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.

I used most of the stuff you listed though I usually switched to mpv instead of VLC. On Linux, I used Strawberry for quite some time though I use foobar2000 on Windows. Deadbeef is a good lightweight alternative to that on Linux but always seems to play catch up to it’s elder cousin.

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.

The site is actually asking me for login now via Google or something else. In recent times, many sites like Howtogeek or MakeUseOf have kinda paywalled unless you login. It works properly with adblocker (uBlock Origin) once I login though.

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.

I couldn’t open the article. Prompt to sign in via X site, then sign up for newsletter; it is shitty.

Coming to the article, his argument makes no sense. India’s youths don’t need to burn the midnight oil to catch up to developed countries. India has a lot of unemployed, underemployed(people having a degree higher than what they are working in; imagine having a MBA and doing a clerical job, that is common here) people.

On the contrary, I would argue there is oversupply of skilled labor in the country but not enough jobs (cough population cough). Logically, you can start instituting four week days and hire extra people. Sure, ultimately company need to pony up more but that is a logical way forward.

Oh, and there are a multitude of things that no amount of work from youths can change in India, which stop it from rising further as a country. But I will stop my rant. Suffice to say, I expected more from a man of his stature than such a statement.

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.

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.

I see. I just checked Posts section on Website UI and it is sadly not showing here as well. It seems like this is common across all Lemmy instances; hopefully will be fixed in the future. Either case, it’s not a bug in the app then, I understand.

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).