Thursday, December 03, 2015

Chrome

I've had a long and happy relationship with Chrome.

I had Chrome on my desktop, my Surface Pro 3, and my phone.

I'm still quite happy with Chrome on my desktop, but I'm turning away from using it on my SP3 and my phone.

On the Surface Pro 3, I'm having the dreaded "resolving host" problem. In case you've never heard of this, when you try to go to a website, you'll get a "resolving host" message, and after waiting for far too long, it will be followed by a "website not available" message.

This is a very, very odd problem, because no one understands why it starts, and the number of fixes you can try seems to be unlimited. Believe me, I've tried all of them (including uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome). Sometimes, it seems to be resolved for a short period of time, then it returns.

Based on the number of people complaining, this is generally a Chrome problem. Other browsers to not appear to be similarly afflicted. So it would be easy to switch to Firefox on my SP3, but I really don't want to, so I limp along.

On the phone, though, I've ditched Chrome entirely.

Google has embraced ad partners like Ad Choices and Taboola and a bunch of other crap that I don't want on my phone. I don't want to scroll throw two small paragraphs of text in a story, then see four gigantic ads ("You Won't Believe What She Does Next!", etc.).

I understand that the Internet primarily exists now (sadly) to serve up advertisements, but I'm going to mitigate that where I can.

So I installed Firefox with Adblock, and even though Adblock does whitelist some advertisers, at least I'm not getting the overwhelming, experience destroying of seeing every ad.

This is definitely a "get off my lawn, kids" moment, because Eli 14.4 doesn't seem to notice ads at all. It's amazing what he can tune out because he has nothing less cluttered to compare it with.


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