Category: Google

More Now Than Ever, I Hate Web Browsers

On December 22, 2024

I hate web browsers. I hated them back in dark ages when one would need to use Internet Explorer on Windows in order to log in to government websites and I was a frustrated Linux user on the Phoenix browser just trying to accomplish very basic things. I guess those were the ‘worst of times’ or whatever at least if you were trying to do things on the web and not using a Microsoft browser. There was always the Mozilla suite just in case you really, really enjoyed shit and failure.

Since then we’ve had Firefox (evolved from the aforementioned Phoenix browser) that started out strong and then became a mess of weird concepts to bring in money (I completely understand that development requires money but the entire day I spent debugging network issues on 20+ windows laptops because FF half-assedly rolled out in-browser VPN that broke internal DNS and , of course, the insanely dumb full screen VPN ads people started seeing shortly thereafter were inexcusable) and our new lord and IE replacement Google Chrome which also started out great and then became a surveillance device.

I’ve recently noticed more weirdness than usual using Chrome and decided that it was time to heed the Firefox users who swear that it rivals sliced bread in terms of usefulness and whatnot. I’m willing to put up with some tracking since I’m not a huge fan of logging into every website that requires a login (read: all of them these days) but when ad-blocking becomes something that is actively being developed to exclude, I shrug off the inertia more quickly. After doing my 30-zillionth test drive on vanilla Firefox in the past 15 years, I’ve determined very unscientifically that it’s still slow as shit and still leaks memory like a motherfucker. On the performance side Chrome has been a much happier piece of software and progressed in leaps and bounds in terms of dealing with my bad browser habits. Firefox sent me on a trip back in time to when you were expected to be patient with every website being a Javascript infused piece of shit and spiking CPU and memory seemingly at random. This last test of FF brought my processor consistently above 70% and gobbled up 32 gigs of memory and I can’t live with that.

When all else fails, I usually revert to Opera since it was the browser that was first to market with crazy features like tabs way back when. It also used to be a browser that you need to pay actual money for back then and used its own proprietary engine called Presto that didn’t age particularly well. I did a little sloppy research on what Opera is up to these days and they’re a European company owned by a Chinese. This shouldn’t give me pause because GDPR and primary ownership residing in Europe but it does because I live under a strict protocol for allowing devices into China that assumes that a device carried there is perpetually and permanently compromised afterwards so I’m leery about placing all of my eggs in that particular basket. I’m sure it’s totally fine but I’m most definitely not, especially given the amount of financial things that I end up doing in-browser. Call it paranoia or overly abundant caution.

So, what does that leave? I landed on Vivaldi for a couple of reasons. One, Chromium is the base and it mostly behaves the way that I’m accustomed to browsers behaving. Two, most of the “issues” that I had with how Vivaldi works were easy enough to fix. The one that immediately annoyed me was the tiny little tabs even when the browser window was expanded to the full length of my widest monitor. I fixed this in a matter of ten minutes. I also liked that you could enable tab scrolling in Linux not because that’s a must have feature or anything but more because I’m used to mouse wheel scrolling through tabs in most KDE applications. Three, it was recommended to me by a person who explained why it was their browser of choice and most of the criteria made the most sense to me.

I also ended up switching to vertical tabs after messing around with the various options since it made more sense to me. I am much happier when able to see all of the tab titles. Vivaldi is freakishly configurable so you can tinker with both UI and interior functionality. This sounds daunting but you can reset entire Settings sections back to defaults with a single click. After only a few weeks, I’m impressed with Vivaldi. I haven’t found any showstopper level issues and generally have enjoyed the changes in UI, etc.

Good To Know I Suppose

By goneaway

On December 18, 2020

In Google

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After all of the outages, I guess it’s a good idea to send out endless notifications about how nothing is broken now, right? I’ve seen like 15 of these in the last hour.

My First 24 Hours With the Pixel 5

By goneaway

On November 3, 2020

In Google, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses

In my personal technology life, I do move pretty fucking fast. Once I’ve decided that I like one thing better than another then I’m mere seconds away from huge piles of administrivia and credit card debt. It’s just how I function which is arguably broken as hell. Just ask my credit cards. They’re very much aware of the problem.

After deciding that I wanted back into the Pixel game now that the Pixel 4 is kind of a dead issue and most of the design decisions that I found untenable for my own use have gone the way of the dinosaur, I hit the preorder button with no regrets. It arrived last night and, as I mentioned previously, there’s no time to start messing with an electronic device that is central to both your life and how you make a living than right after that device arrived.

I started the whole process by porting my phone number from Sprint to Mint Mobile. I did have to attempt this a couple of times and actually talk to someone at Sprint in order to get the account PIN that I actually knew and had written down to work for the porting process. Unlike my Comcast cancellation when I moved out of my post-divorce apartment, at no point did I lie and say that I was moving to Antarctica. The whole porting process only took about 15 minutes from when I hit the Submit button until I had phone service again which was smoother than I expected. My previous service was Spent-Mobile so I’m essentially using the same towers as I was a few minutes ago. Easy.

I transferred data from my OnePlus 7 Pro 5G over to the Pixel with no hiccups so other than a couple of political spam messages that came in while this was in progress nothing was lost. After the super tall OnePlus screen for the past year or so the Pixel 5 felt absurdly tiny. I have pretty small hands so it was novel to be able to reach all sides of the screen one handed. Despite being well accustomed to the 90 Hz illusion of everything on your phone being alarmingly fast the Pixel 5 feels impressively snappy despite the cheaper chipset. I think the compromises that Google made towards things people actually wanted like more RAM and a larger battery were the best design decisions they’ve made recently. The Soli chip included with the Pixel 4 probably seemed like a cool bleeding edge thing to include in their phone until it failed to do anything useful and truncated battery life. There are none of the surprises that I didn’t want and all of the things that I loved about my Pixel 3 XL (excepting the screen size) like the fingerprint reader and that fucking camera.

I didn’t realize how much I’d missed having a phone with a great camera until I took my first experimental Night Sight photo of the view from my front porch. I live in a newly built out part of suburban Denver and the other side of the street is the beginning of a wildlife preserve so there is very little ambient light outside. I think the nearest operational street light is at least a block away and this is what came out the other side:

Nightsight

which was pretty satisfying since it was taken at nearly midnight with no actual source of light other than a windows behind me. When you want to actually take memorable photos but can’t be bothered with messing with anything beyond a confirmation that you’d like to use Night Sight then the Pixel is the phone for you. The sensor is pretty much the same as the one included in my older Pixel phone and the photo above is the result of extending my arm, clicking the photo button, and not doing a good job of keeping my hand still. That is what I expect out of my camera which probably accounts for how badly I felt about most of the photos I took on my OnePlus. The magical idiot-proofing just isn’t there.

The other important part for me was the increased battery capacity and the Pixel has more than delivered on that front. After the initial charge up from out of the box, I’ve been running from that initial charge since then and just recently hit the 30% mark. That’s pretty stellar given the amount of time I spend monkeying around with settings and twitchily tweaking settings. I tend to at least passively charge my phone whenever I’m sitting in one place for more than 30 minutes and after resisting the urge to do that for the sake of science I’m pretty confident that I could get away with charging this phone every other day if I needed to. That is a tremendous improvement upon what I saw with my Pixel 3 XL. It would hit the 20% mark near the end of the day without any topping up charge which always made me a little uncomfortable. I’m fond of being able to forget to plug in my phone before going to bed and still having some life left in it the next morning. I will miss the OnePlus warp charging that would erase some of those mistakes but I’d still prefer to just have the capacity to begin with rather than just pumping a ridiculous amount of watts into the battery to stave off the empties.

My first 24 hours with the Pixel 5 have been great and I’m actually excited to be completely happy with a middle of the road phone specifications-wise. I’m glad that there are at least a few companies acknowledging that just spec-bumping once a year doesn’t make a compelling argument for switching phones.

I’m Having Trouble Rationalizing My Next Potential Phone and Beginning To Suspect That There Is Something Very Wrong With Me

By goneaway

On August 29, 2020

In Android, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses

If you knew me in real life you likely would be ashamed by proxy at how often I swap out my phone. It’s a bad habit that I’ve been trying to wean myself from for years especially in a world where you end up paying slightly more than the MSRP for a phone when you purchase from your carrier and just in time for that phone to be just slightly outmoded and seemingly useless. I dislike myself for that tendency since it’s essentially money frittered away for no good reason and probably ends up causing a lot more e-waste than I’ll ever be comfortable with.

Here are the phones I’ve used in the past 2.5 years or so:

1. Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge
2. Samsung Note 8
3. iPhone X
3. Samsung Note 9
4. Google Pixel 3 XL
5. Google Pixel 3a XL
6. Oneplus 7 Pro 5G

In the best possible world, I’d be using something like the Fairphone if it were more practical outside of Europe and I could stop myself from relentless wanting the latest and greatest by owning a phone that was at least upgradeable. Unfortunately, this doesn’t look like a possibility in the near future. That would be a line in the sand of sorts to keep me from relentless upgrading.

Things I’ve enjoyed about my last few phones:
1. Samsung – battery life! My Notes would last for-fucking-ever on a single charge and it was my introduction to actual fast charging.
2. iPhone – Meh. Solidly mediocre but I fled back to Android land as soon as it was economically feasible.I hadn’t used an iPhone since the 4 was released. I did not miss much. Because I am not in high school or college, the blue bubble stigma means absolutely nothing to me.
3. Google Pixel – the 3a had great battery life and a camera comparable to the amazing one on the Pixel 3 XL. I miss taking photos that look that good. I loved my Pixel 3 XL but the mediocre battery life and the fact that I had to RMA that fucker once without any support from my carrier were both disappointing.
4. Oneplus – I love this phone for everything but the camera and the lack of wireless charging. The fast charging is completely amazing and I’ll admit that the numerous issues that I had with my Pixel 3 XL and the Pixel Stand made me leery of trusting my ass chip to wireless charging especially when you’re wireless charging your alarm clock. Given the direction that Oneplus seems to be moving, I’m not sure that any of the newer phones they’re bringing to the market, in the US at least, are necessarily what I’m looking for. I would love to have the 8 Pro as my next phone but that doesn’t seem likely in the US.

Sooooo, the phones that I’m eyeing:
1. Pixel 5: There is so much to love and hate about all of the hardware that Google makes. I’m hoping they find a reasonable compromise here and make something that’s more usable than the last Pixel that I skipped completely. Battery life is fucking important. Love the camera that is far too capable for a person that mainly takes pictures of my kid and random objects. Love the speed of updates. Love the sometimes stupid extra functionality that comes along with having a Pixel like having the ability for a robot to screen your calls. Hate the seemingly abyssmal hardware QA (I must say that my last RMA for my Pixel 3 was completely software though). Hate the fact that Pixel hardware is much more affordable if you don’t pre-order. Hate the fact that Google still doesn’t get that being able to use your phone through an entire workday is important to most folks.
2. Oneplus: I really would love to be able to purchase a Oneplus 8 Pro and have it function in the United States. That is apparently too much to ask. Sigh.

The weird need to buy is already messing with me. I’m trying to not do anything excessively stupid until the Pixel 5 is actually, you know, released and has actual hardware specifications and pricing. This review of the Pixel 4a does make some good points about features versus dollars which is cool with me for the most part since I’ve used a Oneplus 7 Pro 5G for months which has neither wireless charging nor rated water resistance. Still, how will the Pixel 5 line up?

Pixeled Into The Ground By Sprint

By goneaway

On July 23, 2019

In Google

Due to the unwillingness of our old pal Google and my hated phone carrier Sprint to work together, I’ve been without a phone for about 12 days now. The short story is that Sprint wouldn’t exchange phones under the Google warranty and since I didn’t purchase my Pixel 3 XL directly from the mothership, Google did the standard 2 day shipping warranty return which isn’t spectacular given the 7-10 days that they guarantee. I’m bitter about both of these blockages but the plain simple fact is that I haven’t had a phone for a very long time and I’m getting impatient with all parties involved.

This will be my very last phone with Sprint since they’ve gotten considerably less inexpensive and replaced by other carriers with unlimited data. Plus, I’m hoping to never have a representative, who was otherwise very nice, tell me that despite the fact that my phone is not in working order that I’m just going to have to mail it back to Google and wait patiently while I pay for phone service that I’m unable to use. Fuck every little part of that excepting the part that will motivate me to jump providers after six years. I also hope to never see these particular words together again:
Please be assured that the process will be completed withing the specified time frame of 5-10 business days from start to finish.
. Again, very nice but not helping with all the compliance required MFA that I’m not capable of doing. Sigh.

Guess What? You Bought A Thing That Listens To You.

By goneaway

On July 12, 2019

In Google

I wish I could say that I was surprised by the outcry over the fact that digital assistants like the Google Home actually record audio of your requests. I don’t actually have a problem with this in my own house since I’ve largely transitioned over from Amazon devices to Google devices that have a mechanism for disabling listening for wake words. Google filled in some of the blanks about how this data is used so hopefully people are a little less afraid of the all hearing ports of our robot overlords for the moment.

Power Washing Is Lame

By goneaway

On June 12, 2019

In Google

Ah, I finally got an answer to whether needing to power wash my Pixelbook was my fault or something screwy in the Beta channel. I got bit by Play Store claims it has no network connection issue that I didn’t really see in any of the Android apps that I use. It was a nuisance though and something I probably wouldn’t have bothered working my way through if I wasn’t too exhausted to leave my couch last night. I’m mostly at fault for running the beta channel but I’m on board with being able to postpone updates in ChromeOS until I have time to research whether crazy amounts of shit is going to break. I’m back on the Stable channel for the moment. We’ll see how long that lasts.