I guess YMMV, I just tried a few places around me (UK) and it found them all. You can also defiantly tap on a place to select it.

Did you try it recently or a while ago? I know it was pretty woeful when it came out but it’s improved a whole lot over the years.

I wish Kagi wasn’t as expensive as it is.

If it was $5 a month for unlimited searches I would be all over it but 300 searches is too few and $10 is too much money.

Pfttt… at least with DDG you can turn any of that stuff off with a button in a UI rather than having to make a new bookmark or fuck around with your browsers search engine.

You can even turn the ads off if you want.

Also, Apple Maps is totally fine, it’s not overloaded with ads like Google Maps is and it basically always finds the place I search for.

Phones and PCs are fine, I’m talking more smart speakers like Amazon Echo or consoles like the PS5.

I’ve never been impressed with YouTube Music, the UI feels jank and it doesn’t work on half the devices in my home (compared to Spotify which just works on everything)

Brave is run by some pretty shady people who do things like automatically adding affiliate links to your URL or collecting donations for content creators without their consent

As far as an actual browser goes, Brave is based on Chromium so its more likely to work on every site but it has a bunch of crypto nonesense added that you probably would want to uninstall. There are more extensions that will “just work” on Chromium browsers, for example I’ve had issues with the Postman extension on Firefox before

Firefox is based on Gecko, its pretty well supported and follows all the standards but there is probably a higher chance that a site might break (usually down to its pretty strict privacy defaults) there isn’t really much bloat (other than a Pocket integration that you might want to turn off)

Mozilla also feel (to me at least) like one of the last groups of Good People on the web, you can reach their manifesto to learn more.

This is pretty much it.

YouTube Premium is only remotely worth it because regular YouTube is an absolute shitshow

Tab groups are coming but in the mean time containers work well enough for me with the added benefit that they’ll also block tracking from the sites that are within them.

https://www.popsci.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/GluePizzaAI.png?strip=all&quality=95

I feels like they either badly copy (see Gemini) or don’t think about what they’re offering (see Stadia’s busted business model) they’re content to milk the existing services they’ve already got and make them worse by cramming in more ads (see YouTube, Google’s search result pages) and they cut out or dictate the web through their monopolies (see AMP and Chrome) rather than working with other parties to make good products.

They feel like Hooli in Silicon Valley, basically the definition of a fat tech giant who doesn’t do any innovation of their own.

I feel the original Chromecast was probably the last truly great original Google product, it was simple, it was inexpensive and it worked - you just plugged it in, joined your network and you were off, there really wasn’t anything like it at the time.

I really hate what they’ve become.

Cool, now do Chrome!

I’m in the UK, we have a system for switching ISPs that is apparently relatively painless so I’ve started that process but it’s apparently going to be another 2 weeks before the switch can happen :(

This had already gone past the first level “customer service” level to the 2nd level “technical support” team who sat on it for a couple of weeks, they’ve apparently now escalated it again and they’re waiting for their “network team” to take a look at it.

I’ve basically lost all hope with them at this point.

I’m currently using the iOS 18 beta and - during an earlier beta (3 I think) - Screen Time was broken in that it didn’t let you change the settings or extend a session, it would just crash.

This actually made the feature useful! You could no longer just click a button to skip the warnings, you had to actually stop when the time was up. Sure it was a bit annoying but that’s the whole point.

So yea, I’ve been thinking of getting my partner to change the PIN for it so I can’t skip the warnings in the future.

It’s not a bad feature, it’s just often poorly configured and badly implemented.

I really hate the corporate IT.

I was at a job that was slowly transitioning from a medium sized company to a larger one, initially we were allowed just install and use whatever on our machines, but gradually IT started implementing policies where if we wanted to add something it had to go through a request system and usually it would be denied.

As a software developer this was just infuriating, it would hold up work, force us to use shitty software (like Chrome and Edge) and there would often be fuck ups where installing a new version of software would require removal of the old one and installation of a new one - which would trigger the approval process again.

Like - I get it - some people can’t be trusted, but we were some of the key devs for the companies product, we know what we’re doing.

I was rather happy to leave that part of the company behind when I left.

Destiny was supposed to be their “forever” game, the problem is that after 2 dozen expansions:

1. New players are extremely intimidated about joining
2. Old players dislike losing the content they’ve paid for when it’s vaulted
3. Long term players will eventually get bored of playing the same thing they’ve been playing for years

Live service games just won’t last forever like they want them to.

Hard disagree with that, DDG searches are accurate about 90% of the time that I use it (which as a web dev is quite a lot) if they aren’t hitting Google with the same term rarely wields any better results.

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.