The article also quotes

to "cheat" the system

As if people working two jobs are stealing and not working in exchange for proper value of money.

Whilst I am sure the article might be low quality ultimately, I still wish to see what other options they are advocating. This is clearly just a screenshot and only the first option for blocking ads.

You see so many people asking for smaller phones in the forums and places you frequent.

They do not necessarily represent the views of the common public. I personally could do with a slightly smaller phone because the compact size allows for easier holding with single hands. But, sadly, I have not seen folks around me deciding which phone to buy based on their screen size. Neither is that a priority for them. Simply put, our Venn diagrams do not fully overlap.

I know this site is dedicated to Samsung phones but the title could be framed better. Chrome isn't just being stopped updating for older Galaxy phones, it is being dropped for all pre Oreo Android devices, so it has a much wider reach than just Samsung.

Also, why does Opera require Android 12 as a minimum system requirement? I haven't used it on mobile but boy, they really cut off a lot of older android users.

hoping for improvements

There have been improvements, just on the fronts you haven't been looking for. Also, if I am correct, torrenting over Tor would be painfully slow compared to normally doing it or via a VPN. It is not worth the hassle.

What kind of illogical comment is that? First, you bring in Microsoft to a discussion it is not a part of; second, just because Microsoft does it wrong, it doesn't give Apple a license to do things the convoluted way too.

I follow Ghacks, a tech site, as well and boy there is a Brave shill on there who attacks everyone there for daring to say anything against it. He knows stuff, judging from his comments, yet is so anti Mozilla and pro Brave that I can't understand. Almost thinks anyone not using Brave is inferior.

I was alive when Allende was overthrown by Pinochet in Chile in 9/11 coup! Wait, we are talking about the US 9/11?

I like Firefox because it allows, Atleast for now, customization via userchrome.css files. I once tried Edge and hated it's bloated right click context menu. Meanwhile, in Firefox, I can trim down the context menu to only basic elements.

I do wish Firefox had proper PWA support, but otherwise I have been using it as the main browser on both PC and phone(since uBlock Origin is supported on it, the only Chromium browser to support it is Kiwi Browser on Android).

Microsoft didn't even provide a proper upgrade path for it's users. WP7 couldn't go to 8 and same for Windows Mobile 10.

Shame because the new UI is objectively shit. Autoplaying videos, less dense UI and worst of all, RES works best with old UI. I didn't need to touch my mouse to navigate Reddit all these years thanks to RES. Now, thanks to Spez, he has broken something that didn't need to be fixed.

I couldn't open the article. Prompt to sign in via X site, then sign up for newsletter; it is shitty.

Coming to the article, his argument makes no sense. India's youths don't need to burn the midnight oil to catch up to developed countries. India has a lot of unemployed, underemployed(people having a degree higher than what they are working in; imagine having a MBA and doing a clerical job, that is common here) people.

On the contrary, I would argue there is oversupply of skilled labor in the country but not enough jobs (cough population cough). Logically, you can start instituting four week days and hire extra people. Sure, ultimately company need to pony up more but that is a logical way forward.

Oh, and there are a multitude of things that no amount of work from youths can change in India, which stop it from rising further as a country. But I will stop my rant. Suffice to say, I expected more from a man of his stature than such a statement.

That is true. I hate Shorts and have to block it via uBlock filters. Also, I hate their mobile app. I can't select a precise app wide video quality. There are only two options: High and Low in the settings. I need to go to Advanced settings upon playing each video to manually set a precise video quality, say 720p. This experience is sub par and below what NewPipe used to provide. I mainly use YouTube Music as a service but they bundle YouTube Premium for little onto it.

Forever, no! Sure, compiling Firefox with some flags on my slow system can take ahem, time but I can install Gentoo in couple of days.

Though, in all seriousness, Gentoo takes a notch higher than Arch and unlike Arch, which has many entry level distros based on it, Gentoo has comparatively lesser. It's fully usable but takes some initial time configuring and setting up the system exactly to the user's requirements. The package manager is portage, I think.

Void was a great experience last time I used it. A minimal set of tools/software were installed(for some reason, I dislike ISOs/distros that fill everything from Libre Office to an FTP client in it; I will just download them if I want it), the package manager seemed pacy enough and system was fast. It is definitely one of the better distros I have tried.

they have brand loyalty

Oh, they have some brand loyalty atleast. In my country, Apple has a miniscule market share across all domains[ laptops or phones included ]. They recently launched 2 Apple Stores in a bid to slowly extend themselves inside the market. Quoting from a news article

Another Apple loyalist, Vivek, who waited in the queue for 17 hours to get his iPhone said, "I have been here since 3 p.m. yesterday. I waited in the queue for 17 hours to get the first iPhone at India's first Apple store.

Well, one does need to sideload two apps, a browser and then the corresponding xpi file which will install the add on.

There was/is an alternate way on Firefox Nightly, I think to create a custom add on collection which will add it to mobile Firefox normally. But yes, you are correct, only a miniscule amount of people would care to run it on Android(though it is always nice to have a workaround).

The company also prohibits users from trying to use third party inks, right? Also, I am surprised at the app fication of everything. One shouldn't need an app just to print something. Almost like tech is taking one step forward but HP is taking two step backwards.

The site is actually asking me for login now via Google or something else. In recent times, many sites like Howtogeek or MakeUseOf have kinda paywalled unless you login. It works properly with adblocker (uBlock Origin) once I login though.

Err, going through threads of conversations on both reddit and lemmy regarding YouTube, one would assume ad free access is the norm and Google even daring to offer Youtube Premium is a bad thing.

This is the third insightful comment from you on this thread against him. Are you by any chance, the alt of the user who wrote the original article on Wiki of the OS?

True, geographic diversity is a thing. Smaller phones like iPhone mini or Zenfone didn't caught up in the Indian market. But, should demand exist for them, atleast some companies ought to be making them in some parts of the world. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be happening and that presents one less choice to the customer.

There is Fennec available on F Droid that is basically Firefox with some blobs removed. Not as hardened as Mull but still a worthy option. There is one more browser based on Firefox called Iceraven for Android but it is not available on F Droid even. Though it supports a much wider variety of extensions than mobile Firefox does as of now. The downside is that it gets security updates usually later than Firefox, being an independent project.

Where are they now? On Nebula? I stopped watching much YouTube since couple of years, though I had a decent feed back in the day.

Ironically, I still do use YouTube Music despite it's failings when compared to Spotify(no third party app support or shitty search results even now) but Atleast it worked for me when Amazon Prime Music refused to play in any web browser on Linux for me.

It is quite common, in places like the Indian subcontinent. Though I really doubt Tinder will be able to make any significant dent of it's own in this domain here.

Yes, that pizza for Bitcoin story is quite popular, though it happened in very early days of the currency. Also, I assume you meant NFTs instead of NFCs :p. For a second, I was wondering what did near field communication had to do with this.

Yes, as someone said about the US. It has 2 parties. A right wing and a crazy right wing.

I have Kiwi installed and like that desktop Chrome extensions can be installed on it for the odd occasion. However, IIRC, it is updated infrequently and isn't recommended as a daily driver.

Same here. Whilst torrent sites themselves are blocked, once you get the magnet link/torrent via a proxy/VPN, there is no issue. I do not think anyone has ever received a cease and desist letter from their ISPs here. But then, I think, this is the case for many countries outside of the developed world.

That website has always been like this. They occasionally publish articles and I sometimes visit them for curiosity but more often than not, many articles are sheer garbage.

Oh, it seems like they also started their own membership thing. Wow!

The last can't easily be sarcasm. In app adblockers like Adguard do have a premium subscription option(I had one for a year back in the day, yes, stupid me) and I won't be surprised if in the future some adblocker comes with such an option(should Raymond Hill stop working on uBlock Origin for whatever reason and the community couldn't pick the development up that good).

There does exists one. But when I last tried it, the experience was worse than what a native integration would give. It wasn't streamlined as in other browsers. It doesn't matter much since I only use YouTube Music as a PWA, which I have a relegated to another window in another browser.

Off topic, but screw you Google, for not giving a native app. Spotify meanwhile has command line third party clients even(looks at ncspot) for Premium users.

Some months ago, in email transcripts between Apple employees from years ago, they were discussing about the possibility of bringing iMessage to Android but ultimately decided against it because it was the product that kept users locked in to their iPhones. It isn't a technological problem to bring iMessage but a corporation-al one.

I used most of the stuff you listed though I usually switched to mpv instead of VLC. On Linux, I used Strawberry for quite some time though I use foobar2000 on Windows. Deadbeef is a good lightweight alternative to that on Linux but always seems to play catch up to it's elder cousin.

Yes, you are correct. Bitwarden or any password manager worth it's salt will do the job. I used to be on Keepass [the fork KeepassXC is quite good now] some years before. That being said, I thought there might be some simple about:config toggle to resolve the condition. I also wish more sites supported 2FA so that passwords stopped being the only point of vulnerability.

Many folks might disagree with me, but no portal can be without it's biases. Everything that involves politics or ideology in some form will be biased towards one side or the other. IIRC, Larry Sanger himself said that the site has a left wing bias. That is not to say that the information is wrong there, just that stuff there could be tinted with a prism that is not exactly neutral.

Anyone who pays for premium is a fucking loser.

What a subtle take. Anyone who doesn't conform to my view points must be inferior.

Everyone actively working at the google enshittification should honestly consider jumping off a fucking bridge. You're an awful person and you make the world a worse place to be in.

Yes, inciting people to kill themselves, sure. You do know there are many corporations (cue the oil and gas industry) which are monstrously worse than Google.

Anyone who really thinks that Google right now is the main thing making the world a worse place sure lives in a bubble. But then, these YouTube bad posts I have been seeing since almost over a month ever since this thing started rolling out. I get it, it is bad but would you stop harping over it like it is the end of the world? There is more to tech than just posting Google bad every alternate day.

India has the largest population of English speaking folks anywhere in the developing world, I assume. That combined with the fact that it already has a base of IT workers trained in this sector. (after all, outsourcing some kind of jobs to India has become the norm, not the exception).

Also, this is hardly a political issue. As a developing country, India rightly has many more pressing issues to deal with and people here often tend to skew towards that. This tends to put these scamsters on the back burner and seldom, action takes place. I, myself, was almost taken in by such a scam where they almost beguiled me into sideloading a malicious apk. Despite this, I cannot do much since proving cybercrime is much tougher here(especially when someone just attempted it, but was not completely successful).

Yes, this one I think I tried some time before. It is not perfect as you said but it is the closest Firefox has. I think I will give it another go to see how the extension has matured.

Yes. Chrome OS is heavily modified(and locked down) version of Gentoo but I doubt any end users of Chrome OS want to experience vanilla Gentoo :p.

Folks who use Gentoo do out of their own choosing, not because someone recommended it. It is quite technical a distro and takes some time picking up. Void, is comparatively way easier to come to grips with than Gentoo.