Category: Chrome

any browser but chrome on android

whbeebe1 Comment

I know the title could be considered clickbait. I don’t care. I came to this conclusion after my Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite updated to Android 13 and I spent a few hours surfing with this tablet, waiting at my Acura dealership while they performed regular maintenance on my MDX.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Tab S6 Lite is now running Android 13 and Samsung’s One UI 5. Normally I don’t care for Samsung’s UI, but when it comes to the Settings panel, I’m shocked to say that Samsung’s is better organized, and as a consequence, easier to go find settings for the tablet. Who would have known???

The problem is with Google’s Chrome browser. Specifically that it will NOT block ads of any type. And I looked into Chrome’s setup; no ad blocking. Here’s an example of the crap I kept getting wherever I browsed with Chrome.

Slashdot in Chrome on Android 13

I don’t normally go slumming onto Slashdot, for many reasons, not the least is how the site is plastered with ads. It was Slashdot that motivated me to install an ad blocker on my PC Chrome years and years ago. This was a throwback to an earlier day I didn’t appreciate. Now let’s visit Slashdot with Vivaldi.

Slashdot in Vivaldi on Android 13

You’ll note the Vivaldi view has blocked quite a few ads on the Slashdot site, especially in the right side gutter. Ad blocking in Vivaldi makes the Slashdot site barely tolerable, as long as I stay out of the comments.

Let’s look at ArsTechnica in Chrome.

Using Chrome with a huge header ad that takes up 1/3 of the page.

ArsTechnica stories have a large ad at the top of each page, at least one in the middle, and one at the footer. The header ad has two strikes against it, the first being so damn large and the second that it’s Bono, and I do not like Bono at all. And there’s a bit of irony that there’s ads all over a story about the sin of Microsoft Store ads.

There is one key feature in Vivaldi missing in Chrome, it’s Settings | Tracker and Ad Blocker, Block Trackers and Ads. With that radio button selected all this crap is pretty much blocked and my webpages are very clean. Before I close this post, here are two more examples of before with Chrome, and after with Vivaldi.

With Chrome
With Vivaldi

I guess if I were still a teenager instead of a sexagenarian I’d find the ad full of buxom blondes and brunettes enticing. But at my age it’s called being a dirty old man, or worse. Besides, they look younger than my adult children, so that’s how I see them, as a bunch of kids. And that ad is the least annoying on that page. Other ads try to tell me about toe fungus, or the best way to clean out my bowels every day, and how wonderful Bitcoin is… You see my point. I do find useful text on many sites, but todays ads plastered everywhere are absolute shit, and they’re only getting worse. To help me control what I don’t want to see I run Vivaldi on Android. Before the question is raised, Chrome’s plugin store won’t support Android Chrome; it’s unsupported, so I can’t install an ad-blocker plugin.

Get Vivaldi, or perhaps Brave, or any other browser that inherently blocks ads. Don’t run with Chrome.

in praise of the humble chromebook

whbeebe

I’ve been using a Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook now for well over a year. Over time I’ve come to appreciate how useful this device is in practical day-to-day usage.

Some will criticize that a Chromebook is only useful when connected to the internet, to which I reply that that may have been legitimate a decade or so ago when the Chromebooks were new, but not now.

Firstly is the hardware environment compared to the price. This Chromebook is equipped with an Intel Core i3-1115G4 running with four cores at 3 MHz. It has 8 GB of memory and a 128 GB SSD. I can’t recall the type of screen, but it doesn’t matter, as the screen is bright and clear. The keyboard is full sized and backlit for those times you want to write in the dark. All of this can now be purchased for around $400.

Secondly, this Chromebook (and others, such as my wife’s HP) now come equipped to run Linux as a virtualized environment, complete with a bash shell to work in. The Linux version available is Debian 11/bullseye. It comes complete with GCC/G++, make, and Python. If I want additional tools installed there’s apt. I did install Visual Studio Code and a few plugins. You can even install and develop with Rust, if that’s your thing. In other words, I have a complete development environment that gives me at least 90% of the functionality of my Macs and my desktop Linux system. And all of this with the portable convenience of a lightweight Chromebook.

Thirdly, there’s the convenience of Google Docs. If I need to write a formal document, or work with a complex spreadsheet, if my Chromebook is networked then I can open up those types of documents and just work.

As for network connectivity, I have the ability to pair my Chromebook with my iPhone acting as a personal hotspot for my Chromebook. I have a wireless plan that has unlimited data, which is quite cheap these days.

And for those who keep clamoring for the Year of the Linux Desktop, well, guess what. A Chromebook is Linux, and if I minimize the Chrome browser, I get a desktop, just as if I’d installed a distribution on a bare machine. The “value proposition” of a Chromebook is far better than any Windows notebook, and that value is due in no small part to Linux as the foundation OS on the Chromebook.

I’m way past the point where I want to buy the most expensive and thus the fastest computer hardware. When a GPU board, such as nVidia’s RTX 4090, retails for an eye-watering $1,600, that’s when I realize I’m not the target demographic for this hardware. And that’s before you’re ready to drop thousands more on the last AMD or Intel processor and supporting system. The pricing of high-end computers has reached the level of high-end cameras, meaning more expensive than I can possibly afford, let alone justify.

I can justify, and thus budget, for a good quality Chromebook. After over a year of usage, this little machine keeps on ticking along, and I couldn’t be happier. The tools, and the OS, are transparent to me. I can just open it up and get my work done. And before the nervous Nellies start nattering on about Google/Alphabet’s so-called surveillance via the Chrome browser, I don’t care. If you’re that concerned and paranoid, then you’re the perfect customer for Linux installed on a notebook, but using Firefox instead of Chrome.

Oh. One other nice feature. All my critical documents and data are up in my Google account. This allows me to move from Chromebook to Chromebook. Meaning that if I somehow destroy my current machine, I can buy another device, log in, and pick right back up where I started. It’s not a pure “cloud” experience, but there’s enough that I can recover quickly in case of a disaster.

For me a Chromebook is the Mary Poppins of personal computers, being practically perfect in every way.