I notice it just feels like a less well made browser.
Hard to articulate.
Edit: not to mention that the logo itself is uber cool!
Firefox's JavaScript engine is still slower and large JavaScript apps become sluggish more quickly.
Also, I still haven't found a way to let users download files from JavaScript (e.g. through a button click that invokes a function) in Firefox, that wouldn't open another window and in the process close their websocket connection.
This was true (I no longer use Chrome and don’t know if it’s improved in the last two years). Chrome needed enormous amounts of memory compared to Firefox. Using RAM is not an issue as such, but it makes other applications running at the same time miserable (and the user too).
I play games and use complex web apps (GCloud, Office 365) exclusively in Chromium
No, you are not. You are a Google marketing tool.
And this is not ad-hominem from my side, since you made a claim about yourself the main part of your argument.
Google is known for intentionally crippling Firefox performance on their services. That doesn't make Firefox itself slower.
Also (unless I missed something) there's still no way to get hardware video acceleration on Firefox on Linux outside of Wayland. When I'm on Linux I'm also installing Chromium (with the VA-API patches applied) entirely for YouTube as my CPU usage ramps up immensely when watching videos. Watching videos in mpv (or equivalent software) is an alternative, but I like the convenience of watching videos directly through the browser.
Other than that though Firefox has been rock solid for me and has been my daily browser for years now.
i'll tell you though, the #1 subjective thing i hate is that single-click in the Chrome (Chromium) omnibar doesn't honor OS selection convention. unless you're on windows, where single click selects-all. having this behavior forced on Mac is jarring and awful and no amount of pleading would convince the dictatorial "my way is the right way" attitude of the gatekeepers. they refuse to even have a hidden flag to control this behavior. it's actively hostile.
the incongruity can be seen by clicking in any form field. eg chrome://flags search field. Note that single-click merely places the cursor on mac in a form field. then go to the omnibar. single-click selects-all. ARGH!
I had hoped Edge would fix this, but alas, no. (Also Opera keeps this behavior.)
Fast forward to newer behavior of hiding the protocol from the omnibar, until you click on it. Now when you click (or click-drag, the "proper" way to select less than the entire URL in one stroke, thank you oh overlords), as soon as you release the text changes and your mouse is no longer at the selection point. ARGH!! so awful.
I can't tell you how much I hate this poor implementation choice. However it's not enough to push me to FireFox, which is subjectively very much worse than Chrome.
When in FireFox I am still experiencing weird bugs but am willing to give her some slack and hope they get fixed. Come on Firefox, FireFix and Rock!
I assume there are more factors that go into this than just the browser itself. For example, I find Ubuntu to be one of the more sluggish distros out there in general, while Fedora and Arch feel way snappier, but am sure this isn't the case for everyone.
Main reason why I use firefox is container tabs.
And IE being better than (any browser)? Let's not get carried away. They still have multiple zero day vulnerabilities discovered every year.
My main motivation is slightly different in that being a software engineer I am actually in a unique position to navigate this tricky path and therefore feel a responsibility to tread the de-googled path, so that it might make it easier for others to follow, should they so wish. At the very least we all need readily available choices.
Interestingly, although I went through all the steps to delete my Google account I got stuck at the point of wondering what to do with my Youtube videos. Although, since last time I checked, it seems now I can actually move them to another Google account, I'll look into that.
Out of curiosity, what don't you like about the UX?
And doesn't it use the same "state of the art" encryption as WhatsApp?
Not GP, but I’ve railed against Signal’s stability and UX before.
Apart from messages not being delivered sometimes (or taking very long) and getting unnecessary “device changed” messages when nothing has changed (this happened as recent as last year), within a year or two of use, Signal makes sure that the user realizes that it’s meant for ephemeral use.
It does this by a few different ways. One is that if you change devices, you’d have to jump through hoops to rejoin groups you were a part of, and then see that you cannot see the list of members or the group’s name. Once you change devices, at least in iOS, you’d realize that you’ve permanently lost all your previous chats because Signal explicitly prohibits chat backup by iTunes and does not provide a way to backup chats and restore it either.
In terms of UX alone, Telegram > WhatsApp > Signal. FWIW, I use all these and Wire too. Signal gets the least amount of use because the people I chat with on it are also fed up with the poor UX and lack of features.
As far as I know yes Whatsapp uses some of Signal's tech but doesn't implement it in exactly the same way.
Facebook Messenger I don't get, I'd use Apple Messages over Facebook, or Telegram, etc.
Except when they are
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074
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Note I carefully said user not customer. Except for Spotify (and his email host) he is not the customer he is the product they sell. However in all cases he is a user.
For other communications I use Rocket.Chat for team collab, signal, keybase chat or sms(which if they do happen to have iMessage does convert). I definitely do not trust facebook any more than Google. And I would agree thats a sideways move not an improvement
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And at the very least, it is much harder for Google to correlate a competitors' account systems and user data with their own profiles they use for ad targeting.
And of course, most importantly: Apple collects a lot less data when you use their apps. For instance, Maps data is never associated with an Apple ID, and significant work is done to fuzz and scramble the anonymous data they store to avoid it being possible to turn it into data about a real person. In comparison, Google Maps logs your location to your Google account every five minutes.
(2) Accounts still exist and forward to fastmail as I'm slowly changing my subscriptions etc.
(3) Youtube I feel is the toughest to get rid of, but nowadays I hardly ever go on the website as I hate all the clickbait that the algorithm tries to stuff into my face.
I tried to do simplest thing: create playlist - the only thing I'm really missing not having YT account (beside commenting).
1. First of all, it forced me to create Invidio.us account. Why it can't store everything in my cookie?
2. Next, I searched for a video typing its YT code "fVCAFvIq_F8" - no results. After several attempts I figured out that sometimes it does find it and sometimes it doesn't. Weird.
3. Alright, I copied full address of a video into search box, clicked on result - and got an error: "The uploader has not made this video available in your country." Umm... What? I have no problem watching it on YT itself, why would Invidio restrict me? But even if it was country-restricted, why would Invidio reproduce this stupid Google-imposed geographical restrictions/discrimination?
3. Very irritated, I went for another video (OlNC6gK2y0I) - only to get another error: "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported" ...
4. It was getting boring, but for the sake of experiment I went for yet another video - Invidio found it and played, but... there is no "Add to a play list" button? Turned out, first you need go to a settings, scroll down, find and click "View all playlists" link, on the next page click "Create playlist" link, on the next page create it, then go back to a video you wanted to add and add it. Thats... a clusterfuck.
5. Alright I go to a front page - where can I see my playlist? Nowhere. You need to find and turn on separate setting just to get "Playlists" link on the front page. (Isn't it obvious that I need playlists from the very fact that I created it?)
OK, maybe at least Invidio has additional functionality compared to YT, like downloading video? No, "Download is disabled." Why?
To all of that I must add that Invidio.us worked very slow, sluggish and unresponsive. Occasionally I was getting "Rate limit exceeded" error just trying to open front page.
[0] https://github.com/trizen/straw-viewer
I agree with your point about YouTube. I'll try out the combo you have.
I like YouTube for the videos on there and nothing else. I hate all the ads and how if you watch one video that is off topic from what you usually watch then the algorithm gets messed up and your recommended videos become way different.
I should buy "fastmile.com" and use that as an email alias - would solve a lot of problems, lol.
It would be awesome to have LAN local syncing (as Syntching does), while being able to share doc to the outside world (NextCloud's functionality).
Did you figure this out?
Anther topic: yeah, youtube is not something you can replace, but you can still use other frontends, thus the rabbithole recommendation engine doesn't affect you, nor the advertisements. On Android, NewPipe is a great client.
Nextcloud runs on Digital Ocean droplet and I upload my photos there from phone, store contacts and share larger files with people. Currently Syncthing and Nextcloud do not communicate in anyway.
And yeah, youtube-dl has been lifesaver to escape that "rabbithole recommendation engine" as you awesomely put :D
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/syncthing-nextcloud-how-to/5459...
I still use digital for work since it's collaborative but my personal stuff is all inscribed on a dead tree, now.
A couple of weeks back I switched to Qwant[1]. Privacy focused, technical-matters-friendly, and most importantly, haven't had to look at Google once. Really enjoying it so far.
[1] https://about.qwant.com/
I usually use Google when I want information about a business near me. I haven't tested this thoroughly but I think Google does a better job of getting and presenting phone numbers, accurate store hours, etc.
For email I'm a big fan of Fastmail. The service is great and the web UI is fast and easy to use. For storage I also rely on Fastmail - their standard plan comes with 30 GB of storage. They also provide calendars, notes, and contacts.
My personal phone is an iPhone. I didn't intentionally switch a while back - my android phone broke and my family had an iPhone I could use. I've stuck with it since then, I like the overall experience. I don't currently use any of the Apple Cloud services. It's been rough connecting my phone to my Linux laptop, but I've found the best way to handle it is to just have a Windows VM for uploading music to and downloading photos from my iPhone. I know there's https://www.libimobiledevice.org/ but it looks like it only works for images.
For music I either use Spotify, Bandcamp, or ripping CDs. I never tried out Google Music.
The one thing I haven't found a good replacement for has been YouTube. I'm definitely going to check out some of the suggestions people have made in this thread regarding that.
This being said DDG was able to take over 99.99% of my searching needs for some time now. And when I have some query that doesn't seem to return anything useful on DDG it turns out Google doesn't really do much better (YMMV).
I still use Youtube and Google Maps heavily compared to alternative services. But for everything else I decided to "spread the joy" and not rely on a single provider of services.
Amazon is !a, etc. etc.
DDG has some neat functionality via bangs (aka !): https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Also, if you have hundreds of accounts where you used gmail to register and hundreds or thousands of contacts which might send you mail, it's hard to switch.
Also, you don't have to delete your Gmail account completely. Mine sits there mostly unused just in case, it's fine.