Paradoxvoid

You could use Google-assistant smart speakers to add things to specific non-Keep shopping lists - e.g. Any.Do and Bring are two that spring to mind. Google killed this integration a few months back to force users into using Keep if they wanted to retain this functionality.

I really wish they didn't have to kill third party integration with smart speakers for this. Google bait and switch at its finest.

The far cheaper Galaxy Tab A series is a near equivalent competitor for where Google is positioning its tablet (an at-home media device, rather than a highly-performant professional device), and for a lot of people, trading the considerably lower price for no docking station and some older specs is worthwhile.

Google need to either make the docking capability a lot more appealing, or reduce the price significantly because at the moment it sits squarely in the home entertainment sphere, but with a price tag creeping up to match professional-tier devices - why would someone pay the premium for what is effectively an ebook and Youtube device?

Agreed - they really just need to roll the 'Profile Switcher for Firefox' extension into base functionality - and this would have the benefit of not requiring an additional install to work.

Blizzard aren't worth going out of your way to defend with a review, but the game is fun enough that people playing it are probably doing just that - playing the game.

For my part, my friend group have played pretty regularly since OW1 released, and continue to do so. The game has its problems but they're no more egregious than the ones in games like Apex or PUBG, and certainly not bad enough to put it in the same league as all the hentai crypto mining asset-flips littering Steam these days.

I think this is technically a loop.

Exactly! This is the playbook for how Linux has gained such a mainstay - while GNU/Linux on the desktop may still be pretty small, the extensibility and open-source nature of the platform has meant it's been able to take over on all sort of alternative platforms - Android and Steam Deck being the big ones in the consumer space, but also larger distros being used regularly in enterprise/web hosting.

If everyone had refused to embrace Android or Steam Deck or any of the other distros run and maintained by for-profit corporations due to some preconceived idea of what the 'correct' way to use Linux is, it would still be doomed to irrelevance outside of tech circles.

Honestly, it's so strange this never comes up - yes there are ads but a man's gotta eat. The ads aren't particularly intrusive so the free version is a fine sacrifice for those of us who are happy enough with the base functionality of sync and can deal with the minor annoyance of an occasional ad.

I'd prefer to purchase the ad-free version, but the pricing is a bit excessive for me right now - I can wait it out until there's a sale or other discount in the meantime.

If that's a dealbreaker, all the other Lemmy clients are available to use instead - I've used them all and they're all excellent.

The major point is not so much whether your browser could block ads - your point regarding the browser ultimately having to render each element is true. The problem is that if the web server gets a request from an unattested browser (such as an old version, or one that has an ad blocker installed), it will refuse to serve any content, not just ads.

Regular people will inevitably get frustrated and we end up in scenarios like "is bad, it doesn't work with " because of this proposal, and more and more people end up switching until you have to use a compliant (Chromium-based) browser to do anything at all on the internet, and Google's strangehold on web standards solidifies even further.

As much as we can (and should) lambast Facebook/Meta's C-Suite for terrible decisions, their engineers are generally pretty legit.