That discussion is fascinating just for how dramatically the tone on Google has shifted in the past 11 years. Top comment is a defense of Google, top reply to them is more concerned with US laws than with Google's voluntary behavior.
And this was after Steve Jobs started the war on Google and mentioned privacy as a concern during his era. It took the world 15 years and nearly 10 years after his death to understand this.
I remember asking people who supported Google before or after their IPO how they make money with your Data. No one cares. I remember pushing for Firefox instead of Chrome in 2009, no one cares. Not even on HN.
The sad thing is that those who stood up for privacy got bashed down for so many years and never received an apology. Those who defended Big Tech like Google is safe to use our data never apologised.
People do care, they are just sort of powerless to do anything.
Try the following exercises:
- try not to use google docs at work
- try to block google sites from your phone
- try to pay for things on the internet without accessing google/recaptcha/etc
it is both too big and too small of a problem for most people to deal with.
I know most technical people have done these sorts of things, but it is sort of like being your own sysadmin/security researcher. It's probably easier to run your own mail server in comparison.
I want to keep using Firefox, but the performance gap between it and Chrome keeps getting worse. My bank's online site takes upwards of 2 seconds to redraw in Firefox now when I scroll, whereas in Chrome scrolling is virtually instantaneous. Same thing with Google Streetview. PDF rendering in Firefox and Thunderbird takes upwards of 20 seconds to render the first page of common documents, while evince is a few hundred milliseconds. This is on my latop running recent Fedora. I'm still mostly using Firefox, but my patience is almost done.
I don't think it's fair to call that "performance gap", when for sure your bank never invested one second to even test, to say nothing of optimizing their site for Firefox. As for PDFs I never noticed that delay (sample size of one). Weird.
