Exactly. This blog clearly showed that tracking remained even after switching to a paid plan. These companies have tasted the forbidden fruit of surveillance capitalism and they won't roll back voluntarily.
The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives.
I don't actually consider this remotely likely, but the world is getting weirder, so I'm not writing off the highly improbable so easily.
> The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives.
I see what you're saying, but you're referring to something like a "market-based solution" to this problem. The one and only market-based outcome is the one we have. This is a case of imperfect information. There's no reason to expect a market-only approach to deliver a desirable outcome when one party has so much more information than the other.
Background: I used Opera Presto as my main browser from 2007-2014, and Vivaldi since 2016 (2015 being a mix of Opera, Firefox, and Vivaldi). I've used Firefox as my main browser at work for most of the past four years.
One big factor for me is the customizability without having to rely on extensions. I trust Vivaldi (and von Tetzchner), and don't have to worry about whether I trust extension makers. The customization options in Vivaldi tend to work pretty darn well too, which can be more hit-and-miss with third party ones in Firefox.
Single-key shortcuts are also a big win for Vivaldi for me. I got used to these in Opera and they're great for efficiency while web browsing. Maybe I can get them with an extension for Firefox, but it's enabling one check box in Vivaldi. It's similar to why some people like vim plugins for browsers, but with less vim expertise required.
I've also seen Firefox remove a lot of features over the years. XUL extensions being the big one, but there are others. Firefox Hello. Firefox Panorama, just as I was starting to take a liking to it. Vivaldi has a philosophy of adding features that let you customize the browser to how you like it, and if only 0.2% of users use that feature but it makes them really happy, that's fine. Firefox will remove features if not enough users adopt it. Thus my trust that Firefox is going to keep features that I like has been lowered over the years, making me more hesitant to try new Firefox features, and generally more hesitant about Firefox.
Although I'm considering switching part of my home browsing back to Firefox because of its ability to not autoplay videos. Too many sites have those nowadays (and too often, self-hosted and not as third-party ads that are easily blocked), and Blink-based browsers can't stop them, and I'm getting pretty tired of having to pause/hide videos all the time so I can focus on reading articles.
Yeah, that's why I asked, because if you use only 1 chat protocol, a dedicated client is almost always better (now that ICQ and AIM are dead). Pidgin really shines if you need to aggregate multiple protocols in a single client.
That's been my experience with developing with libpurple unfortunately. The APIs are very inflexible for advanced chat features, and theres little documentation for making your own plugin.
But smartphone is a computer, personal computer with telephony hardware. And Android is Linux with different userspace, mainline Linux can boot quite a lot of smartphones. Terminology is so wrong.
There is a general purpose computer under there but most people don't interact with it like that. The fact that it can does not mean that it will.
A lot of this has to do with the ecosystem and how a device is presented and what the UX is like. Manufacturers increasingly want to lock things down and hide them away.
> There is a general purpose computer under there but most people don't interact with it like that.
The same could be said about 90% of laptops and desktops purchased for home use. How many people actually use "computers" for tasks they couldn't do on a phone or tablet if those devices had larger screens and keyboard support.
That's been true since 1984 (and whenever Windows caught up ;) ). The enthusiast/hobbyist sector has long been a small minority of the computer buying public.
Windows wasn't really that bad until recently. Sure, it didn't go out of its way to give you tools to command your computer, but it didn't get in the way either.
The true dumbification of computers started with smartphones. iOS and Android are the primary drivers of this change, of treating computers as appliances. Microsoft unfortunately embraced this trend in recent years, they quite openly say Windows is an OS-as-a-Service now[0]. Still leaves plenty of control points to exploit[1], but it starts getting in the way.
