Edit: at least you knew you were the customer with AOL and paid them with clear terms for access.
With Firefox succumbing this week, this is pretty horrible.
I’m not a Richard Stallman type, but I think it’s come to the point where if you have even the slightest pretense of being a “free web” person, using Chrome or a Chromium-based browser has become unconscionable. This company is playing embrace extend extinguish to a T and they are nearing the end game.
I switched to Firefox this year and so can you! Just download it, install it, and then clear your Chrome history so it doesn’t feel like home anymore. Firefox is really nice and I was surprised that I don’t miss Chrome at all (except for the developer tools color picker).
Firefox succumbed to what? Genuinely curious, i had not heard this.
Explanation: Google undermined FireFox, both through ads, then through a series of incompatibilities.
And they did the same to Edge, which is using Chromium.
Thanks for phrasing it like this - I'm also not a Richard Stallman type but it's hard to disagree with this statement. Just downloaded Firefox and made the switch.
Clearing my history/sessions in Chrome was an important factor in adoption for me as well. It helps that when you start typing in that search bar, it doesn’t feel familiar. Took a few weeks but did eventually stop looking to Chrome. Now I just use it for testing/Android debugging.
Firing a team building a meaningful advancement in Firefox's tech stack is a big signal, imo.
Let it die, rebuild from the ruins.
The same goes for Google Search/DuckDuckGo. I use the latter on my personal devices, but when I'm tracking down a problem at work I just need the thing that's going to work the best.
I used to think they weren’t as good, but they are good. And I think I’m a pretty serious dev tools user.
BUT, if you want to keep using Chrome dev tools that doesn’t mean you can’t switch to FF. Just de-personalize Chrome (clear you history, sessions, settings etc) and then you’ll stop using it. Say you’re developing and open a new tab to search something on SO: you won’t be logged in on SO. Same goes with any site. So you’ll instantly realize you’re using Chrome to browse and hop over to FF instead.
Seems like a lot of work but it’s not. Maybe I drank the kool aid but I now feel naked browsing with Chrome and try to avoid it as much as possible. I think the important thing is to stop using Chrome for personal browsing.
Depending on your IDE, you can make it just open Chrome when you boot up web projects. That's what I do, but I do normal browsing on Firefox, it helps keep distractions away even. Leaving Chrome with only work related things.
Why? I’m a full time developer at a Fortune 100 company and I have no issues just using the Firefox dev tools. I literally never use the Chrome dev tools. Though, this might soon change now that Mozilla has laid off the dev tool team.
#!/bin/sh
test -e "$(which chromium)" && CHROME="chromium"
test -e "$(which google-chrome)" && CHROME="google-chrome"
test -e "$(which google-chrome-dev)" && CHROME="google-chrome-dev"
TMPDIR=`mktemp -d /dev/shm/chrome-XXXXX`
$CHROME --user-data-dir=$TMPDIR --no-first-run --no-make-default-browser "$@"
rm -rf $TMPDIRI've actually checked with both browsers open side-by-side while developing my own webapps.
What's worse, Chrome is super buggy and will often randomly crash on complex CSS or too many table rows, etc.
All these moves just turns up the temperature of the innovation cauldron, speeding up the pace of whatever will replace them.
More clout and depth has nothing to do with longevity. See every Empire that has evaporated in History.
Google will fail faster than it took most empires too for 2 reasons
1. Things move much faster these days. The time between rise and fall keeps shrinking for large orgs struggling to cope with the furious pace of change.
2. Complexity of playing empire defense grows exponentially with scale. You can't find enough skilled people quick enough. You cant solve increasingly complex issues with just your cash hoard. You can't escape increasing internal politics that slows the speed of innovation within. You can't escape external actors mistrusting every small move made etc etc etc.
So they will keep making such moves. And there is a way to speed up their decline - Encourage them and praise them for whatever they come up with.
My level of respect for origin was similarly the tie-breaker when choosing between Vue, Angular, and React.
Basically, Google have lived long enough to see themselves become the villain.
It doesn't really make sense, though. The AOL thing was always things like "visit AOL keyword lord of the rings" at the end of trailers, and that would take you to the marketing site.
If Chrome wanted to do that, in the example gif the keyword wouldn't be just "en.wikipedia.org" for the URL article, it would be something like "wikipedia URL" that would bring you back to the page you're on through a google search.
I see people every day searching for a brand and clicking rather than appending ".com". It's more convenient. If Google can profit off laziness, they will.
At one time, there were less organizations online but now, almost every single business, large or small, has a web presence over viable domain name scarcity.
As such, discovery service online is a necessity. Google and other search engines fill that void. Now should they completely replace domains? Probably not, at least not yet, but some other addressing scheme needs to exist if we want to be less reliant on services like Google. Personally, I just use other search engines. If I'm not finding results I fall back to Google.
I realize hindsight bias is at work, but I think I preferred Microsoft playing the Shitbag Monopolist role. They weren't passive aggressive about it, at least.
But the company-wide decision to manipulate the URL as a business strategy drains all my enthusiasm. The "U" is really important! The URL is basically a filename that you use to access the data store called the Internet. Don't take it away from me by the brute force of market dominance. I need to be sure of where I'm addressing my packets. Don't tamper with that essential construct.
I use both browsers, but without Firefox, I'd be lost in the wilderness. With its recent layoffs I'm worried about the web.
They take your data and everyone's regardless of if you want them too. That you don't mind hardly makes that better.
The days of URLs as a data access key are gone. So many other things (cookies, etc) go into controlling what pages show that what was originally a 1:1 mapping between URL and content is now a many to many mapping. I'm not saying that's how it should be, but that's the web we live in now.
People might not understand how a seat belt works, it's still there and we still use them.
AOL really only declined because of the rise in high speed internet, and their awful business model and practices.
AOL didn't lack depth: they literally had email (@aol.com), social media (AIM), video-calling (Vonage), cloud filesharing (Xdrive) and so much more.
Ultimately, they failed because (1) they were overvalued to begin with and (2) had a bad innovation model (top-down) that led them to (a) over-commit to online ads and (b) under-commit to broadband.
Google is sustainable & mature, and it has a distributed innovation model that will avoid the particular mistakes of AOL.
Google is reacting to the Walled Garden trend, not driving it.
I could follow you right up to that bit.
I meant to say that Google is well-positioned to take advantage of being a Walled Garden, and is doing so now because the model is being built out out elsewhere, both domestically (Apple, Amazon) and abroad (WeChat, Jio).
Edit: AIM was a really popular messaging client for years after the fall of AOL as a premiere dial up Internet service.
https://youtu.be/V75dMMIW2B4?t=143
I have no idea how popular they ever were, but I'm sure there's a large segment of people that find it easier to remember and to type in "Lord of the Rings" into their computer than "www.lordoftherings.net".