[seneca]

Google is really an awful company at this point. We need to build some viable competitor to the anchors they still have.

Firefox and Brave are fine as chrome alternatives. Google search is dying a slow death. We need a viable alternative to YouTube.

I dread Google getting a new lease on life through Waymo.

[xtracto]

I just paid for a subscription to phind.com it is extremely useful for most of my search needs. I don't use Google search at all

I also have been using Edge as my main browser in Linux (it's vertical tabs have no match for my usecase) .

[DaoVeles]

At this point? They have been for a very long time. We saw this first hand when they almost single-handedly crushed Windows phone by essentially keeping them out of their walled garden. That was back in about 2010.

That was when I swore off them as much as possible. Not because "poor Microsoft is hurt" but because they showed the kind of power they could flex on others. I only use them for the occasional youtube video, nothing else.

[bubblesnort]

The Nokia Lumia was a terrible trainwreck. Microsoft could've done a better job, but they didn't. In hindsight, Nokia had just launched an incredible smartphone with a Debian-based OS and 2 years later they sealed a deal with Microsoft to make MS-Windows the new OS. Pretty good timing for Microsoft to kill off what they really hate. Especially considering that Ballmer was still their CEO at the time and he's known for saying "developers" a lot and calling Linux a cancer.

The thing that made Google evil at that time for me is when they introduced Google+. Before they launched it, you could sign up with fake names and they didn't care. G+ changed that. Nowadays they're making it impossible to register without a valid cell phone number.