That's a subject I intend to get back to later---because the browser wars in conjunction with the search engine wars ended up, by some extraterrestrial calculus, to the hegemony of Google. Google was the good guy, from the very start. As a happy user of Altavista, with awesome search capabilities, I was overjoyed to learn about Google, a new search engine that had two important things going for it: it was GNU/Linux-centric, as a project of graduate students at Stanford University (like Gimp, developed at Berkeley); and it represented a quantum leap in search capability.
Along the way, I have stayed with Google, partly out of blind loyalty to Free Software approaches, but mostly because its awesomeness as a browser had never been superceded. Also, Google was doing amazing things, leaps and bounds beyond anyone else. M$ could only try to copy, to keep it's loyal base onboard. I stayed ,even while I watched the Google become a corporate behemoth, and assume the eye of Sauron.
On Slashdot.org, is this article that answers some questions for me: in particular, concerning the war between Google Chrome vs Mozilla Firefox. I say "war." I hadn't thought of this much as a war, but it is, at least, a moral vs commercial basis for taking sides between the two: that is, the difference between a surveillance based business model Google), and Mozilla's
"nonprofit organization that advocates for a "healthy" internet. Its mission is to help build an internet in an open-source manner that's accessible to everyone -- and where privacy and security are built in."
That says alot. It nudges me closer to abandonment of Chrome, and possibly changing my email addresses (why I don't is something I will take under advisement). But it doesn't get at, in my mind the most villainous aspects of Google's Infrastructure: the draconian confinement of my files behind a complex wall, where Google selects what applications (now called "apps") may be used to operate on these files. Well, actually, that's a little unfair, b/c I can usually eventually find a way to export those files from Google Drive to where I can treat MY OWN FILES as I wish to.
I have recently abandoned the worst Cell Phone OS---Apple's iOS---for Android. It was a long time coming, and I'm glad I made the decision. Still, while sharing is much, much easier---I mean sharing a file with myself and using it in various ways---than the iPhone. Mostly, I can now move photos and other files easily from phone to GNU/Linux and back much more easily. Did I say "more easily?" Perhaps I ought to have said "At all." Well, that isn't fair, because it is possible, through an elaborate suite of kludges, to attach an iPhone to a GNU/Linux computer. Bluetooth is non standard on Apple infrastructure, obviously for commercial reasons, and will not connect to non-Apple bluetooth appliances and devices. Another way Apple is being uncooperative.
I had, BTW, an interesting conversation (email) with the developer of the amazing "Amazing Slow Downer" apps for iOS and Android. He states that it is much more difficult and more boring to program for Android, and that for music, iOS is the standard among professionals. I get that. I doubt it will last. The reference to ease and comfort in programming is interesting. Still I have notices that some sophisticated apps like Peterson's Strobo Tune are better on iPhones, and some scientific data collection software seems (as I have read) to work better on iPhone, or not at all on Android phones. One reason may be the broad array of hardware running Android. Is it really so that these sophisticatecd programs are hobbled on Android?
I will be using Android, until Ubuntu or someone else develops a full on phone implementation of GNU/Linux or some other open source (or preferrably Free) OS. The freedom is palpable.
One more irony of Google. How could you supercede Google Earth, Earth Engine, and Google Scholar. It's a terrible irony.
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