Matomo

I agree. What's your point? I'm not defending the choice to use AI for that purpose. I'm saying AI from years ago can't be compared to the current AI

To be fair towards Reddit here, AI now is vastly different and more capable for this kind of stuff than it was years ago.

It's small compared to most flagship phones. I've used a Moto G100 for a few years before switching to the S24, and it's an insane difference

I remember looking into that a while ago, but it's not like I can just instantly hook up my WhatsApp or Telegram account into that, right? I'd need a server to act as a bridge.

And I wouldn't be so keen on giving that kind of access to a random server.

For me, the difference is how they go about doing it. The tracking Microsoft does is baked into the OS you use, for the sake of... well, not for seeing if people in your friends list also use Word or Teams.

Valve tracks a lot of data too, but also seems transparent about it. They show usercount, active players, it shows up for your Steam friends (if you want). And at the end of the day, they don't need to appeal to some shareholders. To me it feels like they track for the sake of their products, not for the sake of selling this data.

That said, I do think I'm pretty biased towards Valve in this, so I'm not sure how fair my view on it is

No arguing there, the specific situation is shit either way

It's fine to do that kind of work for free for the sake of creating and maintaining a nice community for something you enjoy. It's like charity work.

The problem is that there's a big company that's profiting massively from this 'charity work'.

I'm not sure what it is. I suppose this is the case for the heavier web-applications, but the average website (which is where my expertise is, not actual applications) also feels slightly worse on FF. And as far as I know, I don't use any chrome-specific tricks or optimizations.

Vivaldi definitely has a learning curve. It's great once you have it set up how you like (which, granted, is way too time consuming for the average user). But the tab stacking and tiling is so immensely useful for me, I can't use other browsers without missing those features now.

My guess is because Brave is a relatively known Chromium browser that's been degoogled. Along with built in ad and tracker blocking, and it's an easy less evil of the two.

I want to like Firefox, both as normal user and as web developer, but something about it keeps bugging me. The UI feels sluggish, sites seem to be slightly less performant, and I can't seem to get used to it.

That said, I've started using Vivaldi, and while it can be considered bloated, I really like the tab options it has, while also offering a degoogled chromium that's being kept to date.

Yeah same, we switched from GSuite to Office 365 last year at work, so it didn't exactly feel like progress

It sounds like they don't really have a choice in this unless they completely switch up their internal search engines, right? Like, it's a shame, but not exactly something they're to blame for? Or am I missing something?