this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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As a former chrome user it's so real. Chrome connects every device for you and once you ARE in the loop it's hard to leave it. Wanna switch to Firefox? Oops suddenly your authentication doesn't work anymore. Oh what about those useful Google logins tied to everything now? Good luck with that.
It took me huge effort to switch off chromium based browsers because the longer you use chrome, the more it worms it's way into all your services making it harder and harder to switch. I still can't figure out how to seperate my Yahoo account from my Gmail account
A huge reason I left is realising that if google decided I broke their TOS on something like say, YouTube ad blocking, they can just terminate by Google account and every service attached to it suddenly becomes unusable. I'd rather not be taken hostage like that
Edit: for all the wise people in the comments. I was trying to decouple entirely from Google products, not just chrome
What you're describing sounds more like over-reliance on Google services than the browser. I don't use gmail or google logins anywhere, I just have Bitwarder plugin to manage my authentication and use masked emails to create accounts. I did the same in all the different browsers I used over the years and never had any issues with it or with switching between browsers.
You're right, but that's still a valid concern. Many people are much more ingrained in the Google ecosystem, especially through Android.
We're seeing this issue with Microsoft in the buisness space, too.
And if course we've been seeing it with Apple for decades.
These massive corporations have a great deal of people so ingrained in their interconnected services, it's next to impossible to convince them to extract themselves.
This is why the EU regulations focus on "gatekeepers". Because users will not make the necessary changes in their habits to combat the abhorrent practices in the industry. There is no true free market here. So the solution is to regulate the shit out of these gatekeepers to make them open up and play fair.
IMHO unfortunately most people will always go for what's more convenient, don't care about their privacy and don't mind ads and there's not much we can do about it. Eventually all the content on the web will be locked up behind a paywall and/or accompanied by nu-blockable ads. Most users won't mind that. We'll be left with what we can host/support ourselves like lemmy or mastodon.