That was… a very interesting thought experiment you just sent me on. I’d never considered this, but it immediately sounds plausible upon hearing it. Thanks for mentioning this “off topic” idea :D

https://apps.apple.com/en/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id1484498200?l=en-GB

WebKit browser, on iOS, with (most) Firefox and Chrome extensions possible.

Y’all are welcome :D (also @AllYourSmurf)

Hey, maybe instead you can have some 3 meter tall “solid state” wind turbines?

I have Orion (macOS only for the time being) and it’s sooo good.

The amazing part is that it even works as a daily driver if you’re a not-so-techie person/normal user… but then on top there are all these little extra features and optimizations that make it like Safari if Safari was actually good.

I would at this point a) not be able to go back to either Safari or Firefox (edit: nor Ungoogled Chromium) as well as b) immediately trust an Orion user on most of what they have to say about a “tech” related opinion :D

I’ve tried using wireless charging in a friend’s car on my iPhone SE a few weeks back.

Result: notification that charging had (!) to be stopped at around 50% due to overheating and was poised to continue once the iPhone had cooled down sufficiently. It never continued as that was all I needed to know about the current state of wireless charging with light usage on the side.

Good point on the wireless listening and ear pieces needing a battery as well, though. I guess with those it comes down to convenience for most buyers.

They will not, at least not in the EU.

The difference with wireless listening vs. charging is that the former doesn’t need close to 2x the power of the cable-bound method and doesn’t destroy the phone’s battery in the process, unlike the latter

Even worse, my default browser was changed to Bing after an update.

Is this not literally quite almost what their first big antitrust case was all about (shipping their OS together with Internet Explorer, back then) that almost got them broken up by the state?

Also to add to what you said, switch away from (Google) Chrome everyone!!

Imagine this message, but on every website, and it literally cannot be prevented, as the browser itself will sooner than later just straight up tell the sites “yo, your content has been modified, maybe block the user from viewing”, snitching on you.

Come to think of it now, I wonder if this will affect poorly implemented sites using that feature to accidentally (or intentionally…) disable dark mode/reader extensions.

And then, due to Chrome’s market share, if left unchanged, web developers/companies will at some point just not bother anymore. Imagine “this works best in Google Chrome, download now” you see for some web apps today, but even with the most basic text based site that can’t prevent you from using your Adblocker in e.g. Firefox or Safari.

Yes Signal is goog

If you have macOS* (Edit: read on, their search engine is cross-platform, my bad duh), they have a browser built on top of the Safari technology (WebKit), but actually even more performant than it, with the extremely, extremely neat feature that they ported most Firefox and Chromium Extension APIs on top of that WebKit tech, meaning you get basically all of the world’s extensions available to you – even Safari ones!

Other than Orion (name of that browser), Kagi is also offering a paid search engine which I have to admit I still haven’t tried out, whoops… I should really get around to doing that, but the thing is, I use duckduckgo, my current primary search engine, only somewhat rarely…

*Supposedly also coming to other platforms sometime in the future. I’m rooting for them!! And planning to buy the Orion+ upgrade, too. They deserve it… I really hope their financing is somewhat stable and secured.

Weren’t they literally sued and almost broken up for doing something like this by antitrust prosecutors like 25 years ago?

My mother’s maiden name is pagbdjsGajwHGaj8283Hwnwmfueuhs, why?

Btw, this is unironically how you should treat security-related “questions”. It’s just another password to break. And you wouldn’t use these things as a regular password.

Maybe something like MyMother’sMaidenName?RandomNumber172839it’sNoneOfYourBusiness. Maybe.

Spotify doesn’t allow access to the info for free because it makes it too easy to leave. None of the streaming services do. There are services with access to the info used for switching to other services that you can pay for.

Another EU win. I have literally never seen a paid service for that being advertised. All basic data export should be able to be done for free, and in an interchangeable format between the different services too!

Quantity over quality for them. Very obviously so.

Amazon may be monopolistic, but I have access to more products through from different brand names than I do through the rest of the local multinational chains.

That’s the core issue, I think.

Amazon might be the first major case of monopolistic tendencies where the firm’s behavior hasn’t been obviously disadvantageous (or obvious it will be in the not so distant future) to the consumers from the getgo. So you’d effectively be regulating and banning towards a worse consumer experience, as of now…

If we wanted short clips, we’d be on TikTok damnit!

Exactly. YouTube doesn’t want to lose out on that revenue/time spent on other platforms…

So at least in Europe, where they can unionize and can and do protest for their rights, I don’t see them as any worse than many other multinational chains that do the same.

Do you happen to know whether they actually are unionized in EU countries though, or just could? Genuine question, as I couldn’t tell you (as a German citizen)

Aside from that though, even if warehouse and delivery workers’ conditions were absolutely fine, their monopolistic tendencies are still somewhat of an issue. I’ll try not to turn this into a full essay, because this topic can get real philosophical REAL fast (we’re about 3 winded sentences away, I’d guesstimate).

But: AWS aka Amazon’s cloud business prints SO incredibly much money that they can perhaps unfairly undercut a grocery competitor like Kroger’s, Aldi, and whatnot are their names, that they can start to have a really, really good advantage quite quickly (as hinted to by OP’s order above: not plastics, not electronics, not household goods – food). In case any reader isn’t aware, grocery chains’ margins are absurdly, comically low.

The firm policies/microeconomics philosophy comes in here: how much cross-subsidizing should an undertaking actually be allowed to do? In other words, when is a company expanding too much – even though expansion is something that you could argue to be a core, if not the integral part of what defines a business? Europeans will perhaps see this a bit more strictly, whereas Americans might be inclined to answer close to unlimited here, but keep in mind, this can lead to Mega-everything-corp faster than you realize or like.

I didn’t make all of this up on the spot just now, BTW (some first further “readings”). This has been a somewhat well known issue for some years now, and people knew there could be a day coming where we as a (global) society have to ask ourselves: How many areas can a company dominate in before it becomes too dangerous?