[lesslaw]

I switched to Chrome to see what the speed was like and I came to the conclusion it was a slicker browser for daily use.

But then I reminded myself that some things are more important than raw speed and responsiveness.

Google's interest is tracking and targeting. Chrome actively worked against me in this regard. Firefox, despite its financial ties to Google, put control and freedom onto my desktop.

A bit of occasional sluggishness is a worthy price to pay.

The beer is free at all the browser bars and while I was drinking it, I remembered I liked free as in speech.

[Karunamon]

>Google's interest is tracking and targeting.

Last I checked, every bit of this can be turned off in the browser settings if they really bother you that much. (Or heck, use Chromium.)

In my experience, they offer quite a bit. Typo correction, instant and stupidly fast searches from the address bar, that kind of thing.

I'll never understand the pathological hate-on that people have for advertising, I suppose.

[lesslaw]

Advertising is annoying and rude. Flashing away trying to steal my attention from the activity I am trying to pursue.

"don't do that, come and do this instead"

"skip this ad in 5 seconds" - no thanks

The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so completely modern in spirit. There was hardly a soul in the firm who was not perfectly well aware that publicity--advertising--is the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced. In the red lead firm there had still lingered certain notions of commercial honour and usefulness. But such things would have been laughed at in the New Albion. Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god. Gordon studied them unobtrusively. As before, he did his work passably well and his fellow-employees looked down on him. Nothing had changed in his inner mind. He still despised and repudiated the money-code. Somehow, sooner or later, he was going to escape from it; even now, after his first fiasco, he still plotted to escape. He was IN the money world, but not OF it. As for the types about him, the little bowler-hatted worms who never turned, and the go-getters, the American business-college gutter-crawlers, they rather amused him than not. He liked studying their slavish keep-your-job mentality. He was the chiel amang them takin' notes.