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Comment by ropiwqefjnpoa | Hacker News Reader

Even if you have no issue with Google, this is still a good idea to encourage competition. Honestly, Chrome is not as good as it used to be anyway. For me, Google Maps and Waze are the hardest things to kick. And YouTube...

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In terms of browsers, I have moved back to Firefox from Google for my personal/professional browsing, but I have a product that is heavily reliant on Puppeteer and CDP. There are moves towards interoperability in Firefox, but that's my current blocker.

Firefox DevTools member here. We are looking into Puppeteer/CDP – what is the product you depend on? If you can't post it here, feel free to email me [nickname] at mozilla org

Not the OP but, I use puppeteer (and headless Chromium) as a PDF rendering service. I'd love to be able to try the same thing with a headless Gecko/Slimer.js type thing. My current build process is a major pain to keep updated (building an Alpine docker image with the right version of Chrome to match the right version of puppeteer with the right version of nodejs) And after all that, it's pretty slow.

How many devs are on the firefox devtools team?

~10 across various panels and the new profiler.firefox.com.

Badly worded on my part, but it's my own product. I use Puppeteer to run headless Chrome instances in AWS Lambda to evaluate the network traffic associated with advertising data collection. I have a toolchain built around Puppeteer and CDP, which is in use by customers, so migration isn't a viable option for me.

It's a shame WebDriver hasn't been improved. Instead we get an entirely separate, nonstandard effort from the vendor with a supermajority.

(WebDriver standard contributor and member of the team working on this in Gecko)

There is a plan to update the WebDriver standard to encompass the automation features that are currently only available via devtools protocols. There's agreement it should be possible to open up a bidirectional channel to the browser from within devtools and use it for things like listening to events, streaming logs, etc. However as so often happens reality dictates that implementing something compatible with CDP is needed today in order to interop with the range of existing tooling that's either CDP-only (e.g. Puppeteer) or WebDriver-with-CDP-extensions (e.g. SauceLabs, various WebDriver clients).

In the long term we hope that we end up with a "WebDriver 2.0" that will satisfy all the common use cases in a standard way. That bidirectional protocol will probably end up looking a lot like CDP just to ease the migration for existing implementations, but the details depend on work that hasn't yet been done.

OpenStreetMap had solid data, but my periodic attempts at finding a good app haven't been successful.

Have you tried OSMand (https://osmand.net/). It is not very pretty, but I definitly love the "offline" feature and bicycle maps.

You an combine with brouter to get awesome elevation0-respecting foot and bike routes. This works all fully offline, btw.

https://maps.me/ is a pretty mainstream option.

With removed ads and binaries https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/

I'm using OsmAnd+ found on f-droid. It works very well, you'll just have to download the maps you need before.

There is Mapquest (based on mapbox) it is surprisingly good and works well for nearly most of my use cases.

I live outside the US and struggle with a good mapping solution... I make a point to stick with Apple Maps on my phone but sometimes I am forced to resort to Google Maps to find some place I know exists but Apple Maps doesn't have it :/

So I just tried Mapquest and it had the same problem :(

Google's mapping dominance outside the US is really only challenged by Bing maps... which I can't get on iOS. Nearest is HERE maps but it's not quite the same product.

I've used Here WeGo in several European countries and it didn't fail me yet. I would use OpenStreetMaps but I couldn't find any OSM app with public transport included as an option.

OpenStreetMap data is very weak in many countries. It’s not an option if you are building applications for a global audience.

I wish someone could create a viable YouTube competitor, seems like there's no one that has succeeded just yet.

Well it took YT over a decade to become profitable —before that it was losing lots of money so it’s kinda understandable competitors would be few and far between

I really like the idea of PeerTube, I wish it would gain a larger audience. Profitability might be it's biggest hurdle though.

In the meantime you can use invidio.us, which scrapes youtube, and lets you 'subscribe' and create playlists without having an account directly on youtube. NewPipe is an app for getting youtube without the youtube. And PeerTube is still young, but a place to check out and get involved with, if you want to see an alternative succeed.

> getting youtube without the youtube

I think that's not really what people have issues with. The scariest thing about YouTube to me is that there's so much great content that's only on YouTube and there's not really an alternative. So if YouTube goes away for some reason, or Google decides to wipe all videos with < xxxx views, or Google decides to get rid of it for liability issues or other things there's nothing to archive this amount of content.

I frankly archive videos (as music) solely for this purpose.

>I think that's not really what people have issues with.

It's tedious to even have to draw these distinctions at all, but I'm not saying it is the answer. A replacement is most preferable. In the meantime, here's something that accesses youtube without being associated with a youtube account or ads, which is one step better than being directly plugged in as we await a preferable alternative.

For the gaming Niche, twitch is likely larger than youtube.

This. An ad-free, recommendations-free, comment-free, subscription-free YouTube. Just a search bar with an advanced search feature. That way I can just watch what I need to, not what I want to.

Try blocking all images on Youtube so you won't see thumbnails. It helps a ton.

Don't follow the point

To avoid deep binges into youtube. First of all, youtube thumbnails are cancer anyway, so blocking them is one step towards a Lower Information Diet. And the first step to being able to quit any addictions to youtube.

> youtube thumbnails are cancer anyway

That's due to content creators, not YouTube.

It's not that simple.

YT pressures content creators into doing all sorts of stupid shit. They are made to think they don't really have a choice unless they want to risk their monetisation.

One memorable particularity was YT prompting the content creators to make thumbnail images with grimacing faces, which IMO is cancerous. yt/user/theCodyReeder talked about it, but I cannot find the video any more, this was about two years ago.

When YouTube (actively or not) incentivizes that style of thumbnails you cant really blame the creators. I've heard something like 20% more viewers based solely on having a more "creative" thumbnail.

It drastically reduces the occurence of me clicking another video.

If I want to see a video I have to read all titles and it gives me a chance to think if I want to stop watching.

An added bonus is that it takes me at least a couple seconds to find a video to watch when I open the front page and I don't end up subconsciously clicking the first interesting thumbnail.

PS: Also let me add that I'm using youtube signed off with no cookies in a browser that doesn't remember history so the front page is usually the same videos that I don't want to watch for a couple days or a week at a time.

I've CSS-blocked the Suggestions and Comments sections, which is wonderful.

Of late, I mostly use https://invidio.us

DDG bang: !invidious

Not as short as !yt, but it's there and works.

Apple Maps is now quite usable if you're on iOS...although it's no Waze.

Issues I have with Apple Maps: no cycling directions and, to a lesser degree, overall slightly-worse-quality and less intuitive visuals, like lacking first-person point-of-view or not updating starting point and estimates if I move when displaying directions.

Of course, there's an element of me having gotten too much used to Google Maps in some of this.

> lacking first-person point-of-view

You mean street view? Apple Maps is slowly rolling out their version.

I mean displaying from the point of view of you walking or driving. It simply shows a birds-eye view (unless I'm somehow glossing over a toggle somewhere?).

Two finger swipe up and down changes the perspective.

I've been using Apple Maps for years now, but the new maps are practically unusable for one of my favorite use cases: scanning for roads in remote, wooded areas.

I was trying to show someone one of my favorite state highways through the Hoosier National Forest, but the road (remember, a state highway!) literally vanishes into the greenery until you zoom quite far in. Maddening.

Apple Maps meh. It doesn't work across devices. I look maps on my browser all the time. I need maps to appear everywhere and be sharable with the 80% of the planet not using iOS

You can share Apple Maps links with people; they'll open in Google Maps on devices that don't have Apple Maps.

You can use Apple Maps in the browser through DuckDuckGo

I tried to kick Waze via Apple Maps but their routes are significantly worse. Sometimes the routes that Apple would give me were 10-20% longer than Waze's projection. Waze is the best, followed closely by Google Maps, and (unfortunately) Apple is a distance 3rd. Still hoping a viable alternative turns up!

I use https://maps.openrouteservice.org/ and find it to be perfectly adequate.

Pretty good, but it doesn't do public transport.

Excellent product from my brief examination. Does this work on mobile?

That seems like an excellent mapper (and the isochrones are fun), but it doesn't look like it takes into account traffic conditions. I regularly you google maps just to see which of my commute options is faster that day, and if I have to drive in London any route finding system that doesn't take into account current traffic is next to useless.

Once you've kicked the car-driving habit, kicking Google Maps is easy...

People need wayfinding regardless of how you get around.

Yeah, Google Maps is surprisingly good when you are on a foreign trip and need to find which bus you need to take to get somewhere. There are probably better country-specific apps to do the same, but GM works in all sorts of countries like Hungary or Japan.

not so well in bulgaria, just not im serbia

Moovit (for example) has coverage of public transit in both of these countries. So even in that area there are alternatives for Google.

It does have some cities from these countries, but the coverage is not total enough. I have used Google maps to catch buses in obscure places like Iwaki and Balatonfüred.

There's also OpenStreetmaps

There is Mapquest (based on mapbox) it is surprisingly good.

OpenStreetmaps is a good database with which to build navigation apps, but IMO it's very bad for actually getting directions and finding locations. It's kind of like saying you can use Wikipedia for subway navigation.

On OpenStreetMaps.org, zooming over my area (NYC) and searching for "pizza" brings up the first 3 results in Tuscany Italy.

I presume the parent commenter was referring to OSM-based apps rather than openstreetmap.org (NB singular, not plural).

Why? We did just fine without it up until a couple years ago.

People also only used to stay in their villages or neighbourhood and don't travel as much as they do these days.

It's a different world and just because we got by with sailing the oceans and using star navigation doesn't mean we can't use modern technology to improve our lives.

You've skipped a rather large period of time in which people would travel, and would bring a map with them or buy one when they got there. You think road trips only got to be a thing after Mapquest?

It was obviously an exaggeration but maps are just an iterative improvement until we landed (for now) GPS enabled devices, in the future we'll maybe have it embedded in our glasses, eyes or brain. I didn't say that we could only start traveling or doing road trips once we invented smartphones.

GPS-enabled devices are the first such improvement to have a novel downside: you can now be tracked, whether you want to be or not.

It's getting harder (though not fully impossible) to find maps.

Where you used to find a stand with local maps in most fueling stations, you don't.

I'm looking at AAA's Map Gallery page trying to figure out if they offer paper maps any more. What's on offer are PDFs for online viewing or printing.

I'm someone who's got several atlases, globes, and piles of paper maps, as well as highway atlases and other paper-based navigational aids. I know how to use them. I prefer them.

They're simply not availabe as they were a decade ago (and for decades before that). And may well not exist in another ten years, except through extraordinary effort.

The "it's just an option" argument works until it doesn't. At which point it's not only not helpful, but not true.

Interesting perspective. This could relate to other nuances on centralization of navigation services. If Google Maps is the sole provider , this means they have authority on what streets are most viable, which shops get prioritized, and even where borders get drawn.

Well, yes. If you succeed in achieving the goal of Organising the World's Information, then you get to organise it as you wish, and as benefits you.

OSM-based apps are better for cycling and walking directions than Google. Citymapper is great for urban public transport. Google Maps has a compelling advantage in car directions, but not so much in other ways of getting round.

I wouldn't consider that a "habit" for most people.

Not really. Google maps was invaluable in navigating the NYC subway when I visited.

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