Worked for me. Switched to FF because I just can't trust Chrome anymore. FF feels like a breath of fresh air.

Yup, same. Switched to ff and bing. Was surprisingly frictionless. Next week I'll be off gmail too. Up yours google. The week after, I'm getting rid of my android phone.

I'm a high school IT teacher and have some influence over hundreds of students each year. I've already started to sprinkle in some discussion about privacy and will be sure to inform my students about the issues. Of course I won't brow beat my students, but i will encourage them to make informed decisions.

In aggregate, over time this kind of behaviour by google will hurt them. No such thing as too big to fail in tech.

> I'm a high school IT teacher ... I've already started to sprinkle in some discussion about privacy

Thank you for your service.

> and bing.

Wouldn't we expect Bing to log/analyze/correlate user behavior as hard as they possibly can? Or are you betting that Firefox at least won't cooperate with Bing in such an endeavor because it's not a Microsoft product?

> Or are you betting that Firefox at least won't cooperate with Bing in such an endeavor because it's not a Microsoft product?

It's MSFT, they don't collaborate w/ anyone anyways. Even if they do, it's unsuccessful. /s

Can we make this the top comment or something, so that google folks can see this!. I am sure HN is a good enough influencer for folks at Google to rethink!

Na, just let Google continue their non stop promotion campaign for alternative browsers and search engines :-)

What phone are you replacing Android with? 'cause Apple isn't much better, Windows phone is dead, and Blackberry...

I had an iPhone 6s+ for a year and couldn't stand the UI and poor ergonomic choices. I was also unable to do basic things easily like SSH without paying outlandish amounts of money for things similar to JuiceSSH. It's locked down in userspace much more than Android and it's noticeable. Things like unzipping/unraring files, using a file explorer, always had problems with downloaded files, etc were totally impossible.

I want to go to an iPhone because Google is starting to really piss me off, but the year with the iPhone keeps turning me away. I wish there were other options.

I've wanted to go back to a S40/candybar type device for a while. So far this has been vetoed by my wife who fears that I'll be even more disconnected since I'll then only have access to all messaging on the PC.

Anyone knows if Telegram/Signal etc exists for KaiOS or similar?

Not quite sure if it fits within the idea of complete privacy but Whatsapp is available for KaiOS.

https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000649/WhatsApp-for-JioPhone-on-...

Apple is much better. You can also install a custom rom.

apple marketing sells you the idea that they are much better... sad that even people here fall for that.

10% of their monster revenue is selling your data to advertiser backchannels.

Source? That doesn't right at all. Even google doesn't sell your data directly, just ads; they do in-house analysis of the data.

All those companies sell the "anonymized data" to everyone. for example "ad X shown to user Y targeted on Z at time T"

And if you happen know user Y matches user earenndil in a data set you control, now you know user earenndil belongs to demographic Z.

What will you replace gmail with?

I use FastMail with my own domain. I used to use Google Apps before it.

But before switching email services, do yourself a favor and ditch webmail interfaces first. Pick up a desktop/native email client and switch to IMAP / SMTP.

On MacOS a solid option for us power users is MailMate (https://freron.com/) ... markdown composer, GMail shortcuts, useful bundles, fast, uncluttered, it's basically what I wanted Thunderbird to be. Development on Thunderbird is apparently ongoing too and they just released version 60. Apparently Web Extensions are in the works too.

Transitioning to a native client is painful at first, but it's worth it.

GMail's web interface is a piece of shit lately anyway.

Would like to add to your excellent suggestions. When you switch away from Google, set your gmail to forward and delete your email (to your new email address). That way you won't leave any emails on gmail but you can keep it up until you've completely migrated.

> markdown composer..

What kind of emails need markdown composing?

It's awesome for emails containing snippets of code, code with syntax highlighting being my use case.

And for formatting in general, the resulting email (composed in MailMate) will be very friendly to clients that prefer to display emails as plain text, since the text version is going to be very clean.

There's also a browser extension working with GMail's web interface too, but it doesn't work as well as MailMate: https://markdown-here.com/

From yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054574 :)

I'd love to tell people the only way to replace gmail is to get either your own mail server or at least your own domain, but this is an unreasonable goal.

However.... re-decentralization resonates quite well these days when it comes to the web. I wonder what it would take to be re-applies to email.

>I'd love to tell people the only way to replace gmail is to get either your own mail server or at least your own domain,

It's trivially easy to get blacklisted as spam that way...

This is kind of FUD. I’ve been running my own mail server for over a year now, and my E-mails don’t magically disappear into some blacklist. Do you have to be careful when configuring your server? Yes. Can you get on a blacklist erroneously? Yes. Does not going with a hosted solution mean you cannot participate in E-mail? No way.

I don’t know where this myth comes from that running your own mail infra means your mail will be marked as spam. You’re not the first (or second or third) person to mention it though.

It takes a long time to build up IP reputation if you run your own infrastructure. Even today after a year+ on the same IP, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, senderscore of 100 and transactional email only, Yahoo still randomly blacklists us for weeks at a time. Good luck getting in touch with a human to figure out why when you aren't Gmail or another big player in the industry.

Aside from Yahoo though, we generally haven't experienced any blacklisting or deliverability issues. It does require time to setup properly and maintain however, you can't just set it up and forget about it.

That's exactly part of the problem. If email went back to decentralization properly, the whole idea of ip reputation could go away, which is genuinely wrong and against email in the first place.

As someone who's had his entirely legitimate, wholly none-spamming email accounts blacklisted (numerous times) because he used the same shared server as someone less than saintly, I can attest that this is actually a genuine and existant concern.

Sure, it's 'easy' to get around, by throwing more money and complexity at the problem, but it isn't some made up tale.

I would not use a shared server for E-mail hosting, for this exact reason. Even if you are the only person on the IP, you need to watch out your first couple of months because the IP you have could have been misused in the past. If you find your new host’s IP on a blacklist, request a new IP from your provider.

>Can you get on a blacklist erroneously? Yes.

Can any random adversary easily have you blacklisted just for fun?

Can some Wordpress or other such service you run with your own email get you in trouble?

What about any when viruses (and botnets) in any PCs you have in your company go bezerk with your account?

And so on...

Maybe this is too much tinfoil, but it feels like Google has a bit of a perverse incentive here to make their spam blacklist unnecessarily trigger-happy. After all, anyone they block will just think running their own mail server is too hard these days and might switch back to using Gmail...

I think "get your own mail server" doesn't necessarily imply that you're doing all of the setup yourself. Using a provider like fastmail (or Google apps, fwiw) is a good way to be sure that you set it up right.

Granted you can't set up your own Google Mail domain for free today like you once could, but some of us are grandfathered in... I am, and I'm still looking at this as a better alternative to Gmail because even though it is Gmail, I can take my address with me if I do ultimately change my mind about Gmail.

(That's the first step, at least. You can never take @gmail.com with you, but if you want to start moving away, you could forward to your own domain and start thinking about where you would host it.)

Erm, no. Yes, DMARC, SPF, DKIM is needed, with static IP and a properly configured and authenticated mail system, but once that's OK, it's fine.

I've been running my mail server for 10 years now, I got on blacklists 2 times: once due to a worm that got in through PHP, the other was a client's laptop that got a virus and used outlook express to send mail.

>I've been running my mail server for 10 years now, I got on blacklists 2 times

So how's that an argument that "it's fine"? Sounds like 2 times more than a regular person would want to deal with such issues within a decade, much less a small company. And it can take long to clear those things out if you're small fish...

FastMail looks like a good option!

Testing proton mail. If mail delivery is solid then that will do, otherwise outlook.com will be good enough. I'm ungoogling my life and strangely enough, MS is the less bad option right now.

If you have your own domain I recently found Migadu from HN like a day or two ago in another discussion. (and I love them already)

Migadu is fantastic. Support has been good as well.

proton is good

outlook.com is great

MS is not the most trustworthy company either, see Windows 10.

If you're going to the hassle of actually switching, at lest don't do it from one big corp to the next.

Personally I use https://www.webfaction.com and am very happy with it. Also heard good things about FastMail, but Australia has some crazy laws coming so not sure about that. ProtonMail seems solid as well.

While still using Windows...

Can't speak for ux-app but most people on HN are on macs, also a lot of people on linux.

I visited HN for years before registering and making my first comment.

Those who leave comments are a small fraction of the total HN traffic.

If you saw the a recent thread which asked people why they stalk HN, you'd understand that many visitors aren't start up guys, programmers or even technical in nature.

In other words, I bet HN's actual traffic log will show mobile devices and Windows as the predominant OS.

Do you have any data to back this claim up? I would be surprised if the majority of visitors to HN were using mac.

No direct data. But that's the impression I have gotten over the years. I've seen a ton of posts at the frontpage that talk about moving away from Apple for whatever reason, which are always heated debates. I've never seen any post of people jumping from Windows to mac or linux (I believe that's not a situation a lot of people on HN are in).

it might be my filter bubble, but if I google "hacker news mac vs windows" the only results I get are posts where people are moving away from Mac to something else[1].

[1]: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/969743/46010063-fa... (that's just the top of the page, but the whole first page is like that).

> talk about moving away

It's just that. All talk. Including the usual empty threats of "don't piss of the technical people".

Meanwhile, they're still logging into Facebook using Chrome on their Windows machines.

I also believe most of these topics are just talk. But the point I was making is that whenever someone talks about "I'm leaving Mac for whatever reason" it blows up and everyone and their mom weighs in to give their opinion. It's not uncommon to have these on the frontpage. Why? Because most people use Mac so they have something to say.

However when someone says "I am moving away from windows because of X" it never hits the frontpage since most people don't care since they are not on windows.

This is obviously not great quantitative research. But if I go into any co working space or coffee shop where people work on their laptops. I find a lot of people on macs, and all the technical ones are on HN. Whenever I meet technical people with a windows laptop they are never on HN.

I thought this was quite well established that HN is very apple'y, so I'm having a hard to come up with proper data to back this up.

What about you? You think the opposite?

> What about you? You think the opposite?

I mostly agree with everything you said.

But I speculate, a good collection of today's "chrome leavers" here already use another browser - and are just adding fuel to the fire.

Or, they're not actually leaving chrome - just threatening, because they care.

> But I speculate, a good collection of today's "chrome leavers" here already use another browser - and are just adding fuel to the fire.

Haha you got me! I did leave Chrome (for privacy reason) for Firefox. Not during this big debate, but during a previous one (when Firefox came out with the big Quantum update and it started to perform on the same level as Chrome). Though I haven't stated I would leave today.

It's not a big change like migrating to another country. Most plugins have add ons for all big browser platforms. I do think that you'll see a decent amount of people in this discussion on HN change browser. But for Google this is just a blip in the graph.

The less empty detail is regulatory. "Big tech" is getting increasingly scrutinized over both monopoly abuse and privacy issues. Certainly this is another piece of evidence to regulators that Google is abusing their position.

I assume this is based on a lot of (web/mobile) devs being on HN and them using macOS predominantly based on conferences etc.?

I'd agree with that assessment, macOS probably first, Linux second, but then you have to remember how many Windows users there are. The HN regulars are probably mostly on Mac/Linux, but I'd imagine just the drive by Windows traffic would put it at the top spot.

There are plenty of Windows users on HN actively. Not everybody in tech is an SV webdev.

Right.

But there's a certain amount of irony that people are ditching Chrome, while still using an OS which literally does spy on you.

I tried looking up stuff about windows spying on users, and most of what I'm seeing is useless (debunked articles, generally clickbait stuff). Is there anywhere I could look to read more about this if true?

I see, thanks! I've opted out of everything you can already, and don't use Cortana, so all I'm sending is some basic telemetry data it seems.

And also whatever you type into the start menu.

It took me several days to root out all of the programs and services in my enterprise windows 10 install which were spying on me or attempting to install software without my consent, had to prevent cortana from running, block windows servers with hosts file, delete scheduled tasks, adjust group policy, disable updates, and firewall my own computer.

All this so that I could have an OS that isn't actively spying on me, and play games on it. Thank goodness valve is making progress on linux...

Even Windows 10 seems much less creepy compared with what Google's become.

The browser is looked upon as the portal to the Internet.

When accessing web-sites over a public network, I sort of expect (not necessarily like or agree) to be tracked and others to know what I'm doing. I'm always in the mindset of "what ever I do within this window, others will see" (regardless of browser).

For what I do on my local desktop? No. Not at all.

Is there some actual data on this somewhere? I'd be curious to know the browser / OS breakdown.

I really puzzles me how could anyone have ever trusted Chrome.

Originally when they created a webkit (instead of blink) engine, it was a bit more above-board.

But then hubris and greed have done their usual job now that Chrome is the default.

Personally browse using Safari + FF on macOS.

I've never trusted Chrome but it was (and still is to a degree) faster and more secure than Firefox, so here we are

> more secure than Firefox

How so?

For example for a long time Firefox didn't have process separation, sandboxing, etc. Basic features. I don't know how it is now

IIRC, that's all in place, and has been for quite a while.

Another reason is that the official Firefox builds for at least GNU/Linux doesn't employ standard exploit mitigations (stack canaries, position independent code, read-only GOT).

Honest question: How can you trust FF when they less than a year ago silently modified installers for a small % of users, to include tracking - which then sent all browsing data to a 3rd party?

https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

Or after they (ab)used systems intended for testing features to inject, what's basically an ad? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/lookingglass

Get the tree style tabs plugin, it's an essential.

But its kinda useless because you can't remove the tab toolbar? Or so it seems to me.

You can, you just have to mess around with styling manually. There are quite a few pages on Google telling you how to do it

Irony?

Not irony. The stuff is not on Google, it's on the Internet and directly accessible via links. It's in fact what any company wants, the holy grail: for people to mix its brand with the category of business. It will pass and be replaced by some other fad.

Feel free to google it in any other search engine :)

https://www.qwant.com/?q=Remove%20firefox%20tabs%20tree%20st...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Remove+firefox+tabs+tree+style+tab...

https://www.bing.com/search?q=Remove+firefox+tabs+tree+style...

Same here, switched to Firefox. Honestly, I hope Google realize they should respect their users.

For me the performance was not quite up to the mark and had to switch back to Chrome. I guess someone (big corp ideally) should just take the v8 and the html rendering engine from Chrome and build a wrapper and keep it open sourced.

Yeah, same here. Though I was becoming increasingly uneasy over the years, this was the final straw. Thanks, Chrome for making this an easy decision.

How is the speed now of FF compared to Chrome? A few years ago I switched to Chrome because it was way faster. Has FF improved?

Seems like the consensus is that things have improved drastically since the "quantum" update, although there have been a handful of issues on specific hardware (which may or may not have been fixed in the meantime).

I'd suggest to just try it, it's completely free and pretty straightforward to install after all.

Firefox got much faster on November last year (FF 56)

It feels faster on some sites, a bit slower (but not unbearably so) on others.

Can I import my Chrome passwords into FF?

I really recommend switching to a password manager - it's also easier to access the passwords from other devices. For example I can use the same passwords on Firefox desktop and on Safari - iPhone (including auto-fill on iOS 12). I have good experience with 1Password (subscription paid).

I don't know about easier. having passwords in the browser syncs to all devices automatically. So it's at least as easy.

I was thinking to just have Firefox on my phone as well.

Is 1Password able to provide passwords and credit card information inside other apps?

If you use 1Password on iOS, it is now able to offer completion all over the OS, including apps. For desktop apps, copy paste.

> I was thinking to just have Firefox on my phone as well.

Passwords sync just fine to Firefox on iOS too. No need for a dedicated password manager.

Yes, password managers work inside apps for logins and personal info.

LessPass is also something to consider. One way to solve the sync problem is to make it so there's nothing to sync.

You should use a password manager, there's been a few cases already where malware shows how trivial it is to steal and decrypt into plain-text passwords stored by the browser.

If I have malware on my computer, I assume it'll be able to capture my password no matter if they are encrypted or not.

Unless you have adversaries personally attacking you, your main threat is automated malware. In that case, I think that it's vastly more likely that said malware would target super-popular and totally-insecure software like the Chrome password manager, rather than something not very popular and quite secure like KeePassXC.

I personally recommend Bitwarden as a good compromise between security and usability. It's totally open source, so you can run the API and webservice on your own hardware if you want.

Should work on Windows: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/ea67de243b02...

That's very interesting. Good find!

I just have to find a Windows computer then :p

From Mozilla's docs, this is unclear. Possibly.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-data-a...

I tried that, but it only gave me the bookmarks.

It's hubris. Right now Google know they have the power to shape things the way Google want. That's true, but it's also true that users are more powerful than Google, becoming increasingly aware of the value of their privacy, and that Chrome is paid for with their data.

In the the end, it is just a problem of privacy VS features.

And to be honest, unfortunately, I think most of the average users just want features.

Yup I switched to FF, despite its poorer performance (on Mac, anyway). My personal mail is Fastmail. My search engine is DDG. I do use Chrome for debugging web applications, as I just haven't been able to get myself accustomed to the FF dev tools... That's probably what I'll work on next.

I switched to FireFox yesterday with zero issues and works like a charm (including 1Password and uBlock Origin integration).

Their mobile app also has support for extensions such as uBlock Origin, which is lovely.

I went with Safari browser on iPhone + 1Blocker X(one time payment of $5?).

Unfortunately, the average user (I'm picturing my mom) doesn't give two shits about Chrome not deleting Google cookies when clearing data.

it looks like they are deleted. just immediately recreated.

90% of people won't care / aren't able to understand the issue.

That's were google is heading its efforts :)

I'd say 95% of people are happy that their accounts are all synchronised and follows them around. They pick up any device and carry on where they left off, similar to how Kindle bookmarks are synchronised across your devices.

IMHO the vast majority are not interested in understanding in the technology, they just want their stuff to work.

80 years ago if you had a car then generally you'd need some understanding, 30 years ago spark plugs needed changing every 5k miles, points needed cleaning etc etc. Now anyone can hop in a car and without doing anything the first problem you'd probably have is the tyres wearing out.

People don't want to know how or why, they just want it to be reliable and easy to use.

>I'd say 95% of people are happy that their accounts are all synchronised and follows them around.

I actually really like this feature and find it really convenient for my usage habits.

I also don't really care that Google is tracking me, I give them my data and in return they provide some really useful services for me. They only thing that bothers me about the privacy issue is the off-chance that an individual will be able to browse my personal data but as long as it's mixed with everything else I don't really care (I understand it's a slippery slope though).

We geeks love to complain about Google invading our privacy yet we eagerly devour their services (search, maps etc...) which are very much as good as they are because of all of the data Google has. If privacy advocates want to keep the moral upper hand they should avoid using Google services altogether (logged-in or not) because at the moment we, the "ignorant masses", are helping Google improve those services with our data.

Google doesn't need to read my mail to make a good webmail interface. Google doesnt need to track me 24/7 to tell me where XYZ restaurant is on the map. These are complex services, but nothing magical about them - if Google didn't kill all competition in the space by offering a (admittedly, very good) free service, you would probably be paying a couple of bucks a year for one of the ~5 leading apps in competition with eachother.

>Google doesn't need to read my mail to make a good webmail interface.

No, but they _are_ able to better catch spam, categorize your emails for you, highlight the emails that are most important to you, suggest pre-written responses for you, and more -- by incorporating your data into the service.

>Google doesnt need to track me 24/7 to tell me where XYZ restaurant is on the map.

No, but they _are_ able to suggest restaurants you'd probably like, compare them to other places you've been/rated, warn you about traffic on your commute, show you photographic places you might be interested in, and more -- by incorporating your data into the service.

I don't think anyone is arguing that Google _could_ provide these services without using your data. Obviously, they could. I think the debate stems from whether those services are worth the data they depend on.

I wouldn't (and don't: see Google Apps) use any Google service that costs $5/month. In the same vein, if the features of those services got gutted in the name of "we won't use your data anymore", I wouldn't use the services either (assuming I could find a competitor that provides a better service... probably with my data).

I want personalized search. I want the ads I'm forced to see to be things I'm actually interested in. I want Chrome to log me into everything automatically. I want my data synced across all my devices. I want technology to just work for _me_.

This doesn't matter.

The people who fix your computers or help you over the phone are the family friends who are geeks/programmers. Once the geek herd has moved on to something else, then the mass follows whatever they're currently using, because they're the ones that advocate the change. It will take a few years, but once Google has lost the geek vote, they will die a slow death like Microsoft did. At this point my money is on Microsoft taking the geek mindshare back.

This looks exactly like what happened when Chrome started killing IE.

For that matter, Apple aggressive marketed to the techie-and-designer crowd for years, even while everyone knew aiming products at programmers was far lower margin than mass-market stuff. The payoff wasn't bottom line profits, it was cachet and technical support and useful software that ran nicely on Macs.

For something like Chrome, one price of alienating devs is, among other things, that everyone who thinks "damn, I wish I had an extension for X, I guess I'll make one!" develops it for Firefox instead.

Microsoft is anything but dead... where did that statement come from?

MS? Not! There’s too many of us older geeks that still remember MS and their attacks on Linux.

Possibly.

Their gain?

- Less of a monopoly status.

Their losses?

- The privacy concerned.

- Ad-blocker users.

- Over-opinionated users.

Good move, for them.

I'm sure Microsoft had the same reasoning about IE.

Google strikes off a right balance between annoying and convenient. It's kicking off all Privacy concerned people, Ad Block people, overopiniated people off it's platform indirectly.

Websites get less money from Firefox users per user then Chrome users. If Firefox users make less money, going to future, devs will not optimize for it.

If the only remaining Firefox users block Ads and block analytics, I do not think google or some other search engine will pay to them to keep their default. There is literally no benefit of having such people on your platform.

> devs will not optimize of it.

Yep.

I have been a FF user since.. well, Netscape. Yet, FireFox-specific bugs have always been a lower priority.

Because, it's "a bug effecting 100 users" vs "a bug effecting 900 users"

When you consider FF users are harder to monetise (admit it, we generally are), you can start saying "a bug effecting ~50 potential customers, vs ~800".

*(fortunately, now that IE/Edge is out of the picture, those types of issues are rare)

We might be harder to monetize with ads but are we harder to monetize beyond that? I'm a Firefox user and you'll have to pry ublock from my cold, dead hands but I do pay for a bunch of online services.

I think the main problem with Firefox is the tiny user share, not the composition of said share. We need to make Firefox more mainstream and the problem will solve itself. Unfortunately it's an uphill battle, Firefox is not cool anymore.

Websites work best in the browsers that the developers use to build it, and that will be the only way Chrome can fail.

"Sorry boss, I won't be fixing BUG-332 - I don't use that browser"

That was not what I was suggesting. Fact of the matter is that it is easier to get it right the first time in the browser you work in than the browser you don’t. A growing backlog of Chrome bugs and a shrinking backlog of Firefox/whatever else browser front end developers switch to with product teams pushing feature development over bug fixing and then suddenly Chrome is the “unreliable” one.

Sorry for being flippant. I knew what you meant, and I do agree with you.

IE lost users because it was abysmal. And the reason for that was they wanted to keep people on the desktop.

Who knows... if IE was already as good as early Chrome, perhaps there would be no Chrome.

IE 6 was superior in every way, there truly was no competition at the time.

Then they didn't bother to do anything for close to a decade and "suddenly" everyone had passed them.

Google on the other hand seems to be actively making things worse. Might not take so long time for chrome.

One can hope.

Not really. IE's "killer feature" was ActiveX. Which meant that any browser limitation could be worked around.

But there was competition, that's why they made the original effort. Once the competition was killed, they stopped.

Sure, they wanted it to be the best browser - but not better than desktop.

ActiveX wasn't really used outside of enterprises. It was also used for creating wave-effects on an image, cool stuff.

The desktop was never threatened, most people were on dialup. Javascript was about changing link colors, not creating "software".

Since IE was so much better than the competition it didn't really matter that it got monopoly. Until it stagnated. Same as today, since Chrome was so superior it didn't really matter that all other browsers faded into niches. Until google started abusing it.

Maybe we should start prioritizing open software rather than waiting for a monopoly to be formed?

The reason for why Fusion 360 is "free" isn't because autodesk are nice guys, it's because that's an effective way to ensure that they won't have to deal with competition in the future.

IE became abysmal because principled developers didn’t want to continue to work on it. It wasn’t always so.

Only a small fraction of Chrome's user base will notice, and not even all of those will care. There are likely tech-savvy people reading this on Chrome 69 right now.

Office of 20 here. Now almost everyone's in agreement that we'll move off Chrome. And we'll recommend our families and friends do the same.

This is how Firefox (pre-bloat) gained traction at the expense of IE, and this is how chrome gained traction at the expense of Firefox/IE.

And now this is how chrome's market share will decline as tech leaders, journalists and then the public find out how much of a privacy nightmare it really is.

Same here. Recommending my family, team and relatives to either use Edge or Firefox. Of 70 of them, 15 switched to FF, 32 to Edge, just after 2 months of me saying.

I'm slightly annoyed.

I just made the commitment to move back to Linux from Windows 10 last week.

I was hoping to at least stick with chromium, now I'm reconsidering that.

Now that I think about it, should I really be trusting Android? Is iOS any better? Apple does appear to show some commitment to privacy, but their anti repair stance is crazy. Will I have to switch to custom Android ROM with all the Google services neutered?

With regards to privacy I trust Apple more than Google, if only for the fact that their business doesn't operate on the principle of violating your privacy.

>I trust Apple more than Google

trust apple to make you pay 500 dollaridoos for broken glass back repair when Samsung makes you pay 50 dollars at max. the apple support tax you have to pay is really insane. doesn't help that they basically want every company to follow their model so they can go even more insane(Right to repair laws)

I started using an iPhone, partially to get away from google services.

I don’t know for sure if I can trust Apple with my data, but on the balance of probabilities I feel slightly safer with the company that makes its revenue from hardware sales, vs the company that makes its revenue from advertising.

I agree and disagree. They didn’t get to where they are now by playing games and leaving major design decisions to seemingly the intern marketing dept. I think it’s safe to assume that information/sentiment moves much more quickly in these modern times. I second the recent HN comment that mentioned why Google chose this particular hill to die on.

Maybe, but what if this crosses over into mainstream news? Is Google prepared for that battle?

Nope, they are just finding the theshold at which 5% of people gets annoyed to the extent that they will switch browsers.

Do you think they care that techies get annoyed at Chrome? If you’re browsing google.com - which most people on the internet outside of China are doing - without Chrome, you get an intrusive notice telling you that installing Chrome is the best thing you can do.

Approximately 99.99% of those people do not know what cookies are, nor do they care.

IMHO When you've got a company as large as Google that is able to do things like openly use dark patterns to trick users into giving up their location data and 99.99% of people aren't aware or use their dominant search page to nag users into using a browser that won't respect privacy setting or remove Google's tracking cookies that's the point you need to start thinking about government intervention.

Google is behaving like a malware company.

We were in this situation with Microsoft in the late 90s-early 00s. I was glad when they got a slap on the wrist and told to stop taking the piss. I hope the EU will do the same for Google.

They don't care directly - they care because it's still the same old world where techies install and configure the browser for them on their computers.

Handhelds are different, but computers are just like back in the ol' days. This is how IE lost.

If that where the case, FireFox would have overtook IE.

And that was the trend clearly. Back in 2008 Firefox had 33%, and IE 59.4%. Basically, Firefox was unstoppable before Chrome started. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

By another stat counter, for 5 years from 2004 to 2009, Firefox raised from 2% to 20%, while IE fallen from 95% down to 67%.