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 about those useful Google logins tied to everything now? Good luck with that.
What? You can still use your Google account without Chrome…
Unless you’re not talking about OAuth. Is it Chrome’s password manager? Because I’m pretty sure that’s easily exportable…
Firefox syncs across devices as well, if you sign up for a Firefox account and enable sync. This works for bookmarks, logins, history, and you can even access remote tabs if you want. It’s also easy to send a single page from one device to another.
On desktop, Firefox has an import feature that will pull your bookmarks and logins m other browsers (like Chrome) into your Firefox profile.
Even if you’re neck-deep in Google services, Chrome doesn’t do anything special.
Yeee I’m using Firefox. It’s just difficult to desynch the Google services with all my accounts tied to it I had to one by one change em or even make new accounts entirely.
The worst is the fucking Google authentication app and how it’s tied into stuff like Discord…At least I’m out of the Google ouroboros now but it was still intensely painful.
the fucking Google authentication app and how it’s tied into stuff like Discord
The one that implements the open standard TOTP that has a bunch of open source implementations?
I don’t understand the problem. Google services work in Firefox pretty much the same way, yeah? Does Chrome integrate an authenticator app? If som you might want change your 2FA settings at https://myaccount.google.com/security . If you have an Android phone you can get push notifications on it, or you can also use third-party authenticator apps.
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.
I didn’t have this experience at all. I switch browsers all the time just so I can know how they are, it’s painless every time. I’ve used non-chromium edge, chromium Edge, Brave, Chrome, Firefox, OperaGX, and probably something else. Chrome is probably my least favorite, as it just doesn’t have any bells and whistles.
Oh I was way deeper than just browser
I unfortunately had an account, my entire phone linked to it, my Microsoft account linked to it and even my authenticator app linked to it which was responsible for 2FA on most of my non Google accounts.
It was all interlinked in a way that made removing it from the root hard
