At work I can choose between Edge and Chrome as my only two options. I use Edge, but there’s really no benefit for me to use one over the other. Technically I think I can request Firefox, but it’d have to go through VP-level approvals or something stupid like that.
Based on the “coming back from lunch,” I’d assume this person is on their work computer.
Saw that, immediately reinstalled Firefox, saw the tab bar was still a mess and reuninstalled Firefox. Is there a non-chromium browser with a decent UI. Firefox is a disaster after 3 tabs.
I am genuinely curious what is your issue with the tab bar? I got a long list of issues I have with FF (still my main browser anyways) but the tab bar is not one of them and I always have 20+ tabs open. Not saying your opinion is wrong, just trying to understand why you think so.
Not OP but I really dislike the way Firefox handles multiple tabs. When there are too many tabs, Chrome would shrink the tabs to icon size, but Firefox insists on keep a weird minimum tab size and make you scroll the tabs awkwardly.
I stopped using Firefox for a long time because of that, until I discovered Sidebery (vertical tabs).
Besides just jumping ship to veritcal tabs, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a user .css customization, settings option, or other small extension to get that in Firefox.
Oh yea, that makes sense. The Chrome ones get super super small I think right? Has been a very long time since I last used it. I personally like it the was FF does it because I can more easily tell what tab is what, but I can totally see how it you would dislike that.
Our laptop is locked. We cannot just install programs into it and there are regular audits on the content of the laptop so no portable applications also.
Of course on my personal laptop I’ve always used FF since I became aware of it, about the year 2007 or so.
OK, I don’t think your work laptop really counts, that’s entirely the decision and fault of your employer. We use Google apps at work but I don’t consider myself to be a Google apps user, just my work is.
Yeah but that in itself underlines the problem. A large part of people’s time is spent on work. And yes people do tend to use what is familiar.
Think of adobe. They offer students free access to adobe products. Which in turn transfers to a workforce that mainly use their products which in turn bleeds unto nonprofessionals using their products because of the abundance of youtube tutorials by professionals on how to use adobe products.
True, on the other hand this is very much employee driven. Some IT guy picked chrome as a company policy, and the reasoning behind it was looking at which browser would cause the least amounts of tickets with people complaining about browser choice.
The same is with office. Do you think a company likes to pay MS for it’s shitty office suite, for when people have to type out 3 lines of text? Of couse not, but it cuts down on whining. (obv. there are places that are “full contact” ms office users, with excel sheets full of macros, but these are quite a minority)
Point is if public opinion would shift to firefox, companies would just roll out an update to use firefox from now on. Yes some webapps would break, but that is like “activeX” dependent sites in 2018… A bit pathetic.
Yeah you are also correct. Now what we need to figure out is how to convince the majority, given that the proliferation of advertising from corporations and sheer exposure due to mere universal availability of chrome and other corp products is a major roadblock to overcome.
I used to be IT and now I’m in sysadmin work. I don’t make corporate software decisions personally but I work with the folks who do. You’re not entirely wrong but you’re being extremely reductive.
Browser decisions are less about complaints and more about minimizing the ability of third party vendors to blame issues with their sites and occasional business required extensions on our browser choice.
Vendors would be more likely to support Firefox if it was more popular with the public, but that’s more of a second order thing than some arbitrary “avoid complaints” decision. Fuck, half of sysadmin is selling the business on whatever shitty change you have to force on them because you don’t have a reasonable choice. Avoiding complaints is so far down the priority list that it’s routinely ignored.
The move to Chrome from IE where I work was caused by the vendor providing our timecard site making changes so it would only work in Chrome. One could argue “just drop the timecard vendor” but that’s a decision outside of IT’s hands (timecard and payroll is HR’s domain) and a change like that is too massive to kick off due to something like what web browser needs to be used. That effects payroll, time cards, employee reviews, taxes, access to benefits… too much to just go “IT says no”
For reference, this was ADP. I know not all of their contracts went through this (my wife’s workplace uses ADP and somehow is still on IE, their lack of IT security scares me) but again, not for IT to negotiate. Best part was that we had other business critical sites that still required IE, so while Chrome was the default, we had people using both.
We’ve since changed to Edge as default as vendors were dragged kicking and screaming away from IE and activeX (shudder), but now we still keep Chrome around for the vendors trying to get out of fixing their shit. Avoiding complaints does come into it, but far less than you’d think.
As far as MS Office goes, yes familiarity to the office workers comes into it (employee efficiency and saving time on training trumps personal stands about open source). There’s a lot more to it though. You can’t call up GNU support when OpenOffice shits the bed, we can and do with Microsoft sometimes just to calm a VIP. Having someone external to blame for things users don’t understand is a valuable tool. We can rely on MS Office having easy configuration options so we can meet the various regulatory requirements our company has. MS Office can be managed through the same tools we already use to manage OS settings in our environment with no custom work or additional software. We don’t rely on sometimes janky open source reverse engineering to open document types we recieve from outside our company, risking formatting issues causing problems with legal documents (yes, incredibly unlikely, but why even open yourself to the risk).
Admittedly, my workplace is “full contact” Office use. The things these bastards get up to with functions and macros is amazing and horrifying. When I was on the helpdesk I lost track of how many times I had to walk high level people through the fact that no their machine was not underpowered, they did not need more RAM, but that they had hit the limit for data in a single sheet in Excel and the only solution was to work with smaller amounts of data at a time. Since I’ve moved to sysadmin I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve had issues escalated to us because some department has constructed a faux DB using a bunch of Excel workbooks and data connectors between them. Just happy I’m not our SQL guy trying to move them away from that, poor bastard.
Anyway, at any medium or larger companies, these decisions have a lot more going on than tech dude preference and trying to avoid complaints.
I lost track of how many times I had to walk high level people through the fact that no their machine was not underpowered, they did not need more RAM, but that they had hit the limit for data in a single sheet in Excel and the only solution was to work with smaller amounts of data at a time
Ooh ooh ooh! I got to do this the other day! Out SAAS database software gives us only limited functions and no SQL access so I dumped half a million rows to Excel to make a spreadsheet following a request from the top. After a couple of hours I had crafted my spreadsheet was about to send it when I was told “oh nevermind, they foind they already have a custom report that shows them the same information”
You nailed it. I use FF for personal stuff, but I need a chromium browser for work (internal sites are wonky on FF).
But I work 8hrs a day for 5 days. I don’t even have 8 hours of total free time on saturday and sunday combined, much less use my pc for that long for personal things.
Why not? Brave is way better than standard chromium or even ungoogled chromium. Brave Shields is one of the best adblockers I’ve seen. Balances blocking trackers and not breaking websites really well.
I have converted over to Linux for a huge portion of my work flow but there is still the 20% I either can’t efficiently replicate or there is just not the software I need.
Where possible I choose to work outside of Microsoft, Google and Apple but to keep a roof over one’s head, I must endure too.
Stop using Chrome outside of work then. Unfortunately we usually can’t control the software environments we work in, but separate your work computing from your home computing. The stuff that Google would gain about your personal life is mostly gained from your personal browsing anyways, assuming you don’t use your work computer for personal browsing (that’s what phones are for).
So glad those anti-monopoly laws are working so well in the US.
Seriously the only major time I heard of these in the last few decades was when MS tried to pull the Internet Explorer only move back in the early days of Windows
“We changed our privacy settings to allow us to snoop on what you’re looking at and shove you ads accordingly. Feel free to opt out, but we’ll probably opt you back in when you aren’t paying attention.”
-Me wiping the coffee I spat after reading this. Hilarious 😂
Does anyone know if this is coming to (Chrome based) Edge?
For the last year and for all of the crap Google has been changing in Google Chrome, I’ve actually been pretty happy with Edge (never thought I’d be saying that).
No I understand why websites show ads. I don’t understand why whenever I disable personal ads, I get a message saying “Are you really sure? If you disable this you won’t see your favourite ads anymore and only see ads for things you probably don’t want to buy. That’d be awful wouldn’t it?” and expect me to change my mind because that’s definitely not why I wanted to disable it in the first place.
They act as if people like to see ads because then they can buy stuff they think they want/need. And I’m getting afraid that’s actually true for a lot of people too.
Games probably. If I’m browsing the store looking for new games, any games I’ve seen in ads will probably pique my interest more because I recognise them.
As Netflix and producers of toilet paper know well, people in the end are happy to pay for things they like or need. But Google and its like have discovered that instead of selling stuff to me, it’s much more profitable to sell me to others.
God I wish the days would catch on in america, you just don’t get the same level of clean with toilet paper, seriously I used to have problems with an itchy anus, doctor always said it was normal. Even when it was red from wiping too much just to try to get rid of the itch.
Switching to a bidet cured everything.
If I start to itch back there I just use the bidet, clears it right up
Sadly it hasn’t become culture, that was a thing even back in the days when the internet was just gamefaqs, new grounds, and whatever Message Board your mates went to.
We wouldn’t have gotten this far if they weren’t good in execution. Ads may not work on you or many people in this thread, but it works on enough people to make this worth it.
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