The Google engineers working on this wrote a proposal explicitly stating that their first use case is protecting the value of online advertising: ...In case you were wondering about their...
The Google engineers working on this wrote a proposal explicitly stating that their first use case is protecting the value of online advertising:
Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots.
...In case you were wondering about their motivations. They're also stating that browser extensions are not presently in scope for this, but given A) their motivation and B) a newfound ability to determine the criteria for a "valid" client, it's not wholly unreasonable to assume that this would inevitably be used to filter out clients with adblocking capabilities.
You've got to be ready to tolerate some short-term pain of leaving the convenience of google services behind and learning a new way of thinking of the web and how it serves you information. The...
Exemplary
You've got to be ready to tolerate some short-term pain of leaving the convenience of google services behind and learning a new way of thinking of the web and how it serves you information. The old web was kind of inconvenient in a lot of ways, it required a bit more from you as a user. That's part and parcel with autonomy though.
Use engines like Duckduckgo, even if you still occasionally augment searches with google. Proton Mail is a perfectly usable alternative to gmail with a lot of the same basic features. I use it for my important life stuff (family, friends, doctors appts, banking contact etc.) and then I have a gmail that's sort of burner I use for less important stuff.
Google is massive but they still rely on users wanting to use their stuff. We all have to take the opportunity we have now, of being able to see what's coming down the pipe, to switch tracks as individuals. The companies will follow the users and try to accommodate them if there are enough of them moving in a certain way (recent example: Steam adopting ProtonDB to facilitate linux support).
This is well written. I recently got out of the Windows ecosystem and I'm enjoying myself on Manjaro Linux, having played around with the idea of Linux/FOSS on various computers in the past I had....
This is well written. I recently got out of the Windows ecosystem and I'm enjoying myself on Manjaro Linux, having played around with the idea of Linux/FOSS on various computers in the past I had.
Making the switch was relatively painless other than having to bridge some Windows only VST plugins for my DAW. Steam works great, my music gear works just fine.
I'd like to disconnect myself from the Google ecosystem. I think I should try to, maybe while I still can with the way things are going?
I remember the old web. It's not that much of an inconvenience and I feel like I could happily live with doing a bit extra on my end to get away from whatever the internet is morphing into.
Places like Tildes give me a feeling that it's not out of reach, and that people still care. Maybe they also long for a bit of a slowdown and less go-go-go rabid consumerism as well.
Same experience here, Linux was the easy part. Office 365 was the only real holdout. I keep it around in a Windows VM because it's on a grandfathered rate and I need it for the occasional dumb...
Same experience here, Linux was the easy part. Office 365 was the only real holdout. I keep it around in a Windows VM because it's on a grandfathered rate and I need it for the occasional dumb requirements for some contracts I work at (like timesheet screenshots from another system must be submitted in a Word doc, LibreOffice Writer just handles heaps of images differently that I gave up trying to change it when money is on the line).
As for degoogling, I'm in the middle of it and it's quite daunting. I have multiple Gmail accounts for tiers of signups and keep all the registration emails I get, so I can track where I signed up which account from. It's a lot to setup aliases for each, not to mention I've liberally used Google signups over manually provisioned accounts out of convenience. Good for work accounts, not so good if you want to extricate yourself from the ecosystem.
I'm going to leave my Android phone for last, it's probably going to be the only one left attached to a Google account depending on how much I want to remove it.
Can you give some starter tips for someone with just one google account to get out of that ecosystem? I've had the same gmail account for years now, so switching over for me would probably be so...
Can you give some starter tips for someone with just one google account to get out of that ecosystem?
I've had the same gmail account for years now, so switching over for me would probably be so much easier than for you - I am sorry you're dealing with such a tough time extricating yourself, by the way.
I am also on Android in terms of phone use as well, but I've seen some stuff I like out there like the Nothing Phone 2, and the so called "dumb" phones that still give minimal smartphone capability along with texting and GPS maps , calls, etc. I think one of them is called the Light Phone or something like that.
I started off with mindset. If you got used to Gmail's workflow then there will definitely be adjustment periods when switching to the competition. Outlook/Exchange/365 might be big corpo...
I started off with mindset. If you got used to Gmail's workflow then there will definitely be adjustment periods when switching to the competition. Outlook/Exchange/365 might be big corpo standard, but Gmail is light years ahead especially if you navigate by its keyboard shortcuts. It's definitely hard to let that go and I've accepted the loss of that in return for a little more control over my stuff.
Biggest things in the move are Gmail (multiple accounts), Google Drive (one account), and Android (one account). I have multiple Gmail accounts, tiered by how personal the email that shows up there. One is tied to my real name and where banking/government/contract emails go, the rest are for random forums or services that don't need to know my exact full name (like Steam or online shopping)
Next up is to grab a domain name from a registrar like Namecheap, host it on a big DNS service like Cloudflare, pick a paid email host and point it to your custom domain. I'm on Fastmail right now. Any decent host will have IMAP so it's just like the good old days with an email client, though they do have a web version. All of these aren't free, but they're quite cheap and I guess that's the price for going against the flow.
That domain goes on the resume and becomes your new online identity, and potentially your blog site, so pick a corporate-friendly name that's easy to pronounce as this domain becomes your "brand". The irony is you need an account at a registrar, so to start I used Gmail and switched it over to the fastmail.com domain as a failsafe, in case something happens on that domain. Once that's all done, you'll get your own nice branded example.com email and this is where the cutover starts.
To start off, I made a big backup of each account on Google Takeout before I started switching over (IT habit)
Since I had all the registration emails, I combined that with my password manager to get a list of things tied to my email accounts. I use aliases for each site that route to the same mailbox, so the new email becomes steam@example.com or amazon@example.com.
Anything I can cutover, I go to the website, swap over the email, log in again with new email. Right now I'm not worried about loading the old data into Fastmail at this point, basically to just stop the flow of things coming in to the Gmail.
The things I tied to my Google login and I can't change without having to recreate it, I haven't figured out yet so I'm leaving it for last since that will involve calls and talks to people. Same for things where I physically wrote down my email like my lease. Basically sorted it out from easiest to most complex.
For Google Drive, I've stopped syncing it so that data is sitting in my local computer, but I'll definitely need a second backup of that stuff.
For YouTube, I don't really participate in it, mostly just have it logged in to bypass the age gate. So combined with Android that's going to be one of the remaining uses for these accounts once nothing is relying on them anymore.
I use either Fastmail's masked emails or Apple's privacy relay so that nobody even knows what the domain of my private email address is unless I give it out. And before that I just used email...
I use either Fastmail's masked emails or Apple's privacy relay so that nobody even knows what the domain of my private email address is unless I give it out. And before that I just used email address + tags.
Outlook/Exchange/365 might be big corpo standard, but Gmail is light years ahead especially if you navigate by its keyboard shortcuts.
That's why real nerds use Mutt. Can't worry about a lack of keyboard shortcuts when there is no other options.
What I did was I created account on disroot.org, it's a nonprofit project using open source software. With it you get email, xmpp, cloud storage, synchronized calendar, contacts and some other...
What I did was I created account on disroot.org, it's a nonprofit project using open source software. With it you get email, xmpp, cloud storage, synchronized calendar, contacts and some other stuff.
However as for email, I switched to posteo.de.
For Youtube subscriptions I'm using RSS reader, so I don't need Youtube account.
I remember when I was a kid in the early-mid 2000s everyone had their own selection of good and useful websites that they knew about and visited. It was a set of magic spells, and your friends had...
I remember when I was a kid in the early-mid 2000s everyone had their own selection of good and useful websites that they knew about and visited. It was a set of magic spells, and your friends had different ones. It felt like you and you alone had pulled the useful parts out of the internet and had them at your disposal. And then the web consolidated a bit more and search engines got better and most people gradually moved onto platforms, and there was this feeling that everyone had a shared conception of online reality, or at least that that shared conception existed and was real, even if some people existed outside of it. Whether this development was good or not is of course the subject of much debate.
But it feels like all of that stuff is completely breaking down and the web is slipping back to that pre-Google ideal, where you have to just manually learn the URLs to good, usable websites and dutifully store them on a pad of paper so you can find them later. Way back when it was because there was very little connective tissue between disparate parts of the web, and most of it was empty space. Today it's because the connective tissue we built has been rendered unusable by fatty tissue and tumors, and that empty space is now dense jungle.
I feel like you've hit the nail on the proverbial head with this comment, and I'd like to expand. I'm not so sure that it's so much of a "breaking down" of the Web as we know it today (Twitter,...
I feel like you've hit the nail on the proverbial head with this comment, and I'd like to expand. I'm not so sure that it's so much of a "breaking down" of the Web as we know it today (Twitter, Instagram, data alg-driven garbage), as it's more of a rejection of it from users such as ourselves. Just like my dad watches Andy Griffith, I watch old Futurama, and just like the generations before ours reject the ever-advancing changes in media and, well, everything, we get relegated to a small corner of the Internet where we can be catered to.
I think that the increasing eshittification of the Internet is just one of the first glaring examples our generation has that is causing us to really stop and think, "Wow, I'm no longer the target audience." This isn't to argue that the Internet isn't becoming shittier and is actually really awesome in 2023, because yeah, it kinda sucks these days, but I did want to espouse on that point.
I'm hosting ProtonMail myself for my personal and work accounts. It's absolutely fantastic. DuckDuckGo is also pretty good once you give it some better indications that Google's "ask dumb...
I'm hosting ProtonMail myself for my personal and work accounts. It's absolutely fantastic.
DuckDuckGo is also pretty good once you give it some better indications that Google's "ask dumb questions and hope for the best" approach.
Duck Duck Go is pretty awesome as long as you can give it a bit more to go on than you would on google. I've been pretty happy with my search results for it, as it gives me mostly more specific...
Duck Duck Go is pretty awesome as long as you can give it a bit more to go on than you would on google. I've been pretty happy with my search results for it, as it gives me mostly more specific results than what I used to get on google.
I am unfamiliar with ProtonMail but I'll look into it. I don't do much emailing, it's mostly a dump spot for my logins and site registrations, which is also all tied into fuckin' google. I'd like to change that but I don't think I can without changing a ton of my logins.
Yup. Which is kind of how it should be. PM is really good. Allows for full encryption of your inbox as well. If you've got a password manager, that can help the migration from Google.
Yup. Which is kind of how it should be.
PM is really good. Allows for full encryption of your inbox as well.
If you've got a password manager, that can help the migration from Google.
Just an FYI, Simplelogin is owned by Proton and lets you create up to 10 free (unlimited paid) burner email addresses that forward to your main address. You can enable and disable them as needed....
Just an FYI, Simplelogin is owned by Proton and lets you create up to 10 free (unlimited paid) burner email addresses that forward to your main address. You can enable and disable them as needed. You could set your last gmail account to forward all email to a simplelogin alias, then whenever anything comes in on that alias you can log into that service and change the email. That's how I finally got rid of my gmail accounts.
I like to think the current iteration of the Internet really kicked in when it became less a hobby... More just an abject way to make even more money. So, about the time the smartphone really...
I like to think the current iteration of the Internet really kicked in when it became less a hobby... More just an abject way to make even more money. So, about the time the smartphone really became obiquitous.
Once the Internet wasn't just reserved for nerds and their friends? It became the playground of the same monopolies that developed in the physical world as well.
The DoubleClick merger should I never have been allowed to happen, and Google should have been busted up into tiny pieces shortly after they more or less staged a coup on the W3C. As a singular...
The DoubleClick merger should I never have been allowed to happen, and Google should have been busted up into tiny pieces shortly after they more or less staged a coup on the W3C.
As a singular company, they exert a lot of control over the direction of the internet through multiple avenues. The largest browser, search engine, video streaming site, ad network and email provider under one roof is unacceptable.
This hits. I've been noticing Google search results not only getting worse, but also getting more limited. Like, there'd only be 3 Google searches page results before it shows you a dead end,...
This hits. I've been noticing Google search results not only getting worse, but also getting more limited. Like, there'd only be 3 Google searches page results before it shows you a dead end, despite the first page showing over 10 page results at the bottom nav bar. Like what the heck?
The whole web integrity thing reads to me as google finally cracking down on adblockers. My bet is that through this, they’ll attempt to block people who use Adblock from using the web since...
The whole web integrity thing reads to me as google finally cracking down on adblockers. My bet is that through this, they’ll attempt to block people who use Adblock from using the web since websites will just exclude users who use plugins they don’t like. I hate the whole mobile app environment they’re trying to push on pc
Any tech person who still uses Chrome has part in it. We had similar things done when Internet Explorer had monopoly and we enabled Google to have similar control.
Any tech person who still uses Chrome has part in it. We had similar things done when Internet Explorer had monopoly and we enabled Google to have similar control.
The problem is Chromium, for better or worse, is now absolutely everywhere - Spotify, Discord, even god damn Obsidian. I don't know whether this is due to laziness or just the pseudo-comfort of a...
The problem is Chromium, for better or worse, is now absolutely everywhere - Spotify, Discord, even god damn Obsidian.
I don't know whether this is due to laziness or just the pseudo-comfort of a platform-agnostic convenience of Chromium.
You are just coming with excuses, to justify laziness. Majority of what you said no longer applies. I currently have 122 tabs open on my Firefox (yes, I'm that kind of person, it started with...
You are just coming with excuses, to justify laziness. Majority of what you said no longer applies. I currently have 122 tabs open on my Firefox (yes, I'm that kind of person, it started with opera) and it was open for few weeks and it is using 1.95GB right now.
You just said you don't use it and immediately install chrome. I have feeling you are still taking about your experience few years ago. They had the effort I think it was called quantum where they...
You just said you don't use it and immediately install chrome. I have feeling you are still taking about your experience few years ago.
They had the effort I think it was called quantum where they rewrote it in rust. This improved performance.
Quantum was something like a decade ago. The Rust stuff came a while later, when components from an experimental browser written in Rust called Servo they were co-developing with Samsung were...
Quantum was something like a decade ago.
The Rust stuff came a while later, when components from an experimental browser written in Rust called Servo they were co-developing with Samsung were integrated into Firefox.
Quantum was like 3 or 4 years ago and was exactly moving to webrender (rust) for rendering and css parsing/matching. I'm gonna guess you've got a tab open with some sort of circular memory...
Quantum was like 3 or 4 years ago and was exactly moving to webrender (rust) for rendering and css parsing/matching.
I'm gonna guess you've got a tab open with some sort of circular memory references that maybe it doesn't handle well.
Nope. Quantum was 2017. Which, granted, is much less than a decade ago. Styli, mentioned in the blog post, was a servo component, so those integrations were happening earlier than I thought. But...
Styli, mentioned in the blog post, was a servo component, so those integrations were happening earlier than I thought. But Webrender was happening circa 2020.
What kind of things are you using it for when you have to kill it? I've got a Tux Book (linux converted chromebook) with 4GB of RAM total, and I can run a dozen tabs in FF along with HexChat and...
What kind of things are you using it for when you have to kill it?
I've got a Tux Book (linux converted chromebook) with 4GB of RAM total, and I can run a dozen tabs in FF along with HexChat and an SSH session generally without issue.
Are you using it for web dev? Some kind of 3D rendering or CPU heavy workloads? Not that it never happens, but I legitimately can't remember the last time I had to force close FF.
Ever since the move to the quantum engine I've been pretty happy with it.
Out of curiosity, when's the last time you tried firefox? It definitely used to have a lot of problems, but they've made some massive improvements lately. I switched from chrome to FF about six...
Out of curiosity, when's the last time you tried firefox? It definitely used to have a lot of problems, but they've made some massive improvements lately. I switched from chrome to FF about six months ago on my 2018 MBA and it runs a lot better. I'm running all my usual addons (ublock origin, cookie editor, etc).
Looks like you haven't used Firefox for some years. I don't observe any memory leaks, UI between browsers is almost.the same nowadays. People use Chrome not because it's better, but because it's...
Looks like you haven't used Firefox for some years. I don't observe any memory leaks, UI between browsers is almost.the same nowadays.
People use Chrome not because it's better, but because it's preinstalled EVERYWHERE. Majority don't care about which browser they use, they just browse and get used to the icon they see every time. Firefox isn't preinstalled, that's simple reason why it has so small userbase.
Other commenter wrote they have 122 tabs open for few weeks with 1,95 GB. Similar for me, but with 572 tabs.
Sorry, but no. You are underestimating the power of oligopolies, "tie in" sales and other dirty capitalist practices. It is way more complex than just being better. My parents don't even know what...
Because it works better.
Period.
Sorry, but no.
You are underestimating the power of oligopolies, "tie in" sales and other dirty capitalist practices. It is way more complex than just being better.
My parents don't even know what chrome is and use it everyday.
$$$ it’s money more than laziness. Companies don’t want to spend on building separate native apps for multiple platforms, and they don’t want to spend time on training devs. JavaScript developers...
$$$ it’s money more than laziness. Companies don’t want to spend on building separate native apps for multiple platforms, and they don’t want to spend time on training devs. JavaScript developers are everywhere and chromium promises multi platform support. It’ll keep getting worse as long as JavaScript is a popular starter language.
I don't use Spotify and Obsidian but had no problem using it on discord, and frankly I don't remember last time I had page that didn't work. BTW: When things don't work you should report a bug....
I don't use Spotify and Obsidian but had no problem using it on discord, and frankly I don't remember last time I had page that didn't work.
BTW: When things don't work you should report a bug. There's no point in web standard if only one company controls it.
I played with building out a servo based electron once and would be happy to do it with more people again. Electron is so shitty it doesn't seem like it would be a hard well to get companies to...
I played with building out a servo based electron once and would be happy to do it with more people again. Electron is so shitty it doesn't seem like it would be a hard well to get companies to move off it.
It shouldn't. But there are a number of things that shouldn't be defended but in reality are. I was just morbidly curious to see what kind of thinking would make you think this kind of thing is OK.
It shouldn't. But there are a number of things that shouldn't be defended but in reality are. I was just morbidly curious to see what kind of thinking would make you think this kind of thing is OK.
The only people defending this are people associated with Google, if you're not, why the f*ck would you (or anyone for that matter) defend this? This is literally monopolization in action.
The only people defending this are people associated with Google, if you're not, why the f*ck would you (or anyone for that matter) defend this? This is literally monopolization in action.
There is always someone who starts from the position of contrarianism, then learns the consensus, and makes up whatever the hell they want to rationalize its inverse. Then they call themselves...
There is always someone who starts from the position of contrarianism, then learns the consensus, and makes up whatever the hell they want to rationalize its inverse. Then they call themselves enlightened. Nothing is safe.
This site skews very heavily towards older, more technical users who know just how terrible and dangerous the internet is without ad blockers. I'd be surprised to find much, if any, defence of...
This site skews very heavily towards older, more technical users who know just how terrible and dangerous the internet is without ad blockers. I'd be surprised to find much, if any, defence of google here.
I can't be the only person that thinks it's funny that the article leads with the impact this may have on accessibility and inclusion? Maybe I'm mistaken but is this likely a major concern? I'm...
I can't be the only person that thinks it's funny that the article leads with the impact this may have on accessibility and inclusion? Maybe I'm mistaken but is this likely a major concern? I'm against Web Environment Integrity but it does seem like "the effect on marginalized groups" is a way of politicizing this in a way to rally people who are more socially justice minded. Chrome has lots of extensions to aid people with disabilities doesn't it?
It's similar to Reddits new API policy, people kept bringing up the effect it had on people with vision problems, (where reddit just ended up making exceptions for those apps). Clearly the bigger concern here is the effect on things like ad-blocking.
Whether there's some ulterior motive to it or not, I think accessibility is worth pointing out first and foremost since those issues mean it becomes 100% unusable for affected individuals....
Whether there's some ulterior motive to it or not, I think accessibility is worth pointing out first and foremost since those issues mean it becomes 100% unusable for affected individuals. Accessibility is an afterthought for most designers and companies, and impacted communities have to fight to be heard.
On the note of reddit, last I heard, the "exceptions" were still a major step down in terms of accessibility as they lack tools for vision-impaired users to moderate subreddits. In fact, I checked r/blind and just yesterday the mods posted this pinned post about continued issues. The list of issues mentioned is disheartening, particularly with Reddit's lack of communication. Most recently, reddit just made an email address for bug reports yesterday, because blind users couldn't effectively submit bug reports.
(Side-note: I really hate that we've reached a point where pointing out accessibility issues is considered politicizing something. I hate that accessibility is considered a political issue at all instead of just basic human decency.)
I'm just saying that it's more virtuous to argue in defense of the marginalized, but the majority of the reason people are upset about WEI is not really because of this. To me this seems...
I'm just saying that it's more virtuous to argue in defense of the marginalized, but the majority of the reason people are upset about WEI is not really because of this. To me this seems disingenuous. The connection to WEI and it's effect on the marginalized does not seem well argued. Poor people will have such old phones that they won't have the latest version of chrome and won't be able to use the internet?
Is this a real possibility?
Is this really the main reason people are concerned about WEI?
I am glad people are pointing out accessibility concerns, I don't like people using marginalized groups to further ulterior motives.
In the case of reddit, people were mostly upset because they were going to lose apollo/RIF not because of the effect it would have on blind people.
Edit: To make an analogy, to me it's like how people argue for medical cannabis but in truth see it as a path towards recreational legalization. I fully support both medical and recreational use, and understand the push for medical marijuana as both a real medicine but also as a foot in the door to get to recreational. Despite this I would prefer a world where people honestly espoused their beliefs instead of playing what I would call political games, but I would be a terrible politician for this reason.
But is WEI an affront to basic human decency? Was Reddit's API change an attack on basic human decency? Or are people mostly upset for other reasons? I'm not a conservative and I don't really like...
But is WEI an affront to basic human decency? Was Reddit's API change an attack on basic human decency? Or are people mostly upset for other reasons?
I'm not a conservative and I don't really like being branded as such.
I'm against Web Environment Integrity but it does seem like "the effect on marginalized groups" is a way of politicizing this in a way to rally people who are more socially justice minded.
Wow, I even double checked that sentence and skipped that word, assuming that you were maybe thinking of anything that mentions social justice as being politicization.
Wow, I even double checked that sentence and skipped that word, assuming that you were maybe thinking of anything that mentions social justice as being politicization.
I was trying to say that by bringing up how something affects marginalized/disenfranchised people may persuade others to be more interested in a cause they would otherwise be disinterested in....
I was trying to say that by bringing up how something affects marginalized/disenfranchised people may persuade others to be more interested in a cause they would otherwise be disinterested in.
It's easier to convince someone that "this is bad because it affects the marginalized", than "this is bad because it stops my ad blocker working".
If I used the word "politicization" incorrectly then I apologize.
It looks like this is the origin trial. They're used to test experimental features. Though as was mentioned in the previous thread, they automatically expire after a period to avoid becoming de...
It looks like this is the origin trial. They're used to test experimental features. Though as was mentioned in the previous thread, they automatically expire after a period to avoid becoming de facto standards.
The Google engineers working on this wrote a proposal explicitly stating that their first use case is protecting the value of online advertising:
...In case you were wondering about their motivations. They're also stating that browser extensions are not presently in scope for this, but given A) their motivation and B) a newfound ability to determine the criteria for a "valid" client, it's not wholly unreasonable to assume that this would inevitably be used to filter out clients with adblocking capabilities.
You can read a bit more about it here(interpeer.io).
Brace yourselves. The (open) internet (as we know it) is changing, and not for the better.
You've got to be ready to tolerate some short-term pain of leaving the convenience of google services behind and learning a new way of thinking of the web and how it serves you information. The old web was kind of inconvenient in a lot of ways, it required a bit more from you as a user. That's part and parcel with autonomy though.
Use engines like Duckduckgo, even if you still occasionally augment searches with google. Proton Mail is a perfectly usable alternative to gmail with a lot of the same basic features. I use it for my important life stuff (family, friends, doctors appts, banking contact etc.) and then I have a gmail that's sort of burner I use for less important stuff.
Google is massive but they still rely on users wanting to use their stuff. We all have to take the opportunity we have now, of being able to see what's coming down the pipe, to switch tracks as individuals. The companies will follow the users and try to accommodate them if there are enough of them moving in a certain way (recent example: Steam adopting ProtonDB to facilitate linux support).
This is well written. I recently got out of the Windows ecosystem and I'm enjoying myself on Manjaro Linux, having played around with the idea of Linux/FOSS on various computers in the past I had.
Making the switch was relatively painless other than having to bridge some Windows only VST plugins for my DAW. Steam works great, my music gear works just fine.
I'd like to disconnect myself from the Google ecosystem. I think I should try to, maybe while I still can with the way things are going?
I remember the old web. It's not that much of an inconvenience and I feel like I could happily live with doing a bit extra on my end to get away from whatever the internet is morphing into.
Places like Tildes give me a feeling that it's not out of reach, and that people still care. Maybe they also long for a bit of a slowdown and less go-go-go rabid consumerism as well.
Same experience here, Linux was the easy part. Office 365 was the only real holdout. I keep it around in a Windows VM because it's on a grandfathered rate and I need it for the occasional dumb requirements for some contracts I work at (like timesheet screenshots from another system must be submitted in a Word doc, LibreOffice Writer just handles heaps of images differently that I gave up trying to change it when money is on the line).
As for degoogling, I'm in the middle of it and it's quite daunting. I have multiple Gmail accounts for tiers of signups and keep all the registration emails I get, so I can track where I signed up which account from. It's a lot to setup aliases for each, not to mention I've liberally used Google signups over manually provisioned accounts out of convenience. Good for work accounts, not so good if you want to extricate yourself from the ecosystem.
I'm going to leave my Android phone for last, it's probably going to be the only one left attached to a Google account depending on how much I want to remove it.
Can you give some starter tips for someone with just one google account to get out of that ecosystem?
I've had the same gmail account for years now, so switching over for me would probably be so much easier than for you - I am sorry you're dealing with such a tough time extricating yourself, by the way.
I am also on Android in terms of phone use as well, but I've seen some stuff I like out there like the Nothing Phone 2, and the so called "dumb" phones that still give minimal smartphone capability along with texting and GPS maps , calls, etc. I think one of them is called the Light Phone or something like that.
I started off with mindset. If you got used to Gmail's workflow then there will definitely be adjustment periods when switching to the competition. Outlook/Exchange/365 might be big corpo standard, but Gmail is light years ahead especially if you navigate by its keyboard shortcuts. It's definitely hard to let that go and I've accepted the loss of that in return for a little more control over my stuff.
Biggest things in the move are Gmail (multiple accounts), Google Drive (one account), and Android (one account). I have multiple Gmail accounts, tiered by how personal the email that shows up there. One is tied to my real name and where banking/government/contract emails go, the rest are for random forums or services that don't need to know my exact full name (like Steam or online shopping)
Next up is to grab a domain name from a registrar like Namecheap, host it on a big DNS service like Cloudflare, pick a paid email host and point it to your custom domain. I'm on Fastmail right now. Any decent host will have IMAP so it's just like the good old days with an email client, though they do have a web version. All of these aren't free, but they're quite cheap and I guess that's the price for going against the flow.
That domain goes on the resume and becomes your new online identity, and potentially your blog site, so pick a corporate-friendly name that's easy to pronounce as this domain becomes your "brand". The irony is you need an account at a registrar, so to start I used Gmail and switched it over to the fastmail.com domain as a failsafe, in case something happens on that domain. Once that's all done, you'll get your own nice branded example.com email and this is where the cutover starts.
To start off, I made a big backup of each account on Google Takeout before I started switching over (IT habit)
Since I had all the registration emails, I combined that with my password manager to get a list of things tied to my email accounts. I use aliases for each site that route to the same mailbox, so the new email becomes steam@example.com or amazon@example.com.
Anything I can cutover, I go to the website, swap over the email, log in again with new email. Right now I'm not worried about loading the old data into Fastmail at this point, basically to just stop the flow of things coming in to the Gmail.
The things I tied to my Google login and I can't change without having to recreate it, I haven't figured out yet so I'm leaving it for last since that will involve calls and talks to people. Same for things where I physically wrote down my email like my lease. Basically sorted it out from easiest to most complex.
For Google Drive, I've stopped syncing it so that data is sitting in my local computer, but I'll definitely need a second backup of that stuff.
For YouTube, I don't really participate in it, mostly just have it logged in to bypass the age gate. So combined with Android that's going to be one of the remaining uses for these accounts once nothing is relying on them anymore.
I use either Fastmail's masked emails or Apple's privacy relay so that nobody even knows what the domain of my private email address is unless I give it out. And before that I just used email address + tags.
That's why real nerds use Mutt. Can't worry about a lack of keyboard shortcuts when there is no other options.
What I did was I created account on disroot.org, it's a nonprofit project using open source software. With it you get email, xmpp, cloud storage, synchronized calendar, contacts and some other stuff.
However as for email, I switched to posteo.de.
For Youtube subscriptions I'm using RSS reader, so I don't need Youtube account.
I remember when I was a kid in the early-mid 2000s everyone had their own selection of good and useful websites that they knew about and visited. It was a set of magic spells, and your friends had different ones. It felt like you and you alone had pulled the useful parts out of the internet and had them at your disposal. And then the web consolidated a bit more and search engines got better and most people gradually moved onto platforms, and there was this feeling that everyone had a shared conception of online reality, or at least that that shared conception existed and was real, even if some people existed outside of it. Whether this development was good or not is of course the subject of much debate.
But it feels like all of that stuff is completely breaking down and the web is slipping back to that pre-Google ideal, where you have to just manually learn the URLs to good, usable websites and dutifully store them on a pad of paper so you can find them later. Way back when it was because there was very little connective tissue between disparate parts of the web, and most of it was empty space. Today it's because the connective tissue we built has been rendered unusable by fatty tissue and tumors, and that empty space is now dense jungle.
I feel like you've hit the nail on the proverbial head with this comment, and I'd like to expand. I'm not so sure that it's so much of a "breaking down" of the Web as we know it today (Twitter, Instagram, data alg-driven garbage), as it's more of a rejection of it from users such as ourselves. Just like my dad watches Andy Griffith, I watch old Futurama, and just like the generations before ours reject the ever-advancing changes in media and, well, everything, we get relegated to a small corner of the Internet where we can be catered to.
I think that the increasing eshittification of the Internet is just one of the first glaring examples our generation has that is causing us to really stop and think, "Wow, I'm no longer the target audience." This isn't to argue that the Internet isn't becoming shittier and is actually really awesome in 2023, because yeah, it kinda sucks these days, but I did want to espouse on that point.
I'm hosting ProtonMail myself for my personal and work accounts. It's absolutely fantastic.
DuckDuckGo is also pretty good once you give it some better indications that Google's "ask dumb questions and hope for the best" approach.
Duck Duck Go is pretty awesome as long as you can give it a bit more to go on than you would on google. I've been pretty happy with my search results for it, as it gives me mostly more specific results than what I used to get on google.
I am unfamiliar with ProtonMail but I'll look into it. I don't do much emailing, it's mostly a dump spot for my logins and site registrations, which is also all tied into fuckin' google. I'd like to change that but I don't think I can without changing a ton of my logins.
Yup. Which is kind of how it should be.
PM is really good. Allows for full encryption of your inbox as well.
If you've got a password manager, that can help the migration from Google.
Just an FYI, Simplelogin is owned by Proton and lets you create up to 10 free (unlimited paid) burner email addresses that forward to your main address. You can enable and disable them as needed. You could set your last gmail account to forward all email to a simplelogin alias, then whenever anything comes in on that alias you can log into that service and change the email. That's how I finally got rid of my gmail accounts.
I like to think the current iteration of the Internet really kicked in when it became less a hobby... More just an abject way to make even more money. So, about the time the smartphone really became obiquitous.
Once the Internet wasn't just reserved for nerds and their friends? It became the playground of the same monopolies that developed in the physical world as well.
The DoubleClick merger should I never have been allowed to happen, and Google should have been busted up into tiny pieces shortly after they more or less staged a coup on the W3C.
As a singular company, they exert a lot of control over the direction of the internet through multiple avenues. The largest browser, search engine, video streaming site, ad network and email provider under one roof is unacceptable.
This hits. I've been noticing Google search results not only getting worse, but also getting more limited. Like, there'd only be 3 Google searches page results before it shows you a dead end, despite the first page showing over 10 page results at the bottom nav bar. Like what the heck?
The whole web integrity thing reads to me as google finally cracking down on adblockers. My bet is that through this, they’ll attempt to block people who use Adblock from using the web since websites will just exclude users who use plugins they don’t like. I hate the whole mobile app environment they’re trying to push on pc
Any tech person who still uses Chrome has part in it. We had similar things done when Internet Explorer had monopoly and we enabled Google to have similar control.
I use Firefox primarily because it's an underdog.
The problem is Chromium, for better or worse, is now absolutely everywhere - Spotify, Discord, even god damn Obsidian.
I don't know whether this is due to laziness or just the pseudo-comfort of a platform-agnostic convenience of Chromium.
You are just coming with excuses, to justify laziness. Majority of what you said no longer applies. I currently have 122 tabs open on my Firefox (yes, I'm that kind of person, it started with opera) and it was open for few weeks and it is using 1.95GB right now.
Chrome reaches that level with just 20 tabs.
You just said you don't use it and immediately install chrome. I have feeling you are still taking about your experience few years ago.
They had the effort I think it was called quantum where they rewrote it in rust. This improved performance.
I currently have exactly 30 extensions.
Quantum was something like a decade ago.
The Rust stuff came a while later, when components from an experimental browser written in Rust called Servo they were co-developing with Samsung were integrated into Firefox.
(edited for clarity)
Quantum was like 3 or 4 years ago and was exactly moving to webrender (rust) for rendering and css parsing/matching.
I'm gonna guess you've got a tab open with some sort of circular memory references that maybe it doesn't handle well.
Nope. Quantum was 2017.
Which, granted, is much less than a decade ago.
Styli, mentioned in the blog post, was a servo component, so those integrations were happening earlier than I thought. But Webrender was happening circa 2020.
My bad, my understanding was that Quantum was a project overlapping smaller one and servo was part of it.
What kind of things are you using it for when you have to kill it?
I've got a Tux Book (linux converted chromebook) with 4GB of RAM total, and I can run a dozen tabs in FF along with HexChat and an SSH session generally without issue.
Are you using it for web dev? Some kind of 3D rendering or CPU heavy workloads? Not that it never happens, but I legitimately can't remember the last time I had to force close FF.
Ever since the move to the quantum engine I've been pretty happy with it.
I have like 10 tabs open permanently for months and don't run into memory leak problems.
Out of curiosity, when's the last time you tried firefox? It definitely used to have a lot of problems, but they've made some massive improvements lately. I switched from chrome to FF about six months ago on my 2018 MBA and it runs a lot better. I'm running all my usual addons (ublock origin, cookie editor, etc).
Looks like you haven't used Firefox for some years. I don't observe any memory leaks, UI between browsers is almost.the same nowadays.
People use Chrome not because it's better, but because it's preinstalled EVERYWHERE. Majority don't care about which browser they use, they just browse and get used to the icon they see every time. Firefox isn't preinstalled, that's simple reason why it has so small userbase.
Other commenter wrote they have 122 tabs open for few weeks with 1,95 GB. Similar for me, but with 572 tabs.
OK, so I can only say that our experience of using Firefox is way different.
Sorry, but no.
You are underestimating the power of oligopolies, "tie in" sales and other dirty capitalist practices. It is way more complex than just being better.
My parents don't even know what chrome is and use it everyday.
$$$ it’s money more than laziness. Companies don’t want to spend on building separate native apps for multiple platforms, and they don’t want to spend time on training devs. JavaScript developers are everywhere and chromium promises multi platform support. It’ll keep getting worse as long as JavaScript is a popular starter language.
I don't use Spotify and Obsidian but had no problem using it on discord, and frankly I don't remember last time I had page that didn't work.
BTW: When things don't work you should report a bug. There's no point in web standard if only one company controls it.
I played with building out a servo based electron once and would be happy to do it with more people again. Electron is so shitty it doesn't seem like it would be a hard well to get companies to move off it.
The comments on that page are very much unkind. I'm actually kind of impressed that I haven't found anyone who is willing to defend this decision.
In all honesty - Why should this decision be defended?
It shouldn't. But there are a number of things that shouldn't be defended but in reality are. I was just morbidly curious to see what kind of thinking would make you think this kind of thing is OK.
The only people defending this are people associated with Google, if you're not, why the f*ck would you (or anyone for that matter) defend this? This is literally monopolization in action.
Found this magnificent example: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues/36#issuecomment-1642902730
"Google wants to make you even more private!"
Delusional.
There is always someone who starts from the position of contrarianism, then learns the consensus, and makes up whatever the hell they want to rationalize its inverse. Then they call themselves enlightened. Nothing is safe.
I think it's as simple as the people who want this kind of thing are also not the kinds of people who would ever use git.
This site skews very heavily towards older, more technical users who know just how terrible and dangerous the internet is without ad blockers. I'd be surprised to find much, if any, defence of google here.
I can't be the only person that thinks it's funny that the article leads with the impact this may have on accessibility and inclusion? Maybe I'm mistaken but is this likely a major concern? I'm against Web Environment Integrity but it does seem like "the effect on marginalized groups" is a way of politicizing this in a way to rally people who are more socially justice minded. Chrome has lots of extensions to aid people with disabilities doesn't it?
It's similar to Reddits new API policy, people kept bringing up the effect it had on people with vision problems, (where reddit just ended up making exceptions for those apps). Clearly the bigger concern here is the effect on things like ad-blocking.
Whether there's some ulterior motive to it or not, I think accessibility is worth pointing out first and foremost since those issues mean it becomes 100% unusable for affected individuals. Accessibility is an afterthought for most designers and companies, and impacted communities have to fight to be heard.
On the note of reddit, last I heard, the "exceptions" were still a major step down in terms of accessibility as they lack tools for vision-impaired users to moderate subreddits. In fact, I checked r/blind and just yesterday the mods posted this pinned post about continued issues. The list of issues mentioned is disheartening, particularly with Reddit's lack of communication. Most recently, reddit just made an email address for bug reports yesterday, because blind users couldn't effectively submit bug reports.
(Side-note: I really hate that we've reached a point where pointing out accessibility issues is considered politicizing something. I hate that accessibility is considered a political issue at all instead of just basic human decency.)
I'm just saying that it's more virtuous to argue in defense of the marginalized, but the majority of the reason people are upset about WEI is not really because of this. To me this seems disingenuous. The connection to WEI and it's effect on the marginalized does not seem well argued. Poor people will have such old phones that they won't have the latest version of chrome and won't be able to use the internet?
I am glad people are pointing out accessibility concerns, I don't like people using marginalized groups to further ulterior motives.
In the case of reddit, people were mostly upset because they were going to lose apollo/RIF not because of the effect it would have on blind people.
Edit: To make an analogy, to me it's like how people argue for medical cannabis but in truth see it as a path towards recreational legalization. I fully support both medical and recreational use, and understand the push for medical marijuana as both a real medicine but also as a foot in the door to get to recreational. Despite this I would prefer a world where people honestly espoused their beliefs instead of playing what I would call political games, but I would be a terrible politician for this reason.
Basic human decency is against conservative values so they attack it.
But is WEI an affront to basic human decency? Was Reddit's API change an attack on basic human decency? Or are people mostly upset for other reasons?
I'm not a conservative and I don't really like being branded as such.
Who has ever called it political?
From the comment they responded to:
Wow, I even double checked that sentence and skipped that word, assuming that you were maybe thinking of anything that mentions social justice as being politicization.
I was trying to say that by bringing up how something affects marginalized/disenfranchised people may persuade others to be more interested in a cause they would otherwise be disinterested in.
It's easier to convince someone that "this is bad because it affects the marginalized", than "this is bad because it stops my ad blocker working".
If I used the word "politicization" incorrectly then I apologize.
I don't think you used it wrong. That's basically what I figured it meant but I didn't think it was worth quibbling at that point.
It looks like this is the origin trial. They're used to test experimental features. Though as was mentioned in the previous thread, they automatically expire after a period to avoid becoming de facto standards.
Edit: Typo