Apple Maps and Fastmail.

Fastmail is paid but the 1Password and disposable email address system makes it worth it for me.

I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.

The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.

As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.

Arc is weird but pretty good once you get used to it.

DuckDuckGo is good if you want a minimal browser and don’t really care about extensions

Brave is OK if you want a slightly more private version of Chrome

Honestly though, just use Firefox.

They totally did that

The problem was that people weren’t really interested in any of it.

The UI was cluttered and messy to look at, none of it was as polished or natural to use as iOS or Android.

Plus there was no Google Maps, no Google Docs (and Office 365 wasn’t around to replace it), even that apps that were in the store felt pretty bad quality. I had Spotify on my iPhone and it was nearly flawless, when I switched to Windows Phone it kept cutting out or crashing or disconnecting from the mobile connection, it just wasn’t fully baked.

the more traditional style of forums are still around too.

They’re very rare these days though. It’s a whole lot easier to keep all your interests in one place rather than heading off to one forum for gaming chat and another for programming chat and another for gardening chat.

Keeping it all in a single feed means your interest can be piqued at random times and you’ll be more likely to interact.

In the UK at least, switching banks is super easy, I’ve done in twice in the last 2 months because they offered free cash to do so, there is enough competition that the banks have to make it easy to move or else they lose customers.

For government, generally most systems are built to be as accessible as they can be because there has been [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps ](whole raft of legislation) written up to cover this.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be a problem (power companies etc could prove to be sticky) but there are legal requirements that entities above a certain site have to meet.

The best time to leave Twitter was when Elon took over, the second best time is right now.

I think would be a step too far for most

It is very different:

• Tabs are always vertical which is better for todays ultrawide monitors
• You have the ability to pin tabs to the sidebar which means that whenever you’re on a particular site (not page!) they’re stored in the same place
• Other tabs are ephemeral, they’re open for at most the 24 hours from when you use them, then they get cleaned away
• There are separate workspaces; like swappable sidebars that you can use to - for example - keep work and personal tabs separate
• The vast majority of commands (going to a tab, getting to settings plus loads more) are access via a Stoplight like global search control
• You can “boost” a particular site and change its style sheet to be different colours - this can be handy if you’re a developer and need to be extra careful when working in a production environment.

That’s just the stuff off the top of my head, there is probably more.

Sorry, missed the Android requirement.

It has just been released for windows though

If you want something a little different, try arc it doesn’t behave like pretty much any browser I’ve used but it’s certainly a unique take on it

Oh yea, you could do 1080p or even 800p like a Steam Deck in handheld mode and I think that that would be fine, on a TV it should be > 1080p tho

I can’t be the only one thinking finally…

The Switch was reasonably powered at launch but now feels positively antiquated compared to the Steam Deck and the like, there is no way I would buy any third party games on it right now when I’ve got a PS5 sitting right next to it.

All I need is a good spec bump to get games running at 1440p / 60fps in docked mode to make me happy!

I find NextDNS seems to work pretty well.

I’m guessing Linus’s investment is safe then :)

I think expectations have grown astronomically since 2004, budgets have ballooned, graphical fidelity and animation quality has skyrocketed, development team headcounts have gone through the roof and many games just have more systems than they did before.

Games are less frequent because they take a lot longer to make, I read the other day that Halo 2 was apparently churned out in 10 months, these days even games building on other games foundations such as Tears of the Kingdom can take 5 years to come out.

98 was incredible, besides all the ones OP mentioned they missed:

• Metal Gear Solid
• Sonic Adventure
• Resident Evil 2
• Sonic Adventure
• Grim Fandango
• Caesar III
• Unreal

Surely one of the best years, only possibly beaten by 2004:

• Half Life 2
• MGS3
• GTA: San Andreas
• Ninja Gaiden
• Halo 2
• World of Warcraft
• Doom 3
• Killzone
• Fable
• Burnout 3: Takedown
• Lumines
• Far Cry

So many amazing games!

Normally I would agree with you, but I often need to use the Postman Interceptor extension which is only on Chromium browsers

Yea, I really liked Edge when it was first launched, clean fast and simple. These days there is so much shoe-horning of Microsoft integrations it just feels like they’re desperately trying to steal all of your personal information

Arc could be amazing but there are some features which just don’t work as I would expect.

As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:

• Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
• Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
• Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
• Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
• Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
• DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
• Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
• Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.

I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!

Not OP, but those people are just not my friends any more.

We had one person in our group say she wanted to delete facebook and we were all “Yea, alright then” and just moved that group to discord.

I’ve still got an account but use it way less these days since all the people I really cared about were in that group.