My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil
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@aach1 For me, whenever I go on any of the Google Drive services through Vivaldi, there's a message box at the bottom of the page that says "You are using an unsupported browser. If you see some unexpected behavior, you may want to use a supported browser instead. LEARN MORE"
It's kind of annoying and condescending. Other Chromium-based browsers, like Opera, aren't even listed on there as "supported browsers". I just click x to remove the message, but I have to do that every time I go into G-Drive.
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@d0j0p heh, word. I've never noticed that before. I'm going to check next time I use the Google Drive website and see what the page says
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@wyghthy There have been government actions against Google for monopoly and there is more than one lawsuit against them at present for the same thing.
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@cout said in My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil:
but if you were 90% of the web
Google doesn't provide 90% of Internet content, it's just search engine. No, YouTube doesn't hold 90% of streaming video market too.
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@an_dz: This...Exactly THIS!
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@niheiguilty said in My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil:
I used to use Opera Mail as my primary mail address [...] the service was ended and it was a chaos to migrate everything to another place, the sense of lost still hurts to this day.
My OperaMail account closed literally last week! When did you think the service ended?
I also just went through the pain of migrating mail provider since I had been using that OperaMail address as primary mail for nearly 25 years!!!
And, as you suggested, in the interests of longevity I plumped for the "old evil" - redirecting all contacts to my equally old Hotmail account (which I think I had to create to be able to chat to friends when it was all about MSN messenger). Figured that Microsoft are less able to harvest my info than Google these days...
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@rigo Hiya. Another Tumbleweeder, kool !!
Some time ago i did look at qwant.com & decided not to use it, but now i have no recollection why... so i need to now look again... thanks!
BTW, a couple of years ago didn't France bring in a version of the egregious US Patriot Act with similar onerous data retention & access laws?
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This is not surprising, though. Any more than the fact that oligopolies and monopolies are the natural end game in capitalism. When the responsibility for heinous acts is diluted among all the leadership of a big corporation, no one person feels responsibility. It's "the company" that's doing it, not the people who make the decision to actually do it, at least psychologically. Add in a heaping helping of profit motive and bonuses for people who screw others over extra hard and well, it's obvious that "Don't be evil" is just a noise.
It's meaningless in capitalism, especially if it's not codified and specified as to what that means. Don't discriminate against other browsers. Don't collect personal data beyond what you absolutely need. Don't use the personal data to make buttloads of cash in morally repugnant ways. Yes, that's all technically under "don't be evil", but the corporate leadership would no doubt file that under "being a savvy businessman". In capitalism, if we didn't have laws against grinding random babies into paste and selling it as health food, some corporation would no doubt try it when they really reached the pinnacle of their quest for money at all costs. That's just how it works in a competition-based society, where we equate money with freedom. The more money, the more freedom.
Any major corporation evolves over time into becoming a den of villains. That's just what the pressures of our society does. It's inevitable.
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@jon: you probably misuranderstood what i meant... i was talking about vivaldi giving the users a better web, and that's because google is giving us a bad one
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@cout said in My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil:
@ksx4system YouTube + Google + Gmail + $google service here ~= 90% of the web. Also love how THIS is your counterargument.
It's really not though... It might be what you GO TO 90% of the time, but the content passing through Google is mostly coming from elsewhere on the web.
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@steffie Yes, France has this useless data retention that is illegal in the EU according to the ECJ. That's why in France, nowadays your mobile phone takes 10sec to connect. It first registers with their slow servers in Paris ...
But data retention doesn't serve anything if you don't have the IP, cookies nor fingerprinting. So as qwant has no data about you, the data retention required is useless. But of course I use other search engines too. To avoid monopoly, one always needs to use various browsers and search engines and things.
And yes, it would be cool to have vivaldi on my jolla phone
BTW, if I close a tab in vivaldi, I sometimes get hangs in plasma and high CPU consumption. Do you experience the same? Might be my KDE prefs from 1995 ... -
@rigo No, my V & Plasma5 behaviour is not at all as you described -- i only changed to openSUSE Tumbleweed in May/June this year, from Maui, & before that Mint KDE4. oS TW P5 is giving me THE best, most solid & reliable, P user-experience i've ever had, KDE4 or KDE5, & of any distro i've tried. I'm simply thrilled with it, so that really disappointing to hear that you're not enjoying the same behaviour. What about if you were to create a second user account, thus with default Plasma settings, & try V therein?
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I think its time we all stopped using Google search - without their dominance in search they would be less powerful. Lets all use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Yandex, Ecosia, Startpage etc. as much as possible!
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@steffie probably a good idea. But migrating my complex setup would be a lot of work. It is already a good indication that it doesn't happen to you. So there is no general bug, but rather some config that isn't appreciated ...
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@mossman: You are welcome to use your vivaldi.net mail account. We will be there. It is ad free and we do not scan your email.
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@niheiguilty: You are welcome to use your vivaldi.net mail account. We will be there. It is ad free and we do not scan your email.
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@luca247: Ah. Understood. We do try our best.
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@chas4: Yes, we had to spend a lot of time on this at Opera and I thank you for your help there!
The feeling is that we should not have to do this at Vivaldi, but we do. Mostly Google services, though, which makes no sense at all from a technical point of view.