The article also quotes

to “cheat” the system

As if people working two jobs are stealing and not working in exchange for proper value of money.

What kind of illogical comment is that? First, you bring in Microsoft to a discussion it is not a part of; second, just because Microsoft does it wrong, it doesn’t give Apple a license to do things the convoluted way too.

hoping for improvements

There have been improvements, just on the fronts you haven’t been looking for. Also, if I am correct, torrenting over Tor would be painfully slow compared to normally doing it or via a VPN. It is not worth the hassle.

Oh, I understand now, especially the second one. The only thing from Amazon’s product line worth using to me is the Prime delivery service. I can’t give two hoots about their Prime Music( which I lost respect for after it denied to run for me on any browser on Linux for some reason) or Prime Video.

IIRC, YouTube Music is also offered as a standalone service, Atleast in some countries. However, the difference b/w YouTube Premium and just the Music service comes out to be miniscule, so folks just pay for the former.

Microsoft didn’t even provide a proper upgrade path for it’s users. WP7 couldn’t go to 8 and same for Windows Mobile 10.

Yes, that pizza for Bitcoin story is quite popular, though it happened in very early days of the currency. Also, I assume you meant NFTs instead of NFCs :p. For a second, I was wondering what did near field communication had to do with this.

It is quite common, in places like the Indian subcontinent. Though I really doubt Tinder will be able to make any significant dent of it’s own in this domain here.

Yes, this one I think I tried some time before. It is not perfect as you said but it is the closest Firefox has. I think I will give it another go to see how the extension has matured.

There does exists one. But when I last tried it, the experience was worse than what a native integration would give. It wasn’t streamlined as in other browsers. It doesn’t matter much since I only use YouTube Music as a PWA, which I have a relegated to another window in another browser.

Off topic, but screw you Google, for not giving a native app. Spotify meanwhile has command line third party clients even(looks at ncspot) for Premium users.

I follow Ghacks, a tech site, as well and boy there is a Brave shill on there who attacks everyone there for daring to say anything against it. He knows stuff, judging from his comments, yet is so anti Mozilla and pro Brave that I can’t understand. Almost thinks anyone not using Brave is inferior.

I have Kiwi installed and like that desktop Chrome extensions can be installed on it for the odd occasion. However, IIRC, it is updated infrequently and isn’t recommended as a daily driver.

There is Fennec available on F Droid that is basically Firefox with some blobs removed. Not as hardened as Mull but still a worthy option. There is one more browser based on Firefox called Iceraven for Android but it is not available on F Droid even. Though it supports a much wider variety of extensions than mobile Firefox does as of now. The downside is that it gets security updates usually later than Firefox, being an independent project.

I like Firefox because it allows, Atleast for now, customization via userchrome.css files. I once tried Edge and hated it’s bloated right click context menu. Meanwhile, in Firefox, I can trim down the context menu to only basic elements.

I do wish Firefox had proper PWA support, but otherwise I have been using it as the main browser on both PC and phone(since uBlock Origin is supported on it, the only Chromium browser to support it is Kiwi Browser on Android).

The company also prohibits users from trying to use third party inks, right? Also, I am surprised at the app fication of everything. One shouldn’t need an app just to print something. Almost like tech is taking one step forward but HP is taking two step backwards.

Well, one does need to sideload two apps, a browser and then the corresponding xpi file which will install the add on.

There was/is an alternate way on Firefox Nightly, I think to create a custom add on collection which will add it to mobile Firefox normally. But yes, you are correct, only a miniscule amount of people would care to run it on Android(though it is always nice to have a workaround).

True, geographic diversity is a thing. Smaller phones like iPhone mini or Zenfone didn’t caught up in the Indian market. But, should demand exist for them, atleast some companies ought to be making them in some parts of the world. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be happening and that presents one less choice to the customer.

India has the largest population of English speaking folks anywhere in the developing world, I assume. That combined with the fact that it already has a base of IT workers trained in this sector. (after all, outsourcing some kind of jobs to India has become the norm, not the exception).

Also, this is hardly a political issue. As a developing country, India rightly has many more pressing issues to deal with and people here often tend to skew towards that. This tends to put these scamsters on the back burner and seldom, action takes place. I, myself, was almost taken in by such a scam where they almost beguiled me into sideloading a malicious apk. Despite this, I cannot do much since proving cybercrime is much tougher here(especially when someone just attempted it, but was not completely successful).

Same here. Whilst torrent sites themselves are blocked, once you get the magnet link/torrent via a proxy/VPN, there is no issue. I do not think anyone has ever received a cease and desist letter from their ISPs here. But then, I think, this is the case for many countries outside of the developed world.

You see so many people asking for smaller phones in the forums and places you frequent.

They do not necessarily represent the views of the common public. I personally could do with a slightly smaller phone because the compact size allows for easier holding with single hands. But, sadly, I have not seen folks around me deciding which phone to buy based on their screen size. Neither is that a priority for them. Simply put, our Venn diagrams do not fully overlap.