From experience, it's not overstated. Running your own email server is pain, and even if you do everything right you may get delivery problems. And if you want to improve your chances, you have to do whatever big tech wants you to. And if you ever get onto the bad side (for example, your site is hacked and distributes malware for a few days) you may never recover.
It's not impossible, but it's not something you run once and forget.
Gmail or Apple scaling up is going to be treated differently from some random new domain suddenly appearing on a Digital Ocean or Hetzner or AWS cloud instance.
But how would anyone know it's Gmail or Apple if the IP address is new?
That's exactly my point, that the reputation need is overstated by all those services that claim to solve a known problem that everyone has heard of, but noone has actually experienced, because, guess what, it might not actually exist.
I've seen plenty of cases where the emails sent out through Sendgrid et al, end up in the Spam folder, or these "professional" services don't even attempt to retry, thus, never getting through the greylisting, or other bugs which cause deliverability issues, which would never happen if you were to run your own real mail-server on your own hardware yourself.
I'm not disputing that assertion, yet it does go against the marketing materials we're all presented by all of these services, as for reasons to not run our own mailservers.
In other words, if all you want to do is run a personal mailserver, or even a corporate one, you'll probably not have to deal with this supposed IP reputation issue, unless the IP addresses you use, have already been added to the blacklists even before you start at it.
Running your own mail servers to do the volume emitted by Sendgrid would indeed be on the level of starting your own medium sized business. Getting IP allocation, swip'ing them out to divisions of your company or your customers and paying into whitelists for all the "free" email providers like Google et al would be a massive up front cost.
Running your own mail server for personal email is an afternoon of setup DKIM, DMARC, SPF, FCrDNS and such, setup of your MTA/IMAP/WEB preferences, tuning some filters, setting up aliases, accounts for family and with time the tuning work eventually slows down and then it's just maintaining accounts, aliases and the occasional rules to block problem networks and domains. With time you may find some servers that require lowering security or filters but that is also very easy.
Yes if you are using a domain that's been around for a while and has a reasonably stable IP address history and is not on any blacklists, that is the defintion of a "good" reputation. Or at least it's not a bad one.
Can you kindly explain why Blink's monopoly is bad, but iOS Safari's monopoly is good?
Whilst at it, can you kindly explain how Blink is even a monopoly if it's actually separately distributed by 6+ distinct and unrelated/competing vendors, namely, Google, Microsoft, Brave, Vivaldi, Yandex, Opera, etc? Out of these 6 vendors, a total of at least 3 are running an entirely independent search engine, so, these aren't just "fronts", but real competitors.
Whilst at it, can you kindly explain why is it better than I have to use a Windows machine to configure my keyboard or mouse, or the Bluetooth headset, instead of using a web browser on any device with any OS? Or why do I have to download extra apps to get video conference access instead of using a Blink-based web browser from one of like half a dozen vendors?
I never have to use Chrome on any device besides ChromeOS; how exactly is it a monopoly when I can uninstall it once, and never see it on the same device ever again, even on Android, which is made by Google? How is it a monopoly when I don't even lose anything by replacing it with another browser, even on Android?
How exactly is Chrome the same as Edge or Brave or Vivaldi or Yandex Browser or Opera?
Why are there no browsers on iOS besides Safari, and how is that not a monopoly?
The "Internet Explorer" issue culminated with Microsoft attaining a market share that allowed them to stop all innovation and investment into the product, where the browser became substantially lagging behind the competition, as well as lagging substantially in standards compliance. Something that's currently an issue with Safari, not Chrome. (Please enlighten me if that's not the case — which exact standards does Chrome NOT support today? Else, how is supporting EXTRA experimental standards a bad thing?) Chrome and Blink, on the other hand, became market leaders not because they couldn't be uninstalled, but because of superior engineering; Blink is the only browser engine today where you can configure your gaming keyboard, for example. How's that NOT innovation?
Why do you have to keep redefining words according to some laws some politicians wrote, or misplaced analogies that turn things upside down, in order to sustain your points? The only Internet Explorer of today is Safari — severely lagging behind in most modern features, without any ability to be uninstalled or replaced on the iPhones and iPads. Again, I'm actually typing this in Firefox on desktop. As I said, I don't use Chrome, it's not even installed on my machines; because it doesn't have a monopoly in any way, on any device besides ChromeOS. (If you're curious on why I don't use Chrome or Blink on any desktop, it's because I cannot stand blurry text, and there's no way to disable blurry text in Safari, WebKit, Chrome or Blink, which have mandatory antialiasing, making all text super blurry and ugly; that's the actual monoculture we should be talking about.)
I'd much rather have to switch to Brave or Vivaldi for a video phone call, or keyboard configuration, or NFC, than install half a dozen of outdated third-party XXX-only apps with full permissions and questionable security practices or distribution methods.
The better question to ask here, is, why would you NOT want to have a CHOICE to have these things in a secure browser by SEVERAL distinct major vendors like Google, Microsoft, Brave and Vivaldi, and Yandex, and Opera, and others?
Again, I don't even use Chrome. I replace it even on Android. So, I am not concerned with Google taking me over, because they clearly aren't.
But how am I more secure when I have to install lots of dodgy apps to get the most basic things like video conferencing working?
Just because you don't see a problem with Apple's monopoly, doesn't mean that everyone for whom it's a problem is a Blink admirer or works for Google or Microsoft or Chrome or Blink.
I'm typing this in Firefox on a Mac; I usually uninstall Chrome even from Android, usually after first using it to install F-Droid, then Aurora Store; then it's disabled promptly. Why should I not be allowed to disable Safari?
Apple's iOS monopolies are a far bigger issue than Chrome. These issues you guys talk about, don't really exist for me. I use YouTube regularly without Chrome, I use Android without a Google Account, I use all the banking apps without Play Store. None of this is possible on iOS. On iOS, you cannot preserve your privacy at all, because everything depends on having an Apple Account, and being monitored by Apple. Hence, I don't take iOS or iPhone as a serious contender for a daily driver for me.
What if the reason for this monoculture is because every other browser vendor was forced out of business because they cannot go after the most sought-after customers?
Personally, I uninstall Chrome whenever I see it (on Android, I first use Chrome to download the F-Droid app store, then I uninstall/disable Chrome promptly).
But if you do agree with the author that Safari is so poor that noone would keep it, if other browsers were available on iOS… Isn't that a pretty weak argument against browser choice? You're basically agreeing with the author that Safari is so poor noone would use it if it wasn't mandatory? How's that a good thing we're all forced to keep using such an uninspiring piece of software?
Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to uninstall Chrome from Android; but that's not the case; to the contrary, it's Apple's Safari that's impossible to uninstall from Apple's iOS.
Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to install Apple's Safari on Google's Android because of Google, but that's not the case, either, it's actually Apple that has discontinued Safari outside of their own ecosystem some 10+ years ago. Which, BTW, was a few years after Steve Jobs predicted that Safari will be the only browser on the planet, on both Macs and PCs, and that it'd be good.
Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to use Google's Android without a Google Account tracking your every move; but this is not the case, either, because you can easily sideload F-Droid and Aurora Store, and side-load any of the free Play Store apps as published and signed by Google, without any Google accounts, and uninstall Chrome, YouTube and most of the other pesky apps, yet still have access to your banking apps, to YouTube through free clients like NewPipe or PipePipe, and to lots of other stuff, all without any signs of any Google Accounts. Can you even install a third-party YouTube client on iOS? Ironically, you can on Android. In fact, you don't even lose any major functionality by foregoing Chrome and a Google Account on an Android; even the experience of watching YouTube is actually superior with PipePipe. I have several extra phones without a Google Account, and they're fully usable without any unexpected limitations; sync is the only thing that's missing.
Yet to the contrary, NONE of these things are possible on iOS.
On iOS, you can't even use even the "premium" pre-installed apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand or iMovie, without assigning them to an Apple Account first. You can't install any apps or stores, either. You can't do anything without at least an Apple Account. Yet it's Apple that's the last bastion of our privacy?! How?!
Google's support article is wrong/misleading. You can uninstall all app updates for Chrome. You can disable Chrome. Once disabled, it cannot run again, unless you expressly enable it. It's basically equivalent to an uninstall for most purposes.
The latest trend in OS design are an immutable system partition, so, obviously, you cannot modify the underlying system image, neither on macOS, nor iOS, nor Android, but what evidence do you have that doing an overlay disable isn't enough?
I've been using Android for years, and have not seen funny business after I disable Chrome. You can use Brave or Vivaldi or Yandex Browser or Opera in place of Chrome at all times. Or Firefox in many cases. I routinely have fully functioning test devices with stock Android without any Google Accounts or any Chrome. Everything just works the way it should. Including the banking apps installed through Aurora Store through F-Droid, as well as the streaming apps like Amazon Prime Video etc. Again, all of this works without a Google Account in any way on my side as an end-user, and it's expected to continue working even in 2027 even if the trial they've announced goes through worldwide. It works on any Pixel device, it works on any Motorola device, it even works on Samsung, too.
> I've been using Android for years, and have not seen funny business after I disable Chrome.
You have not seen any funny business because Chrome WebView, which many applications depend on, is a separate application. Developer settings let you change it to another application, but only from a hardcoded list of package names and only if they're installed to /system. There are also no non-Chromium WebView implementations available to my knowledge.
So no, unless you're OK with breaking applications that use WebView, you can't remove Chrome from an Android smartphone.
> Which, BTW, was a few years after Steve Jobs predicted that Safari will be the only browser on the planet, on both Macs and PCs, and that it'd be good.
Safari is good. As a user, I could not care even an iota less about how "annoying" it is to develop over-built, shitty websites to work right on Safari. Web developers as a general rule don't really seem like they give a shit about delivering good work, that respects the users wishes and devices and privacy, so if it makes it harder for them to have to write garbage like fucking Confluence or whatever for two platforms claiming to comply with "standards", sounds good to me, I don't care. Works great for reading documents and watching videos. Works great checking a menu of a restaurant from a QR code. I don't want it or need it to be my entire operating system, accessing my camera, my microphone, my location, my goddamn serial ports, running gobs of terrible quality, remote, slow code ensuring my brand new computer feels the same as my brand new computer from 10 years ago, to do what a barebones platform API app could do talking to the exact same JSON-RPC APIs their dogshit React app is talking to.
> Your argument against Google's monopoly would make a lot of sense if it was impossible to use Google's Android without a Google Account tracking your every move
And this argument would hold water if it was solely about being forced to do something horrific to your privacy instead of led to or being tricked into doing it. It holds as well as "well you can just not buy an iPhone". Give me a break! Google is not out to empower anyone. They are out to own general computing and the mountain of data if produces, and turning the browser, the one platform they have control over, into the operating system, is how they are going to do that. And in a stroke of brilliance, for the last 15 years they've "allowed" the "choice" to sidestep their overreach, which leads to braindead arguments like "well, at least you can sidestep it, therefore its really not that bad" from libertarian brained bozos who can't see the forest for the trees.
Apple is by no means free of sin. There are a million things I would change about the App Store monopoly. But that isn't the world we live in. We live in a world where one company controls and inspects the conduit to the internet for a vast majority of the population, and one controls it for the vast majority of the remainder. Whatever their reasons, the latter are holding back the Kraken ready to envelop and consume everything, and I'm not going to poo poo their efforts because it doesn't immediately comply with whatever half-assed, hostile "standard" the former pushes out of its rectum.
I feel the same, I agree that the web has gone downhill with all the endless JavaScript wasting all the available CPU cycles. (With all the rest CPU cycles being wasted by the swap-in/out because of the memory bloat of web browsers, again.) This is why these days I ALWAYS enable Low Power Mode in any browser or system that provides such a functionality; macOS has finally added this a few years ago — better late than never.
But I feel like ALL browser vendors are not doing enough to combat this bloat. There have to be resource limits, warning messages/icons, and stop-gap measures to avoid pointless JavaScript wasting our electricity; but NONE of the browsers do this to an extent I'd wish they'd do; in fact, Chrome has actually been ahead of Firefox and Safari in reigning these sites, probably because it has to run in production on 4GB ChromeOS machines costing $99, whereas all the Firefox and Safari devs are probably using 48GB machines costing $2399 as their benchmarks. So, the reality, is that, ironically, Chrome is again the leader even in this area. Because Chrome on a $99 4GB ChromeOS machine feels snappier than Firefox on a $999 MacBook, given enough open tabs.
Your point about feature bloat sounds good in principle, but is not practical in reality. In reality, if things don't work in Safari, you're simply asked to install an app from the App Store. Or if you have to configure a keyboard on a Mac, you have to use a Windows machine with the native keyboard configuration tool, instead of VIA in Chrome WebHID or WebUSB. Why in your opinion are these alternatives not worse than having these sorts of things as web standards as written by Chrome?
Nice character assassinations, but whose fault is it where ChromeOS is pioneering the field, and is alone in writing and implementing these sorts of standards?
You've conveniently omitted the wider effects of Apple's monopoly from this analysis. There's plenty of evidence of the actions they've taken to wall-garden anything and everything possible.
For example, let's talk about NFC. It's been acknowledged that NFC adoption by major third-party apps on Android is severely constrained by the notion of feature parity with iOS; meaning, since NFC cannot be done on iOS in an app, it's almost pointless to support NFC just on Android. About a decade ago, I could pay at Trader Joe's and other NFC terminals for my groceries directly with my Wells Fargo app; but, today, I cannot do that, because Wells Fargo no longer supports NFC in their app. Many other vendors in many countries went directly to the QR codes given the realities on the ground. (If Apple had unrestricted NFC access, would Walmart forgo NFC?) Yet now you're telling us it's Google's fault that "noone" wants to implement WebNFC, depriving it of the standards status, due to the lack of the independent implementations?
Now, let's talk about Mozilla. You're implying that Google is Mozilla's master, because they pay them half a billion a year. But is Mozilla allowed to ship a proper browser on iOS? And, even if they did, would they have a capability to access NFC, and implement WebNFC? Whose fault is that if not Apple's? So, who exactly besides Apple and Google are even capable of implementing WebNFC given the realities on the ground? Because clearly that's not Mozilla, since Apple won't let them, in more than one way.
And, BTW, what actual solutions or alternatives do you propose? Simply not have any standards for these things at all, since security and privacy?
Because without these "proprietary" "standards" that no other vendor wants, or has the capability, to implement, what exactly are we left with?
Are you serious in implying that Apple's fully proprietary APIs are better than Google's open standards that noone else wants to implement, simply because of the Apple/Google duopoly, since noone else is big enough, and since Mozilla has abandoned Firefox OS and Boot2Gecko?
