Reply to post: Re: Missing poll answer

Re: Missing poll answer

"Is WaterFox usably stable yet then? It used to make the firefox alpha versions look rock solid last time I tried it."

I've never seen that myself, but I haven't been using Waterfox for that long. I used it before Mozilla had an official 64-bit version of Firefox on Windows, and I tired of the constant crashing that actual Firefox was doing all of the time, apparently because of contiguous memory issues. When Mozilla came out with the beta for FF x64, I tried that and found it to be excellent, so I moved to that simply because it was a more recent version of the FF base (more security fixes, etc) and it worked just as well as Waterfox. The FF x64 beta was more stable than the x86 official release from the very first day the beta was available, for me at least.

I used Firefox x64 (in beta or eventually release form) from that point until quite recently, when the growing annoyance with Mozilla (and the upcoming addon armageddon) gave me the impulse to switch back. It's been just as stable and responsive as FF x64, with no crashing or hanging at all.

Mozilla has shown that they don't want to listen to those of us who don't want the powerful addons removed, but fortunately, FF is open source, and when an open-source project loses the plot, as they often do, forks are bound to happen. In this case, it's an existing fork that was created for another reason initially, but it fits what we need perfectly. Hopefully it will continue to be so going forward-- I would hate to contemplate having to decide between using an out of date browser version and using one that has a terrible UI that can't be fixed.

Waterfox had some kind of a deal with Ecosia for search (I had never heard of it before seeing it in WF), but now apparently that's changed to Yahoo. I've actually been using that lately and I have been pleasantly surprised by it... I was always a user of Altavista since it first appeared (before Google). I liked it and used it through the acquisition of Altavista by Yahoo, but one day the search results just began to be terrible. I noticed that on the bottom of the search page it said "powered by Bing," so I did some reading, and found out Yahoo had dropped their own search in favor of a partnership with Bing-- and it made things a lot worse. That was when I finally switched to Google. I'd never really used it before then.

Google was OK, but over the years, it has gotten really much worse at finding what I need. Reverse image searches that used to properly identify a given celebrity now come back as "female" or "arm" or "human," or other similar things equally worthless, and the more common text searches often return a lot of irrelevant crap. Not only that, but when I try to exclude certain results by negating the search term, it sometimes returns them anyway, and when I try to enter an exact phrase in quotation marks, it still finds bits and pieces of the phrase rather than the whole thing as entered.

I was trying in vain to find a given part number for a laptop part the other day in Google, and in frustration, I tried searching in the other search options in Waterfox... DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, and Yahoo. Yahoo in particular stood out; it found what I needed on the first try, where Google had failed. That's when I noticed that it doesn't say "powered by Bing" anymore, and when I searched that specific topic, I found out that Yahoo and Microsoft have apparently gone their separate ways. Is Yahoo using the Altavista search technology they acquired all those years ago once again? It does have that feel-- and I like it. It's the default search again, for the time being anyway.

Google's gotten so bad that it's hard to find anything anymore, now that they are apparently more focused on trying to prevent search engine optimization without paying them than trying to return relevant results to the user, and it requires deliberate countermeasures to prevent tracking. I have Google screaming at me multiple times a day that a "new" device has signed into my account, since it can't find its cookies, which is deliberate on my part. I sign in just before doing anything that uses a Google sign-in, like posting this reply, then clear the cookies once again as soon as I am finished. I don't search while the cookies are present (while I am signed in), nor do I use any other Google service while signed in. My IP address is dynamic, so it changes once a day at least, so it's at least a little harder to track me than Google would prefer.

I've sent feedback to them about the stupidity of me receiving so many "security alerts" spams that if there was ever a real issue, I'd never be able to see it for all of the false alarms. Of course, then I am explaining to Google why I clear cookies so much, and the answer is "because you're Google," which is not likely to strike them as a good reason-- if my feedback, one among what is surely millions, is ever actually read anyway, which seems doubtful. By a human, at least; I know that all the stuff you do with Google is being read and analyzed by a machine.