Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible

I wholeheartedly agree. I'm a technical person, I run Linux as my primary OS and use FOSS software. But I also have a full time job and 2 small kids, and frankly I just don't have the time or patience to be a full time sysadmin. Proton has come a long way in providing alternatives to Gmail, GCalendar, GDrive, etc., but like you said if you want to replace ALL of Google you practically have to self host a gazillion Nextcloud instances or whatever.

Why does it have to be Mozilla everything? I want Mozilla to continue doing what it does best: build browsers and (maybe) mail clients.

Not everything has to be unified. I'd be quite content with Teehee Photos, Hoho Notes and Huehuehue Assistant as long as they're decent tools.

I kinda agree with you. Before my exams I had lot of time. I used to self host nextcloud, email and invidious etc. But during exam had no time to manage instances or update my packages, one after than another they kept showing error and they went offline.

I stopped my VPS and started using Google Drive(it was already available on my android) to share my notes temporarily with friends, soon I kept using it. I hope protonmail becomes better so I can start using them instead of other products

It’s a hard fight between all the time maintaining your own stuff takes and the utter resistance by other users who just won’t learn anything new or use any real security.

Microsoft is arguably worse than Google. They make you pay for the software they use to harvest your data for free.

These businesses should be paying for the data, the raw materials, they collect and use to build their products. You can't assemble a car without paying for the nuts and bolts, but that's what they do.

I have to agree with this.

I’m basically “the idiot”. Decently tech savvy, but non-IT. Very capable of learning what I need to know, but I haven’t really had the time or mental capacity to learn how to do a lot of the things I need to to get away from corporate overlords.

I’m working on it, and have been for a while, but in the meantime I do use several google services, because that’s what I’ve been using for many many years and change is really hard. Especially when you have to initiate the change yourself, and especially when you know if you switch to a stop-gap solution you’ll loose all impetus to actually keep making the change (which I will).

The biggest challenge is learning what is worth it to self-host, what hard/software to use for the configuration I want, what’s compatible with devices I own (windows, Linux, iOS and android), etc. I’ve been running Plex for like 10 years now (windows then Linux), but it’s a very basic setup on a host pc I don’t use for much else. Beyond that, I need to learn almost everything from the bottom up, and that’s a lot to learn -just- to avoid an existing company and their existing products that I’ve been using for years. Unlike my Plex content, I would actually care if I lost my other self-host data, so not something to fuck around half-ass with.

I can’t blame people for not wanting to/knowing how to do it. I like learning this shit (because of the end result, not because I have interest in it, sorry not sorry) and I still don’t actually want to do it.

Can't fix everything, but Google drive is easily replaced by proton drive. Google notes/keep or any kind of note taking is easily replaced (and improved) by Obsidian, and on android you can install f-droid as an alternative store.

Downside is that these thinks cost money. But everything has a cost, and at least here the cost is clear, and upfront.

Hey, I switched to Firefox because I liked its UI better (after Quantum though)

Well, super bad breath is not your ordinary bad breath. It would possibly melt your lungs faster than the fire. Bacteria that can thrive in superman's body is not to be messed with.

Or Mr. Incredible being sued for saving a guy commuting suicide..

I literally swore off Firefox for half a decade because they removed and broke Panorama with their engine rewrite, so yes.

Yes. Because the UI and UX of a tool that you use everyday matters. The average user will hold ease of use over privacy 9 times out of 10. In my case though I wasn’t able to use FF for a while due to the lack of debugger support for a project I was working on. Now it comes down to me having to work on multiple projects at once so tab groups and organization are key. Now don’t get me wrong, once Chrome totally kills adblockers I’ll drop Chromium browsers like a bad habit, but the point still stand though, FF could use some UI improvements.

Yeah I thought it had that feature already but I wasn’t seeing it. I’ll have to look again.

Which ones? Besides sending a tab from mobile to desktop it doesn’t have tab groups or vertical tabs. Those features rely on extensions and/or custom css.

I use FF. But I also use Chromium based browsers out of necessity. I understand where you’re coming from but what’s also going to screw us is Mozilla not keeping up with the latest features which is something they’ve struggled with. At the end of the day they have to give people a reason to switch and use FF as their main browser. Simply saying “better privacy features” isn’t enough for the average user.

IMO there are none. They are all janky. Your best bet, (and what I may start doing), is to make separate folders in your bookmarks bar and add any tabs you want in there as a group. Not ideal but it works.