
Quitting Chrome: Because Google+ - badloginagain
This weekend I made a fairly major change to how I interact with the web- I consciously switched default browsers. Fed up with Google&#x27;s constant ramming of G+ down my throat, I&#x27;ve decided to hit &#x27;em where it hurts: their marketshare. So I&#x27;ve switched to Firefox, and while noticeably slower, I feel it&#x27;s a browser I can put more trust into.<p>Google should be employing a strategy of invisible control over how people interact, not forcing a centralized interaction layer on something that is inherently decentralized. They should be quietly creating and controlling channels of communication that I cannot live without. Apply the strategy that grew their search engine to all Google initiatives.<p>Or I will find alternatives.
======
xpose2000
This sounds backwards to me. If anything, you should be quitting Google, the
search engine, rather than their browser. Google can live without you being a
Chrome user, but it hurts them if you switch to Bing or duckduckgo.

~~~
lelandbatey
Yes, but switching to Firefox also hurts _me_ a lot less than switching to
Duck Duck Go.

~~~
jolurox
DDG is great. The instant answers feature is awesome, honestly I prefer it.

~~~
a-nikolaev
Agreed. I have been using DDG for ~two years. Maybe once or twice a week, I
actually ask DDG to search in google (with awesome "!g" or "!img" bang-
commands). DDG works consistently great, and the new DDG is even better, with
auto-completion, images and video tabs. And I'm using Firefox as well.

~~~
mathrawka
Save yourself half the keystrokes!

!img == !i

~~~
Rudism
Huh, and all this time I've been using !gi

You, sir, have just increased my productivity by 33.3%.

------
jmillikin

      > Google should be employing a strategy of invisible
      > control over how people interact, [...] They should be
      > quietly creating and controlling channels of
      > communication that I cannot live without.
    

Wait, what? You don't mind a third party controlling how you interact, but you
hate being _told_ about it?

~~~
sliverstorm
It sounds to me more like, "Make it so good it's indispensable to me, rather
than trying to force me to use it"

~~~
jmillikin
Using Google doesn't require an account of any kind, and a Google+ account is
only required for social features such as posting comments or sharing links.

The launch state of Google+ provided an extremely hostile experience due to
policies such as "one social identity per account" and "use a government-
approved non-ethnic name", but these issues were resolved years ago with the
Pages feature.

------
zobzu
I dont understand when people find firefox noticeably slower. I wonder if
thats related to OSX.

Regardless, I agree with the move 100%. Thanksfully, while Firefox may not be
the best, its very good/useable for everything.

If ever it isnt good enough anymore and there is no other replacement - this
is when we'll really be cornered

~~~
subsection1h
> _I dont understand when people find firefox noticeably slower._

In my experience, people who think Chrome is faster than Firefox never have
hundreds of tabs open.

I like Chrome and I use it for development, but I use Firefox for general web
browsing because it handles hundreds of tabs much, much better. Not only is
Firefox's performance better, but Firefox extensions such Tree Style Tab and
Session Manager are vastly superior to the tab management extensions that are
available for Chrome. For example, I'm still waiting for a Chrome extension
that supports the basic task of appending the current window to a previously
saved session.

~~~
frik
Browsers that use several child processes (like IE, Chrome, Safari/WebKit2)
are faster, have less latency, crashes involve only one tab and the child
processes run with limited OS priviledges ("sandbox") than browsers with only
one process (Firefox, Safari/WebKit1).

Mozilla is working on a multi-process Firefox, one can activate it with a
hidden flag (it is still not production ready, and it will break several old
plugins).

With multi-process browsers one can have hundreds of tabs open for weeks (if
you have enough RAM like 8+ GB).

~~~
azakai
> Browsers that use several child processes (like IE, Chrome, Safari/WebKit2)
> are faster, have less latency, crashes involve only one tab and the child
> processes run with limited OS priviledges ("sandbox") than browsers with
> only one process (Firefox, Safari/WebKit1).

It's more complicated than that. For one thing, "have less latency" is often
the opposite: a keypress in a multiprocess browser has to travel from the
user-facing process to the child process, then the effects have to travel
back. In a single-process browser, there is no need to cross that boundary
back and forth. You can see this in action in games for example, where you can
sometimes see more input lag in multiprocess browsers.

Regarding speed, depends how you define it. Definitely multiprocess gives you
responsiveness - one slow tab doesn't slow down the others. But throughput,
not necessarily.

Overall though, multiprocess is a good thing. I'm just saying it isn't a win
across the board, like everything it has downsides.

------
adamconroy
I've done the same.

I use gmail a lot, I have an Android phone and I was using desktop Chrome for
years. However I started to notice things that worried me, for example I would
be using Chrome on my PC but definitely not logged into Gmail / Google+, then
I would see that my recent google searches from the desktop Chrome would
appear in my recent searches list on Android within seconds. I could somewhat
accept that if I was logged in to Google, but I don't accept that if I am
logged out.

On one hand the functionality is pretty impressive, on the other hand my gut
feeling is they have gone too far.

~~~
jmillikin
Chrome logins are separate from Google web logins; go into your Chrome
settings and sign out.

------
mark_l_watson
I switched browsers for a different reason: I installed OS X Yosemite beta and
it seems like the Safari browser uses far less COU resources, noticeable by
longer battery life.

~~~
demallien
My apologies for the off-topic, but I wanted to ask how you are finding
Yosemite - is it stable enough for me to switch over my dev machine?

~~~
liviu
Yes, is pretty stable on my old MacBook white. The only thing that crashed was
Xcode Playgrounds.

You also will see some pixelated rounded corners for some contextual menus...
but hey, this is beta.

[http://i.imgur.com/IMys5f6.png](http://i.imgur.com/IMys5f6.png)

~~~
wyclif
How are you running Yosemite on a white MacBook? Is it a 4,1 2008-ish MacBook
that maxes out at 4GB of RAM? Just curious, because I have one of those but
I'm still running SL on it because I figured Mavericks would be a dog.

~~~
liviu
I have a MacBook White Unibody (13-inch, Late 2009) with 8GB of RAM. This have
a 64-Bit architecture and I can run the latest OSX without any problems.

[http://support.apple.com/kb/sp579](http://support.apple.com/kb/sp579)

~~~
y4mi
> two SO-DIMM slots support up to 4GB

... confused

~~~
liviu
I think the reason Apple specified 4GB is max is because four years ago there
were not any 4GB sticks for testing and Apple does not retest years later for
a discontinued product.

[http://i.imgur.com/CKbdu6c.png](http://i.imgur.com/CKbdu6c.png)

------
quotient
I don't understand why Chromium isn't a more popular alternative to Google
Chrome. It's the open-source basis of Google Chrome. It runs noticeably faster
than Firefox, while being similarly trustworthy. It's a great browser,
available on all conventional operating systems. What's not to like?

~~~
jmillikin
Chromium doesn't have stable builds, and the official snapshot binaries don't
auto-update. This isn't so bad if you're using an OS with a package manager
such as Debian, but it makes Chromium completely impractical for Windows and
MacOS users.

------
mikeratcliffe
Firefox is faster these days. If you find it slower then you probably have
addons that are slowing things down.

Try disabling your addons and enable them one by one to find the culprit.

------
WWLink
Make sure to turn off things like the google autocomplete thing in the address
bar then, because firefox does that too. I was surprised, looking at wireshark
lol.

------
asaddhamani
I switched from Chrome as my default browser after two years of using it just
two months back. Sometimes Firefox isn't able to render certain websites and
rather spits out the html, but aside from that, I haven't had any issues. I
think it works noticeably faster for me. I use it on both OS X and Windows,
and it works great on both. It is also a lot more customizable and lets me run
my own sync servers.

~~~
adrusi
I find the problem you mention very odd. I've used Firefox for over a year and
have never seen anything like that. Is it possible that you have some
configuration messing it up? Otherwise all I can think of is that the sites
are sending html content with the Content-Type header of "text/plain" and
Chrome is deciding to render it as html based on other clues (which would be
non-standard behavior).

------
tritium

      Google should be employing a strategy of invisible control
    

Uh, no thanks. I'm not interested in being controlled by anyone, and I chafe
at the idea of any corporate strategy that attempts to do so.

------
dibbsonline
I simply don't use Chrome because it is a closed source browser from an
advertising company.

------
Errorcod3
I've tried chrome/mozilla, and did not like either.

I use Opera and highly suggest it!

Issue I had with chorme is when I would open up a new tab it would flash to a
white screen quickly before loading the background image of my home/speeddial
page.

------
jolurox
I am using Safari because it's faster for multi tabbed browsing and I can use
WebKit's "FTL" JavaScript JIT compiler.

------
meira
Well, what is the point so? You're dropping Google Chrome because you think
google should control you more?

------
krato
I would switch if I could find a way to use multi-user profiles. Is there a
way to do this with Firefox ?

~~~
e15ctr0n
You can create several profiles and even run them simultaneously. Each profile
can have its own collection of bookamrks, add-ons, etc.

[http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/firefox-profiles-run-
multiple-f...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/firefox-profiles-run-multiple-
firefox-profiles/)

------
b00tbu9
I have switched once my laptop started lagging when Chrome is opened. Even
mouse pointer stopped moving.

------
Lidador
Iron browser = Chrome without Google.

------
ASneakyFox
Opera = chrome - google

------
metastart
Try EpicBrowser.com -- built on chromium but designed to protect your privacy
with everything Google ripped out.

~~~
lh7777
I like the idea, but I'll wait until they publish the source.

