#firefox or chrome i don't give a fuck at this point

[deepwoundsandfadedscars]

I'm ready to tear my hair out, I want to comfortably use Docs without staring into a flashbang, can someone recommend a functional dark mode for using google docs? All the extensions I've looked at just darken the page and makes the text unreadable so then the whole document has to be edited to change the font (pain in the ass) and/or does not function on the google docs selection page, like the list of my documents is still fuck off bright so it is irritating to move between documents

[fuck-customers]

Genuinely wish I could just tell customers "oh too bad, guess you don't get a coupon, then if you'retoo stupid to follow directions" when they refuse to follow my extremely simple step-by-step instructions on how to acquire coupons.

The steps, for reference:

1. Go to the app store and download the [store name] app

2. After you download the store app, you are required to set up an account with your email and set a password for the account. You will not be able to access any discounts at all unless you do this. (Yes it sucks, but I did not design the shit app)

3. After you've downloaded the app and made an account, go to the "coupons" page, which can be accessed through the button on the bottom middle of the app screen.

4. Scroll down to see all of the different coupons available today and show the cashier the one(s) that apply to your purchase. Or, simply show the cashier the screen and they will scroll through and scan all applicable coupons.

Or, alternatively:

1. Go to the store website on your browser-firefox, chrome, etc, which is <storename>.com

2. There will be 3 lines on the top left corner, tap that to open the menu.

3. At the top of the menu is a link that says "coupons and discounts" in red. Tap the "coupons" link.

4. After opening that menu, there will be another menu. Tap the top link that says "coupons"

5. Scroll down until you see a barcode. The coupon with the barcode is the only applicable in-store coupon. The rest are online only or require you to download the app.

6. Show cashier the screen so they can scan the coupons.

Every fucking day, there's multiple braindead mouth-breathers who can't follow these EXTREMELY simple instructions. And this is about word-for-word what I tell them to do. I had a braindead moron open her fucking CALCULATOR when I told her to open her browser and got mad at ME because it obviously didn't do shit. I spell out the website letter-by-letter and morons still fuck it up somehow and spell it wrong and end up on seedy websites. The majority of these idiots can't even get to their browser successfully.

It's genuinely difficult to tell whether this is weaponized incompetence or if they're that fucking stupid. At this point, if I give a customer these instructions and they still fuck it up, I just say "oh, I guess there's no coupons today 🤷‍♀️. Your total is $x.xx"

Posted by admin Rodney

[autolenaphilia]

Fuck Chromium (and that includes Brave and Vivialdi)

I have made multiple posts about why you should use Firefox, and of course I get the reply "not all chromium browsers are bad, they are not all as evil as Chrome." And sure, browsers who use the chromium code are not required to do all the shady things that Google does with it.

Still, I think it's bad that chromium-based browsers are getting close to total market dominance. By this point it has made Google's competitors like Microsoft and Opera drop their own unique proprietary browser engines for chromium. Browsers are becoming a fucking monoculture at this point. And Chromium becoming the browser code base of choice empowers Google, since they are the ones who mainly develop, maintain and fund its code. It means supporting them in their quest to become an internet monopoly that can do things like drm the web itself.

So let me be clear: you are still supporting google by using chromium-based browsers. By helping out in making chromium the de facto standard for browsers, you are giving google power. They are the ones driving chromium development, they will set the standards. And those standards will be in Google's favor. They are an ad company, their goal is to kill off adblockers by making them impossible to use, first with manifest v3 for extensions and now WEI, their web drm.

Brave is a joke.

The supposed "good guy" chromium browsers people recommend are actually shady as shit.

The one i see recommended the most is Brave, and it's fucking terrible. For one thing, it is funded by right-wing techbro Brendan Eich. He was Mozilla CEO for some time, but then people found he was a massive homophobe who funded campaigns against marriage equality, and Mozilla forced him to resign. And that's why he created Brave. That's who you are supporting by using Brave.

It runs off chromium because that's the easy and lazy choice for a browser. And it's literally funded through cryptocurrency, probably the negative environmental impact is a plus in Eich's book. And its adblocker runs off the same dishonest business model as adblock plus does, it will not block ads if advertisers pay them for the privilege. This betrayal of the users is opt-in at least, and you get paid for watching ads, but it's in the aforementioned worthless crypto beans. Brave is a joke.

Vivaldi and the importance of open-source

And then there's Vivaldi, it's a freeware proprietary browser run by a for-profit company, which alone should scare you off it.

"If you aren't paying for it, you are not the customer, you are the product" is a phrase that sometimes unfairly gets applied to open source projects to dismiss them. If it's open source and either community-run or run by a non-profit foundation like the Open document foundation for Libreoffice and or the Mozilla foundation for Firefox/Thunderbird, you are safe even if it's free.

But that phrase 100% applies to free products from for-profit corporations. These companies need to make profits at some point for for their shareholders, and if it is not from selling goods or services, it comes from things like selling your user's data or "attention".

That applies to Vivaldi, who makes big promises about how they will respect their users privacy and never sell their data. But promises mean nothing, Google also says they respect your privacy. And the thing is, Vivaldi is closed source. Not entirely, ironically the bits they got from Google's chromium are open source, but other parts of their code is closed-source. And what that means is, they can make any and all promises about what their browser's code does and there is nobody except Vivaldi that can check if their code actually fulfils those promises. Only Vivaldi has access to that code.

I'm no open-source fanatic, like I don't care if some random game i install and play is closed-source, as long as it is from a credible developer. But open-source is important for security and privacy, because that means someone else other than the company who develops the program can vet it's code for vulnerabilities and privacy violations. Your browser and e-mail client (vivaldi has an e-mail client too) should be open-source for your own safety, because those programs handle sensitive data like your passwords or your e-mails. Closed-source is not more secure, since Kerckhoff's principle applies to digital security and privacy.

And Vivaldi by being proprietary software fails that test. Their own justification is that being closed-source is "their first line of defense, to prevent other parties from taking the code and building an equivalent browser (essentially a fork) too easily." It's the same hypocritical argument that Red Hat used to justify making their Enterprise Linux distro closed-source. "It's fine if we use chromium's code to build our own browser, and expressly for making an Opera clone (that's the literal point of Vivaldi, that's why the name is a music reference), but if someone does the same with our product, they're evil." It's nauseating and alone justification to distrust Vivaldi as it is crying out to be trusted.

Listen to some Antonio Vivaldi instead, his music slaps. And install Firefox and Thunderbird instead.

[thelittlepalmtree]

I hate that people don't know what rickrolling is and I know I've made a post about this before. But like why has everyone collectively forgotten what the fuck rickrolling was? Because it wasn't someone links you to a YouTube video of Never Going To Give You Up by Rick Astley. There was a website that played that song and basically had a million pop ups and at that time you couldn't do that thing on Chrome where you ask it to automatically block pop-ups. I think at this point Chrome didn't even exist and we were all using Firefox. So you had to click through literally every lyric in this song before you could get out of this tab and it would take you no joke pretty much the entire song just to get out of this tab because there were so many popups that we're stopping you from doing anything else on your computer. That is why it was so annoying and why any time someone gave you a link and they rickrolled you you were fucking pissed. It drives me crazy when people are like oh Rick Rolling was just funsies because you have to listen to the Rick Astley song. I would not be surprised if the reason Chrome and Firefox made it possible to stop websites from sending you a bunch of those little dialog boxes was because of Rick Rolling. It was like a constant struggle when this was popular.

[tedoculus]

I am a very very old resident of the internet. I remember searching with aol, I remember searching with askjeeves, yahoo, go2net.com, go.com, altavista, northernlight, etc etc. I remember email before gmail. I think what younger people, or people who aren't that much younger but weren't on the internet as young as I was don't remember, is how much google changed the game.

I really, really hate brand loyalties as much as I hate brand "haters". I was an early adopter of google, I paid a kid in high school to send me a "beta invite" to gmail, I adopted Chrome as soon as it came out and basically refused to work on or a fix a computer until I had first installed Chrome on it. It was the best search engine, it was the best email service, and it was the best browser, and those facts don't care about anyone's feelings. It became the most powerful force on the internet by being the best.

Those facts are no longer true. At some point I grew extremely frustrated with Chrome on my home desktop: crashing, freezing, using a ton of memory. I was convinced it was my fault, one of my extensions or settings or registry changes, etc. I debugged the hell out of it, and then finally when I had something time sensitive and it failed me again I installed Firefox out of ANGER, not thinking I would keep using it just wanting a blank slate to make sure I didn't lose my progress again. But I kept using it and... I was shocked at how it felt just like using Chrome. Just as fast, at this point more reliable, more stable.

But I never thought I'd use a different search engine. Yet I found myself, over and over again, just mystified that I couldn't find whatever the fuck I was looking for anymore. I didn't switch to duckduckgo because I'm concerned about privacy or boycotting an evil company, I switched because it gives me better search results today.

It still isn't perfect, the internet is still changing, there are still multiplying forests of bot written listacles and forums are disappearing and some subreddits are controlled by the corporate interests they are about (don't bother posting on r/roku about how to hide their gross, disgusting, offensive ads because it will just be deleted). And enthusiasts have stopped writing guides, now they exclusively make video tutorials because that's how they can dream of monetizing it.

I'm grateful for this list of modern working alternative search engines and databases. I guess we have just arrived back to the pre-Google state of things. All those ancient search engines I listed above, they weren't fads, they didn't rise and fall replacing each other in discrete periods, they were just all useful for finding different types of sites. And when you were looking for information, you had to try multiple places. And I guess here we are again.

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

[laisai]

look firefox being able to run ublock origin on mobile is a LIFESAVER and yes it also syncs via desktop

that was one big thing i cared about, syncing tabs across desktop and mobile bc sometimes i prefer to like, find fic on desktop but read it on my phone

anyway remember how shitty internet explorer was? that was because they had murdered their only competition during the 90s. so they stopped giving a fuck.

firefox was its first competition in a LONG time when it came out and it forced explorer to shape up... and eventually explorer gave up and died lmao

then chrome came in and said look at us! we're faster! we also have these newfangled tabs things! we take seconds to install and we look cooler and look no terrible malware toolbars!

and we all jumped to chrome. even microsoft edge these days runs off chromium, which is like chrome but removing a lot of the google branding/specific stuff (its more complicated but look it up if you care)

BUT FIREFOX DOESNT. IT'S NOT BASED OFF CHROMIUM (loads of other "alternative" browsers are based off chromium too. its sad and pathetic) (also firefox is born from the ashes of internet explorer's old adversary and it's pretty cool)

you might not think browser monopolies matter but trust me, it was a SHIT time for computer security/innovation and it will be a shit time again if we let chrome dominate like internet explorer used to

and this time its worse because SO MUCH more of your personal data -- government/social security id, financial info, family connections -- all of that is being accessed thru browsers again

and there's loads of "apps" on your desktop that are actually just Browsers in Disguise (look up electron framework) and they run chromium too, so if chromium/chrome has a vulnerability THEY WILL TOO

JUST USE FIREFOX.

(also chrome being the default has caused websites to ONLY code for chrome, which lets GOOGLE dictate how websites work on the internet. a private company shouldn't have that power. explorer was like that in the early 00s. it was hell. it made some aspects of web design easy -- design and test just one browser -- but it held back innovation for like a decade.

if you find you still need a chrome browser bc some websites aren't compatible btw, might i point you to Microsoft edge? it's hilarious but basically because it's chromium based it works like 99.9% of the time when a website asks you to use chrome, only it doesnt record all your info and send it to google.

don't sign into it and it won't record enough info on you to matter. also turn on hardware acceleration in the settings if something doesn't work; that setting is on by default in chrome.)

seems that Chrome has around 60-65% market share, so it’s not totally dominating the market yet but it’s worrying that we’re basically reliant on Apple and Microsoft to hold the line.