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There's a pretty simple settings window: https://github.com/domenic/display-blackout?tab=readme-ov-fi...

Would that UI be hard to accomplish?


You mean conceptually or to match it? Native components are pretty much impossible to match without actually using the native framework which provides them, so you need WinUI/WPF.

Win32 provides its own components which are basically Win95 style apps, and you can draw the components using some graphics APIs by yourself.

The whole native development area is a mess exactly because making your own (decent) renderer is a huge undertaking.


Agreed. The Qt framework, which is a cross-platform UI framework, does a decent job mimicking the native Win32 looks. Inside, the code is a giant mess. But on the outside, the API is very well thought out and easy to use.

But you are making false equivalence, the Win32 GUI API is decades out of date from modern UIs. I can use flutter and make a pixel perfect equivalent of the above UI in an hour, with the exact same responsiveness behavior on both windows tablets and desktop, and scales perfectly in high DPI displays. 3 hours if you want the toggle animation timing to be exactly the same.

I came from the WinForms world so don't pretend I don't understand Win32 programming. The fault lies with Microsoft for not investing in it more.


You talk like that is a bad thing. Win32 UI works, is fast, works everywhere even on ancient 640x480 server screens, safe mode and vnc in 16 colors without opengl, directx, Angle or vulkan.

Flutter is nicer to scale and maybe design but it is a massive overhead. Skia still has trouble with some drivers and causes lag or falls back to software rasterization. Hot replacement while coding is pretty neat though. It runs much better on mobile devices imho.


It works, and fast, but it is not portable. I would argue something like Qt is much more viable in $current_year for cross-platform development. Or if you're really dead-set on actual native components, then I guess wxWidgets works too.

I'd rather tell Linux and Mac users to use WINE.

The functionality of that is not hard at all. A few checkboxes, a trackbar, and a hotkey control (there is actually a standard Win32 control for this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/hot... ), with "pushlike" checkboxes at the top to be drawn replicating the monitor layout.

But that "modern" style is... disgusting and repulsive. That whole dialog is bigger than one of my monitors due to how much wasted space it has.


My favourite example of "Modern" style is the toggle switch, shown even in that image. I laugh a lot of the times I see one, it's the 'replacement' for the checkbox, but it's so awful at actually telegraphing it's current state in a consistent way- (the entire purpose of the control!) that it has to have a label indicating whether it's on or off. I find it so absurd that people genuinely put this stuff into their programs and have no problem with it, because apparently we are just supposed to accept this type of poorly designed component because it's more "Modern".

But think of the poor users expecting consistency with their phones where confusion is expected!

An actual example of this lives in the Gmail iOS app. Click a link in an email and every x days, a sheet appears: https://imgur.com/a/nlGS4Yk

1. Chrome

2. Google

3. Default browser app (w/unfamiliar generic logo)

They removed the option for Safari some time in the last two years; here's how it looked in 2024: https://imgur.com/1iBVFfc

And the cherry on top of dark UX patterns: an unchecked toggle rests at the bottom. "Ask me which app to use every time." You cannot stop getting these.


The darkest UX pattern I have ever hit is trying to cancel Google Workspace; whereby they disable the scrollbar on the page so you cannot actually get to the cancel button.

Yes, I want through this last year and documented it in a screencast. This is how it looks https://mstdn.social/@can/115243851196253381

How is this legal?


Don't assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence:

* new automated UX experiments starts * the UI bot made a change that made the page unscrollable * the experiment has a much higher rate of retention then the control (because people can't scroll) * the experiment is deemed a success by results analysis (no one looks at the page to see WHY) * the experiment is blessed as the new pipeline

Such an obvious business improvement made by Gemini !


How about "don't assign to incompetence the malice that can result in big bucks"

>Don't assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence:

OK, if it is a bug, what are the different time frames for people experiencing this pretty serious bug?


It's probably not but no one has challenged them on it.

It's legal until somebody sues them.

Oh yes, I have had that! I tried disabling workspace for my brother-in-law through screen sharing and I thought it was a screen sharing issue. I successfully did it on my own computer but I’m glad to learn this was probably on purpose. I’m not crazy!

I get this on cookie consent modals too

Hanlon's razor applies.

I think there needs to be a new kind of 'razor': 'Never attribute mistakes to stupidity that benefit the ones making them'

The dressing up of purely malicious or greedy actions as merely resonable ones, that were executed poorly has become incredibly prevalent in the modern world.


It’s Grey’s law: any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws


one time had cancel Google Colabs and really I couldn't figure out have to yell at them in support ticket to remove my subscription (eventually they did)

Welcome to the future :)

I was so mad when they removed the fourth option. I can't remember which one was which, but one meant "open in a webview inside this app" and the other was "open in a new tab in your default browser". It was still terrible UX but I liked at least having that choice.

I hate this pop-up so much. I don’t even have Chrome installed on my phone. How about open up on the only browser I have installed…

This kind of thing should be illegal. The default browser is the default for a reason, to avoid this kind of stuff.

I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too.

The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now. How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting?

Google really has made the internet and worse place in so many ways.


It's OK. This is the dying, last gasp effort that a company makes when it has no way to innovate, no way to add any real value, no capacity to drive change internally, and has become completely non-user focused.

In short, it's what companies like IBM and Broadcom are now.

Shallow husks of their former self, mere holding companies for patents, with a complete lack of care and concern about any end-user retention.

Google search has turned completely into junk over the last two weeks. You may think "two weeks only?!", and you're right there, but this is a whole new level of stupid.

You may not be getting this where you are, but here searches are constantly prepended with human checks, searches can take up to 5+ seconds, you name it. They literally spend so little on maintaining and working on their search engine, that it's effectively unusable much of the time now. I don't care whether it's bot traffic, or what, and no it's not just me, or my ISP. This is wide-scale.

It takes so long I just click on an alternate search engine and search there. I don't have time to waste in their inanity.

Any sane and sensible company wouldn't entirely trash and destroy their mainline product, which is key to drive users to experience Google products. But this degree of sheer, unbridled arrogance is what topples empires. The thought that it really doesn't matter, flows off of google as a foul stench.

Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market.

So goes Alphabet these days.


The problem is that these companies can remain on life support for decades, phoning it in and making things continuously worse as their desperation grows.

If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.


Pretty sure this would be the only way the rest of the world (except China) dumps US tech services, so it sounds great.

> mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium

I would hardly notice, TBH.

There are alternatives for all of that.


Good for you. That doesn't change that millions of people rely on these daily, including many less technically inclined.

Real change starts with real pain. People aren’t interested in obsessively checking privacy settings in apps or disabling tracking everywhere and I don’t expect them to. Governments don’t protect them because of gestures widely at status quo. People will realize those services are important and there will be a massive realignment. That’s how I expect things will go.

Microsoft is already pivoting away from consumer products.

>Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market.

Have they ever been more valuable than now?


I think it’s more about how they are perceived. They’re making a lot of money somehow, but they have been losing desktop OS marketshare for at least 15 years, they completely missed mobile, Xbox seems to be failing, they completely gave up on the browser and just threw a skin on Chrome. They have O365 in the enterprise, sure, but that was a market they once owned… now they share it with Google Docs and a host of others. They had to shove Linux into Windows just to get developers to stick around. They had the PC gaming market on lockdown, but Valve is coming for them with all their Linux based efforts… we have PewDiePie as an Arch user now. How bad does Microsoft need to screw up to push someone all the way to Arch? All their consumer facing products seem to be trending down.

Everyone loves to talk about FAANG… there is no M, why not? One would think Microsoft would belong more in that collection than Netflix, yet here we are.

In terms of technology and looking forward, what is Microsoft doing really right? Even their investment in AI seems questionable and they pushed it into their products so hard that everyone hates it. They have GitHub and VS Code, but that was an acquisition and people are always nervous, because they don’t really trust Microsoft based on their track record. Azure is fairly popular, but AWS is still the benchmark everyone talks about. There is their enterprise management software… that helped take Styker completely down last week (maybe not totally Microsoft’s fault and more the admin, but that’s still some really bad press). Did I forget something big?


TBH, you could change a few terms and that text wouldn't look much different in the 90's. Microslop never gave a shit on end-users and what they think. Nobody ever "liked" Microslop. People were always complaining that Windows is shit, Office is shit, MS Servers are a joke, etc. Nobody at Microslop ever cared. They always cared only about having all the companies and governments in ransom, which was always their golden egg goose. The only other thing they care about, to make the first thing happen, are developers. They put a lot money into keeping people developing using their tech, and this actually works. Even on Linux it's hard to avoid Miroslop tech. (I've got just today a Pipewire update which pulled in some MS libs for ML; and there is for sure more as they have even code in the Kernel.) Microslop's EEE strategy is a long game, which is actually pretty hard to beat.

Your circles are really small and echo-chamber-y.

Office was considered a very solid product for many generations. Windows 95 was loved. So were Windows 2000, Windows XP with the SPs, Windows 7, Windows 10.

.NET was the envy of the Java world for many years.

Microsoft had many duds but they also had some great products.

You can't sell as many products as they did without also having some good products.


> Office was considered a very solid product for many generations.

When was that? My introduction to Excel was in the 1990s when a scientist asked about data corruption, and my response was "oh, yeah, Excel does that, you need to fiddle with these options and hope the options do not get turned off, seeing as companies may randomly screw over user preferences". The look in their eyes...they probably had done a whole bunch of data entry before they even noticed the corruption. Anyways, a few decades later those genomes got renamed, for some reason or another. Other customers came to me and pleaded, please do not install Word 6, it's bad, and I was like, well, be that as it may, but Microsoft has broken the file format, again, so if someone sends you a Word 6 document you will not be able to read it. They've got you over the barrel, perhaps consider not using their software? Unless you like being chained to that main-mast, of course, don't shame the kink! Later on a coworker said, try Visio, and I was like, this is sort of bad, and they were like, yeah, it was better before Microsoft bought it. So, when was Microsoft not producing kusogeware? Sometime during the semi-mythical 80s, perhaps?


I don't think everyone hates Microsoft's AI offerings, but rather a vocal group of online people.

Copilot is useful, particularly if it is the only thing enabled in your company.

Don't get me started on Azure though. Their VMs are insanely slow, yet still cost like hundreds per month.

I don't know who in their right mind thinks it is a good deal and that they should move all their services into Azure. Apparently a lot of senior management.


I think if, 10 years ago, you spun Microsoft into several different companies with everything playing out exactly as it has today in the product management side, the most direct consumer-facing sections like Windows Desktop and Xbox would have cratered and most analysts would say that they have bleak futures, while Azure and 365 would have grossly overperformed and would have been titans.

MS has been successful despite fucking up the monolithic position they held in desktop and gaming, because they managed to find a particularly valuable golden goose. It's just that in doing so they allowed the other golden geese they have to become quite sick.

If you took out cloud rev MS would have been much more motivated to not let the rest of the company's products turn in to the sorry state they're in.


Most client PC are still running on Microslop Windows.

They are, as always, using Windows to sell all their other crap, especially Azure and 365. Things like their AD or office tools are tightly integrated into the cloud so you realistically can't even use the one without using the other.


At work, we needed a PC for a Linux-based Webkiosk the other day. The computer proposed by the colleague who actually orders stuff comes with a Windows license. I said we don't need that. A fruitless, lame effort was made to locate a substitute w/o a Windows license. I renewed my protest, but the feeling that the problem is me was already floating in the air. I gave up. We purchased a Windows license to run Linux. For the umpteenth time. It's like a Microsoft tax on PCs.

Those OEM licenses do seem quite cheap. I think it was Dell who gave an option for a while. To remove the Windows license and have Ubuntu instead only saved $10.

It was low enough where I think most buyers questioned if it would be worth it to have the license just incase.


I’ve heard the actual OEM cost is offset by the manufacturer getting paid for all the bloatware included.

Kiosk can probably be done with rpi.

From a CPU / GPU standpoint? Yes. From a "I need to constantly replace SD cards or netboot the weird firmware" standpoint? I'd rather not.

Yeah, this kind of crap is exactly what antitrust laws are supposed to prevent but governments don't care.

If you had separated them, 365 would probably run on AWS and have better cross-browser support.

Do you feel they're? As user, not as investor.

I don't know what feelings have to do with an objective measure like valuation.

I'm not sure where you are but at least here Microslop is still ruling more or less everywhere besides the online ad market.

They are big in everything that is mass scale developer oriented with things like GitHub, VSCode, or all their libs, tools, and integrations (they "own" in large parts for example Python, TS, and Rust). Governments and public services are all running on Azure. So do a lot of companies; more or less all small and mid sized. They are still dominant in the gaming market, and get stronger there with every year.

Microslop was always, and still is the same Microslop. They are very successful with what they do since decades. Whether one likes that or not.


They haven't been dominant in the gaming market for a long time now. Since the beginning of the last generation (Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch), Microsoft has had the worst selling game consoles. And they are getting weaker with every year: the Xbox director was fired just a few weeks ago.

They still control PC gaming. Even Valve has long given up on disrupting DirectX and the Win32 API in general and is just translating whatever APIs Microsoft decides we should have.

That only grants market control so long as Microsoft keeps releasing new APIs, otherwise the people reimplementing them like valve/wine will catch up.

I think Valve’s play isn’t to steal tons of Microsoft’s gaming market share; their play is to just get enough of a market that game developers are incentivized to code to the APIs that work well in Proton, not whatever the latest and greatest in Windows is. If we cross that inflection point, Microsoft’s PC gaming chokehold will be on life support.


I noticed you didn't mention any consumer products except gaming. That's because they no longer dominate there.

Github and VS Code are kind of consumer products aren't they?

This narrative has some critical flaws. Google is not just search or Android and hasn’t been for a while.

Sadly I'd say it's the opposite with them winning that antitrust case, none of these big guys give a shit anymore, they're basically slowly easing into doing whatever the hell they want.

Just to illustrate how bad Google has gotten, I've had the boomer habit of searching for a website name and then clicking the link in Google.

In the past 1-2 years I had to stop that, as there's a good chance I will be taken to some ad-sponsored link that has hijacked the search results.

For example, if I search 'Claude' the actual link to claude.ai will not even fit on a 1080p screen.


Alternatives are not that better :(

Also Google search degradation is partly due to the web becoming infested with AI slop and most content moving to chat apps, which are walled gardens by default.


The funny thing is that until like 2024 iOS actually HAD no default browser control, so this kind of thing was a huge help for people who wanted to use Chrome against Apple’s monopolistic wishes. Of course it’s fair to argue that it should be eliminated now. The commenter who mourned the web view option also has a good point, but tbh that ought to just be asked once and then live in settings.

Even when it had no default browser, it should only prompt for Chrome when a user has Chrome installed. I do not.

In addition, it should remember the setting forever and not keep prompting every couple months.

This is not a good faith attempt to let a user open a link in their browser of choice, it’s a push to get users to download and use Chrome. I can only assume users with Chrome as their default browser don’t get this needless slide-in.


Can the app tell if Chrome is installed?

> I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too.

Alas, I don't think it's a bug. A PM or VP probably got a bonus for this.

> How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting?

Yeah this is kinda weird. I don't know if it's browser specific though. I use Firefox on my main computer and I think I still see it. Which means that the website owner opted into this weird pattern. No other auth providers do this. Just Google.


I opt into it on my site it's just a login option you can ignore if you want to log in another way, but for those who use it it removes the friction of writing out a password and verifying the email

It can’t just be ignored, it covers content, and if someone accidentally clicks the wrong thing… poof, they now have that site linked to their Google account.

It’s a cancer on the Internet.


I’m annoyed by it every time on every site when I have to dismiss it. Probably not the only one and probably depends on your type of site/visitors.

I'm sure some number of website owners ran A/B tests and determined that more people signed in when it was present.

I'm also sure that some number of website owners don't know or care that it's annoying to some people.

Personally I've just learned to ignore it; but if it did annoy me enough I'd zap it with uBlock.


Thanks for sharing! It's not really easily ignored for some people (I ignore it the same way I ignored banner ads in the 00s). I'm curious if you have any metrics on bounce ratios with/without the option. The sentiment here on HN appears to be largely negative but HN does not represent the population at large. I find that many people don't mind or even like a lot of stuff that HN tends to hate.

> The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now.

It's indeed aggravating. Thankfully it turns out you can turn it off (and of course the option is extremely well-hidden): https://developer.chrome.com/docs/identity/fedcm/customizati...


Having to use Google browser to disable Google’s own bad behavior is unacceptable.

But only on Chrome? I'm on Firefox and I see those prompts all the time.

Go to your uBlock Origin settings and enable the annoyances/social filter lists.

You can set a personal rule in Ublock origin to block these sign in with Google pop-ups.

https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/#wiki_g...


> The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now This drove me really, really mad last winter. How did they even achieve this? My policy is no US vendors. Period. Not for work stuff at least; not for things I depend on. What a mess.

> not spam it on every website just for visiting?

It's the website that spamming that.

Either via google.accounts.id.prompt(), or options provided to loaded Google scripts.

Google is guilty only insofar as that feature is possible.


There is no way this many sites did it organically without Google pushing it in some way, not to mention they built the thing in the first place (as you mentioned). There also doesn’t seem to be any way to disable it (other than maybe an extension that I saw recently, but at $15 I needed to think about how much I want to spend just because Google is obnoxious).

I’m sure the real goal of this “feature” is to get people to sign-up for the site without them actually realizing they are signing up. They click OK just so the modal goes away and now the site has their email address. They can use that growing email list to seek higher prices from sponsors when they put an add in their newsletter the user will now be spammed with.

Imagine if the other auth providers followed suit. Open a news article and you need to close the Google auth, Apple auth, Facebook auth, Microsoft auth, GutHub auth, X auth… I’m sure I’m forgetting some. After closing those 6 modals, reject the cookie prompt, close the newsletter modal, and maybe now we can start reading the article if there is an auto-playing video ad covering some of the content.

All of this is really pushing me away from the internet in general and souring me on the tech industry as a whole. I’m at that point where I find myself casually browsing for jobs that won’t require I ever touch a computer again.


You can disable it in your Chrome settings: chrome://settings/content/federatedIdentityApi

Websites that choose to put a sign-in with Google button on a page can disable the popup by setting data-auto_prompt="false". The default being "true" is how Google is pushing this, but this seems like a rather gentle way of pushing.

It's clearly a deliberate choice that websites make. Your explanation as to why they're doing it seems very plausible to me.


I don’t using Chrome. Having to use Chrome to disable a Google “feature” doesn’t feel like a path forward.

I think this whole functionality is actually based on an experimental browser API (FedCM) that may be coming to other browsers as well.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API

But ultimately websites can pop up whatever annoying nonsense they want. There isn't really any "way forward" except avoiding bad websites or using ad blockers.


Just use µBlock Origin for most of the annoyances, and for the stupid google popup a simple Stylus CSS rule is enough.

They did it because they want you to be signed in, for tracking, upsell, or whatever else.

Google is guilty

Trouble is we cognoscenti know it but the great unwashed do not and or don't give a damn about the fact.

Google and all of Big Tech well know of our objections but unfortunately we are only hardly perceptible noise to be ignored on their way to even greater profits.


> This kind of thing should be illegal.

That's a bit silly.

Some people think pineapple doesn't belong on pizza, but that means you should avoid buying pineapple pizza, not outlaw it.


Google buys up all the pizza places in your town and stops selling anything but pineapple pizza. The delivery driver also stays and watches to make sure you don't take the pineapple off and if you do, you're banned from buying Google Pizza anymore. It's a long drive to find a pizza place that isn't owned by Google.

> Google buys up all the pizza places in your town and stops selling anything but pineapple pizza.

Awesome: great business opportunity to open new pizza places.

Either you make a lot of money from customers, or you sell to Google for more money. If the latter: open yet another place, rinse and repeat.


Except the fact that opening up new pizza place have a huge upfront cost. Your pizza may need to be pricier too. You thought people are flocking to your new pizza place, but the reality is that most people just want to not get hungry, and will rather chomp down pineapple pizza while being surveiled, than spending more for non-pineapple pizza.

Look, I love making a analogies. Just that they have scale, and competing against it is hard.


> [...] but the reality is that most people just want to not get hungry, and will rather chomp down pineapple pizza while being surveiled, than spending more for non-pineapple pizza.

In that case, who are we to judge the company that gives people what they want?


It's not what they want, it's the minimum of what they'll tolerate.

People don't know what they want. $VENDOR knows that and shovels whatever shit they can mass produce into their customers face.

I, for one, still wouldn't care one bit. The problem is, this drags us all down eventually. I don't wan't shit shoveled into my face.


Who knows better than people?

If you have a monopoly, different rules apply.

Google doesn't exactly have a monopoly here.

I’m in the UK and use the Gmail app, I don’t ever see this sheet. Is this US-only?

I don’t see the sheet for imgur.com either because, well, they’ve blocked access completely for UK users. :shrug:


I see it in the UK.

The app settings offer a way to set default browser to the system default (which is what I have selected), as well as a toggle to “Ask me every time” — I have this turned off and never see the pop-up.

EDIT: also just tested turning this checkbox off. I then clicked a link in an email, got the pop-up, unchecked “ask me every time”, clicked default browser, and didn’t see the pop-up next time.


Don’t worry, it’ll come back in a couple of months. Not sure if has a timeout, or if it gets reset by app updates, but that checkbox is only sticky enough to gaslight you into thinking it works

An annoying extension of this is opening a Google maps link on mobile. It always prompts to open Google Maps (the app) no matter what. If you click no, its bugs the fuck out and opens an App Store link. If you click yes, even if you have Google Maps installed, it bugs the fuck out and opens an app store link. In neither case will it properly show the location on a first attempt. It's been like this for years. I'd ask what they're thinking when they came up with this, but I remain unconvinced that any such activity happens inside any Google offices today.

I think this is an Apple bug.

I’ve seen it with non-Google apps too. I’m not sure what causes it, but I believe sometimes you can long tap the link and select the correct option.

I believe the behavior where you say no and it still tries to open the app is because the default behavior on Google Maps links is to open Google Maps.


This happens to me now on Android. It either wants to download google maps or if I try to open in browser, it just repeatedly refresh loops before drawing anything. But not always possible it seems to get the address by inspecting the link

If you use iPhone, you can use iOS Mail app (and with iCloud mail) if you really care.

Apple dark UX pattern is that there always has badges on Settings app if you do not subscribe to iCloud even if you have manual backup. You cannot dismiss it.


I don't subscribe to iCloud, and have never seen these. Where do you see them?

This has tripped up non-technical family members who ask for help and aren't sure if they are required to pay for these things.

"What is Arcade, am I supposed to be paying for it?"

Sigh. Apple used to be better than this.


They keep enshittifying the experience for those not using iCloud Mail. They just removed the feature to use alternate email aliases on non-iCloud accounts on iOS 26.

I love the irony that the Imgur link asks you to install the Imgur app first

I don't understand why people don't use alternative mail clients to avoid that? Is the Gmail app the only one that is good enough? If so, and if it is essential to you, just go with the bundle (Gmail, Chrome, etc). (FWIW, I left gmail entirely, I pay for my email provider)

This would drive me insane! I'm glad I ditched Gmail altogether.

Please don't use imgur, it blocks off half of the internet. Use catbox.moe or imageban

the YouTube app does the same. Infuriating. I don't have Chrome installed and it doesn't list the only third party browser I _do_ have installed: Orion

Why are you even using the Gmail as your mail app?

The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. On top of that, since Google does their own thing, it doesn’t fit well into standard IMAP that most clients use.

Sparrow made Gmail a great experience, but Google bought it and shut it down. I’m still rather bitter about that. It’s the only email client that actually made me enjoy email.


>The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible

You can use mobile Thunderbird with a Gmail account.


> The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from.

Not that hard. Get new email, autoforward old email to new. In old email, set reply-to as new email.

After suitable time has elapsed, disable old email.


This doesn’t solve the root of the problem. Google is still the backbone of a significant amount of the email and no meaningful progress would be made toward the day when I could delete the Google account.

It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of, assuming they allow that, or deleting the account if they allow that. I’ve been making efforts here and it’s painful. Many companies don’t have good systems for that, if any at all. Even big companies like Amazon and Sony, I was told to just abandon old accounts and let them hang out there forever… I had duplicate Audible and PlayStation accounts. No way to delete them. I found this particularly upsetting with Sony, considering how many times they’ve been hacked. On some sites I also ended up in captcha purgatory.

Then there are the hundreds more who have my email somewhere. I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account. I think she used the new one a few times, but do I really want to nag my 70 year old mother about using the wrong address? My dad is the only one who reliably uses it, because he uses his contacts app properly. Over a decade and the progress has been almost non-existent. All this effort did was make email and logins harder to manage by spreading it out.

The pragmatic approach is to go back to Gmail, since most stuff is still there. I don’t want to be in bed with Google, but at least it’s only one thing to think about.

Thinking about it, my Gmail account is also my Apple ID. I think Apple only recently made an option available to change that, but it feels risky.


I changed my Amazon sign in a few weeks back, no real issue. I just popped over to Audible and there seems to be a pretty straight forward flow to changing your email, although I didn’t actually try it out. What issue did you have? Was it awhile back? Not trying to be contentious but curious / you may have some luck now if you struggled with it in the past. It’s certainly not trivial to just abandon one email for another, especially if you have been using the same for two decades.

I had 2 accounts. A legacy Audible account and my main Amazon account. The Audible account was created before Amazon bought them, and I think after the acquisition I just started using my Amazon account.

My main Amazon account has all the Audible stuff I actually care about, as well as copies of the stuff on my legacy account, so I wouldn’t lose anything that mattered if they deleted it.

My goal was to delete the legacy account and all my personal data related to it (which I believe is required by law in some places).

I ended up on the phone with support and talked to them for quite a while. They said there was nothing that could be done. This was probably a year ago, Best I could do I guess is delete as much as I can, if they allow it, change the email to a 10 minute email, and then let it go. This is what I had to do for Papa John’s last week and a couple other places, but I’d rather my account actually be deleted so I don’t have to worry about a future data breach on an account I would no longer be able to get into. I don’t know how their database is setup, if I change something I can see, is it actually gone or does the DB keep a history? There are a lot of unknowns that make me uncomfortable with just abandoning an account.

With Sony it was worse. At least Amazon talked to me. Similar situation with 2 accounts. Their website said to call to have your account deleted. I called, waited on hold for 40 minutes, then was told they couldn’t do it. They hung up on me while I was trying to tell them their website said to call the number.

This past weekend I migrated out of 1Password, which I had been using for 18 years. That was a fairly big job. The export/import did OK, but I still had to go one-by-one through 600+ entires to sure things up and fix little things. The main job is done, but I have a little more I’d like to do. The email job is bigger and has lots of other people involved, which is where the real challenge is, as they’re all different.


> This past weekend I migrated out of 1Password, which I had been using for 18 years. That was a fairly big job. The export/import did OK, but I still had to go one-by-one through 600+ entires to sure things up and fix little things.

Don't start using new services or capabilities on corporate platforms. It's a trap (TM).

Start with open source. It'll be a little bit behind the curve initially, but it will pay off over a lifetime. I started with Keepass back in the day, and never had to worry about migration.


I’ve tried to use Keepass many times. It’s always felt extremely clunky to use. Last time I tried it (at work) about a year ago and it seemed like nothing changed in the last 20 years.

As much as I’d like to be an open source purist, the user experience isn’t there. The lack of design talent in the open source community is still apparent, and there is often little focus on the last 5-10% of the UX that makes something nice to use. I assume this is because that part isn’t very fun.


> It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of

Yes, this can seem overwhelming. That's where the auto-forward helps. This is what I did: initially changed emails at the big ones - banks, govt, etc., maybe 10 or so. For the rest, when an email would come in, I would change it for just that one. It distributes the workload over time and is much more manageable.

> I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account

This is where the reply-to setting becomes important - most email clients will use the reply-to when responding. For persistent ones, go into, say Mom's contacts, and update the email there, deleting the old one. Had to do this with my parents and family. Don't make them do it, do it yourself.

How to set reply-to: go to Settings > Accounts and Import, click "edit info" next to your email address in the "Send mail as" section, select "Specify a different 'reply-to' address" in the pop-up and enter the desired email.


> the 300+ sites

I am almost sure that you only use 15 of those sites regularly, 30 of those sites occasionally, and almost never for the other 250.

It's doable. If you keep finding excuses, you'll never get it done.


Do one a day and you'll be done in a year. Do one a week and you'll be done in 6. You don't have to be done tomorrow.

I hate to say it but you are right. It might be finally time to cut the gcord

And the accounts I have in many many places which use email address as a primary key?

You don't need to update all of them. Nobody is asking you to give up your Gmail. You can start with the 20 sites you use the most frequently which takes an hour. For the rest, either take time to migrate or leave them in Gmail, since you don't actually need to visit those sites or get updates often.

I've not had issues plugging Gmail into Thunderbird, aquamail, k-9 mail, maybe you could try one of those?

The issues I had (granted this was probably a decade ago), was that Gmail uses tags and IMAP uses folders. The translation there always felt messy and cumbersome. To me, this is why I felt Gmail wasn’t good in generic mail clients and really needed one built for Gmail.

Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.


I can confirm that basically all third-party apps have to handle this "Gmail weirdness" and come up with an abstraction layer to make Gmail IMAP accounts play nicely with "regular" IMAP accounts.

It's possible and I migrated almost all my emails from Outlook and Gmail. That's two services.

I still have those accounts and occasionally check for emails from old contacts or service emails, but on a daily basis I don't interact with Gmail at all.


I still use emacs gnus with Gmail. You need a token instead of old fashioned imap auth, but it works fine

Spark is a good replacement for Sparrow.

I just checked out a video. I don’t think it’ll do it for me. What I liked about Sparrow is it made email feel more like Messages or Twitter. Going back and forth in email didn’t feel so formal. I didn’t see that in Spark. They also seem to be leaning really hard into AI, which is a bit of a turn off.

Gatekeepers have to gatekeeper. Sigh.

It's just as much "change is scary" and "I like this as it is." It's a very human reaction.

I dont think its just that. Nimbys also see:

- many new building being very ugly (side note: ugly buildings no matter how green get torn down and are this not as green as building that are beautiful)

- increasing density bringing increased crime

- increased density actually turning out to be less efficient on a per capita tax basis (this is always wild to me, cities should be spending much less per capita than rural areas but arent)


I actually have first hand experience with this! One person came for the on site interview, and a different and much worse dev did the remote work once hired. This was over a decade ago now.

I’d probably leave the hospital if I heard the doctor filed an LLM generated diagnosis for the nurse to validate

It looks like there's some requestAnimationFrame call going on more than once per second. It's definitely an energy intensive tab.

But for reference, keeping CNN.com open is more than double that memory pressure on my 5 year old Mac laptop, and it handles both fine. Do your fans really kick in for heavy sites?


https://lite.cnn.com/ is the only version you should load :p

I have an 8 year old laptop that works fine except as long as I don't bother with sites like CNN.com. Heck, I even have a 13 year old laptop that works fine on most sites. Absurd ad-tech and tracking technology is not a motivation for me to upgrade but to avoid badly coded sites.

Hear hear.

Be comforted by the fact that most somebody elses listen to humans talk at 1x speed.

Those diagrams of risk vs cost bared are helpful.

You’ve made the analogy but I don’t think you’re actually doing an analogous thing. I think you’re just talking about code review.

It’s not a call and response like that but the audible gross out sounds from the theater audience for The Substance added so much to my viewing.

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