There’s literally so much else they should do, google docs, sheets, drive, phones, maps, earth, calendar, play store, translate, etc.
Good work, continue please.What is the issue with docs, sheets, drive, phones, calendar, play store?
There seems to be plenty of options in all of these spaces. Play store isn’t even on a lot of android devices.
Correct. My example for another necessary intervention would be YouTube. That’s a space in which Google does have a monopoly.
Exactly. There are workable alternatives to most of the others, but YouTube has a stranglehold on that type of content due to the network effect. Examples of alternatives:
- docs/sheets/drive - Microsoft Office 365, OnlyOffice, or self-host LibreOffice Online (through Collabora CODE builds); if you just need drive, there’s also BackBlaze, AWS, DropBox, etc
- phones - I use GrapheneOS on their Pixel devices, but plenty of other Android phones support LineageOS/DivestOS/CalyxOS
- calendar - still looking for a replacement for my smart watch, but I’ve been using my Nextcloud install; there are also some FOSS calendars that support CalDav as well, so look around
- maps - I’ve been using Organic Maps, which has been great; main problem is searching for addresses, but if it’s in there, the directions so far have worked fine; there’s also Apple maps, Bing maps, and probably some others
- translate - it’s built in to Firefox, and it seems to work well enough in a pinch
But there’s really not much for YouTube. I guess there’s Odyssee, Rumble, and a few others, but they don’t have anywhere near the content as YouTube, so they’re not really practical alternatives. I actually sub to Nebula which is the closest to a replacement so far, but there’s still a ton of content that doesn’t have a direct replacement there.
Off topic, but how do you like graphene? I am thinking of making the switch on a pixel 7a, but I have a fear it’ll be like having Linux on my phone where things randomly don’t work and then I have the hobby where I make it work
I really like it, but I also mostly use F-Droid apps. You can install Google Play in the regular app sandbox, which prevents the worst of the issues andn provides most of the benefits.
That said, there are still some caveats:
- NFC payments don’t work - I use a Pixel watch instead, which works fine (it’s paired to a separate profile on my phone with Google Play installed)
- some banking apps don’t work (some check if your phone OS is stock)
- some apps just don’t work without Google Play services running (e.g. the Sensi app for my smart thermostat), and some have issues even with it running
But other than that, it works pretty well! I have three profiles set up:
- Owner - default, with no Google Play
- Work - handful of work apps using my work Google account
- Google - apps that require Google Play, using a fresh Google account
I’m using a Google Pixel 8, and it does what I need it to do.
Most definitely. They need viable competition.
Big doubt anything actually happens.
The Reuters article suggests prohibiting payments to Apple so that Chrome users on their hardware default to Google search. What about default settings to Firefox? Similar agreements finance a large portion of Mozilla’s revenue.
Who would buy this and how would they monetize it? In browser ads? A freemium paid model to remove the ads?
I’ll bid $3.50 just to GPL it.
https://www.chromium.org/chromium-projects/
It’s already under BSD license
Sure, but GPL would prevent the Chrome tracking addons and other pleasant closed-source paraphernalia (the difference between Chrome and Chromium)
Isn’t the BSD licence more open though?
BSD is more open towards being closed.
Is the DOJ the only working system in the US now?
Obviously not. Trump is still free.
Step 1: Buy Chome
Step 2: End development
Step 3: ???
Step 4:
Profit?Non-Profit Firefox?Hot take: they sell Chrome but keep Chromium.
Seeing how tech illiterate some of these people are, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what ends up happening
How would that work exactly? Google would sell Chrome but keep paying teams if developers to work on Chromium?
Basically. I mean look at Edge, it’s running Chromium under the hood, but the UI is developed by Microsoft.
sell it to Microsoft so they can finally have a web browser that people use
Microsoft run Chrome clone? But they already have Edge
Which no one willingly uses
Unless you’re at a company using Microsoft services, where you have no choice, other than chrome (at my company), which hot take, is worse than edge.
it was good at launch, but they’ve added so much bloat
I use it and love it tbh
You need to get out more
Like what?
How fucking dare you have an opinion!
Yes, the anti-trust lawsuit should culminate in one part of a tech giant being sold to another tech giant.
what else would happen
Never again
Imagine where the software industry would be without all the lost productivity because of MSIE quirks.
What does Chrome have to do with search? 🤔
What search engine does Chrome, by far and away the most used browser be it on phone or PC, use?
Google is the default search engine for chrome, and chrome is the single most popular browser at about 95% market share.
Um, that wouldn’t change if Google “sells Chrome”, though.
Firefox uses Google Search as a default, so does every Samsung phone (and most other Android devices).
Unless the DOJ is telling everyone not to implement a default search engine (and let the user decide upon first opening the browser), then who owns Chrome really doesn’t change much.
Other remedies the government is asking the court to impose include prohibiting Google from offering money or anything of value to third parties — including Apple and other phone-makers — to make Google’s search engine the default,
This is the only thing that makes sense, but “sell Chrome” is a laughable request.
Alright then I’ll do you one better:
Google regularly abuses their market share dominance in browsers in order to push for changes to web standards that benefit them, such as their web integrity api (which would have prevented blocking ads). This is monopolistic behavior, and the largest ad company on the planet shouldn’t get to decide web standards.
As a side note: both firefox and Samsung are paid handsomely (just like apple) to have Google as a default search engine. This also is monopolistic behavior, if you built a better product than them then you couldn’t outspend them to get to the same position.
Oh, yeah, don’t get me wrong, Google is highly unethical, and I avoid any and all Google related products whenever possible.
Selling Chrome, however, doesn’t really stop them from doing damage.
The part about not allowing them
to bribepay other companies to use their search is a much better idea.And regarding their influence over the internet… we need stronger regulation to prevent any company from having that much control over an essential service.
Since you were unable to answer, I’ll just tell you: Google.
Hey look, some boomers who don’t understand tech are trying to do a thing with a tech company. Sell Chrome? What a stupid idea.
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I’m afraid that this is a terrible take. There is nothing to stop them from making it into a separate company. It would break the monopoly because the same people making the browser won’t be the ones earning the ad revenue.
How does Chrome the company make money?
That isn’t the point, is it? Why does the government and the people care about the profits of some company?
How do you sell something with no value. It’s a stupid premise.
It is the point. There is no benefit to us, as in the world, if this were to happen.
It’s pretty clear that you don’t understand what antitrust is about. I might suggest you read the Wikipedia article before commenting further. Also you should maybe take a moment to consider why you are taking the side of Google, a terrible and abusive company worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They don’t need your support.
Pass. I’m not taking sides, I’m looking at the blowback of such a stupid decision. Maybe you should research how important chromium is to open source and stop riding the blanket antitrust chubby.
LOL chromium is not important, it isn’t. I know you want it to be, but it’s not. There are plenty of alternatives out there, Firefox being the most obvious one. Really, stop simping for Daddy Google. You sound like an edgy teen.
We should nationalize it
Ehh just fight it for a month pay king trump some money and bam their golden.
The fact that this is TOTALLY WITHIN REALM OF REALITY is PROOF that Trump is Draining The Swamp!
Google ditched their “don’t be evil” motto, so yeah, this is on the table.
This is exactly what will happen. Same thing with Albertsons and Kroger too.
Okay but consider them taking this moment to let Elon buy it and using it to control information on the clients end 💀
That would end the internet/world.
Maybe we’ll actually see people switch to Firefox if that happens.
We all know this wouldn’t happen.
Just…please for the love of whatever dirty do Microsoft. Fucking sick of their shit recently with One Drive.
All mega corps but it won’t happen
Do you have a few minutes to learn about our lord and savior Linux?
Man the Linux propaganda is STRONG on Lemmy. I’ll say what I’ve said before: I use my computer for gaming, web browsing, and managing a media server for my family that hosts pictures and other things. If those 3 things can be done easily without issue on a Linux distro without having to fuck around with configs every time I want to do something, I’m all in. By what I’ve heard though it’s just not there yet. I am super happy Steam decided to go Linux for their Steamdeck though as I’ve heard thats helped make monumental strides the right direction. Trust me, I want to. Large part of it is I worked tech support for over a decade and having to troubleshoot my own shit is like the furthest thing I want to deal with haha
Hey I will give my anecdotal recent experience. Several months ago I switched to Pop! OS and have had basically no issues. I have an Nvidia GPU and I play a lot of games. I don’t play any games that are blocked by anti cheat (not because I can’t, I just don’t happen to play the few that are blocked).
I spent the first day getting everything signed in, installed, set up and tweaked to how I like it with very minimal terminal usage. Mostly gui and clicking.
Steam+Proton along with lutris makes it easy to play any game for me.
Side note: I have 4 monitors of varying resolution, size, orientation and refresh rate and it hasn’t caused problems other than the initial setup (I used cursr to help with this)
Oh God I didn’t even think about monitors. I only have one but it’s the stupid big ultra wide by Samsung. I honestly play most games in windowed. Wondering if there’s resolution support on the actual os though. The rest is like…5120 x something.
One monitor will be fine no matter the resolution.
I’m running Ubuntu and never had an issue with 5120x1440 on a stupid big ultrawide AOC.
Just going to say, I do those things too, on Linux, and while I can’t say I never have to mess with config files, it’s not frequent. And, the computer acting like it’s my computer rather than on loan from a megacorp is nice.
It’s not all the way there yet but it’s so very close and the bits that are still pain points aren’t nearly as bad as the pain points of Windows.
As the other commenter said, you should give it a serious try. Mint is very smooth overall.
You owe it to yourself to try it out! I recommend dual booting into Linux Mint Cinnamon for a while and have your windows install to fall back on to. That or one of the gaming-specific distributions, but from what I’ve seen Mint does all with gaming too. It’s a good all-around starting place, and there are a lot of resources because it’s popular and built off of the most popular distro. I installed it on my work machine (software engineering) and I’ve felt no lack of capability or a need to switch to a more “hardcore” distro.
Thanks! Appreciate the type up and suggestion. I’ll add it to my list of ones to try out.
If you can live without games having invasive anticheat, then everything should be doable, and probably a lot easier than in Windows.
Yeah not really into multiplayer competitive games. Indo play a lot of co op though. Will have to find a list somewhere.
Proton DB is the place to go. But I don’t check 99% of games I play, unless it’s going to be an expensive purchase and I want to check before I buy. I also don’t bother with people’s suggested tweaks on proton db unless I actually personally experience issues. The only game I’ve had to tweak so far has been cyberpunk 2077.
Edit: added context, I’m on 2 monitors and one of them is an ultrawide. Never had any issues that aren’t similar to issues I’ve experienced on Windows in the past.
Microsoft is waaay easier to avoid than fucking google. Is one drive that annoying?
I feel like Trump’s probably going to axe whoever is finally tackling these monopolies, unfortunately.
What changed with OneDrive? I’m genuinely interested because I’m a user and haven’t noticed anything.
On corp side and personal if you don’t have One Drive setup MS will spam notifications to set it up, and when you go to save will try to default to One Drive as opposed to local.
>sell Chrome to open search monopoly
>Chrome isn’t a search engine but a web browser
Yeah, Google pays other companies lots of money to have its search engine enabled by default. That’s what the lawsuit argued, so I’m not sure how separating chrome from the company will change that…
It has massive market share and uses Google search by default. If another company owns the browser, they’ll likely change the default search engine, and since almost nobody changes the defaults, it’ll eat away at Google’s marketshare.
For example, Microsoft would be pretty interested in buying it to promote Bing search. Edge is already based on Chromium, so they could reuse their existing teams to offer support for it.
Yeah, see all this stuff happening between now and inauguration day. See, we did something. Too little, too late. If there are ever free and fair elections in this country, and the Democrats return to power, they better get their fucking shit together. The dismantling of the Federal government will be almost impossible to reverse.
Like someone commented in another fediverse community: this court case can really only keep going for two more months, after that it’s anyone’s guess what will happen to the court: Alphabet could bribe someone in the DOJ to make the case disappear or (and this is the funny one) law and order could breakdown completely, rendering the case, the court and all the rest of society moot.
