Google has a long history of "accidentally" breaking gmail on firefox and funneling users to Chrome back in the day. It's beyond stupid to argue they should be able to do whatever they want with their vertically integrated monopoly.
Like, if you want to dig holes in your own driveway sure whatever, but if you own all the roads in Detroit and you want to dig holes in them, then make a killing selling new tires and suspension repair a fair society wouldn't move out of Detroit, they'd fucking run you out of town.
The more things Google does to make gmail less useful, the better.
It’s no secret that Google is an ad company. Anyone still using gmail deserves what they get.
Would Google be making the world shit if all its cloud services had only a few dozen thousand users?
What's forcing you to interact with Google isn't Google, but Google users.
Let’s not pretend this was done unto them. Anyone can stop using gmail at any time.
It's a collective action problem: you'll have to persuade millions and millions of "normies", who have no idea what's going on, or what internet privacy is, or what's broken about the system, and who don't care to learn, and won't listen to us - or you'll have to impose regulation. Those are the choices. The second seems more possible than the first. Us nerds saying "walk away" is idealistic; we will, and always will, get squished, because the corps have the power and most folks won't (ever) care.
Who's your host, just in case that's the difference?
If you're dealing with spam originating from Gmail, without any helpful action from Google, that's not really your choice.
If you're dealing with difficulties sending mail to Gmail users, without help from Google, that's also not really your choice.
If vast numbers of other people stopped using Gmail, those problems would mostly go away.
Just going to copy/paste this part of the comment you replied to, because it seems like you may have missed it?
>My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.
I would recommend Google Workspace to any company because it gives them a ton of business productivity tools.
I would probably not recommend gmail as a users default personal email because frankly it's not that good.
The reality is most users have a Google account ans just use their Gmail account which is bundled.
Most of my circle which cares effectively use their Gmail account for sites that insist on it and never open that e-mail if they can get away with it.
True, and applies to many other things as well. Anyone claiming otherwise is shirking responsibility for their own actions. Every single sibling comment here suffers from this.
Arguments in the form of "other people do it, so I must also" are unpersuasive and pathetic.
Your post: > Everyone dealing with gmail is doing so because they chose to.
No, it's clear that not everyone dealing with Gmail is doing so because they chose to. Repeating your incorrect statement does not make it correct.
Further, everyone has to deal with its impacts on the email ecosystem as it's practically impossible for somebody who works a 9-5 to run their own mail server that Gmail will deign to not only accept mail from but also successfully deliver it to its intended recipient.
So even if I never use Gmail I still have to deal with replies going to / coming from it.
Not my wife - her school board mandates it.
Organizations I don't like = Monopoly!
Organizations I like = ...
Gmail is not a government service. Google is free to make that work with only one browser, if they want.
You can't assert that Google must make Gmail work with any browser whatsoever, because that means supporting someone using Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 5.5.
Of course lying about why makes it worse, but I don't think it would've been that much more okay if Google was honest and said "users' ability to install highly effective ad blockers hurts our bottom line so we're removing them".
I LOL every time I see it. Imagine the lengths they have to go to, to try to make people trust a product they have.
My mom, who has Ublock Origin installed on her Chrome by me, will never know these details.
When I maintained a hook-based plugin system, I learned that many programmers do not know data structures or algorithms and would slow down the whole software by writing plugins that looked up rules using extremely slow ways extremely often. And if users wanted to complain about the software being slow, they would always blame me first.
But when I replaced it with rule lists, now I was in control and could implement fast data structures.
You're just pissed because I've chosen to block your code in software you created. Next, you'll tell me I have to watch your programming on a TV I bought with your code on it.
The idea that we have to do anything that evilCorp wants us to do is just insane that people have come to the point of accepting that.
I don't understand why they ads are not spliced into the stream. It would be undetectable by extensions at all.
Maybe you're willing to pay the price, but that doesn't mean it was what's best for the ecosystem.
If manifest V3 ad blockers were nonfunctional to the point of being broken, I’d be more concerned, but in my experience they’re perfectly OK.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
That said, I know a number of xooglers (myself included) who don't believe for a moment that this would have gotten off the ground if someone important hadn't opined on the usefulness WRT ad-serving.
Of course not all of them do, Google is a big company.
They shouldn't be free to use all the money in the world to corner a market, rope in the conpetition and then abuse that position.
It only works because nobody can touch them, it's otherwise straight illegal in most markets.
Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it. People can use a different browser if they wish (I do).
This whole “better for users” bullshit is why I don’t respect Google as a company. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.