NoRodent
So who are the good guys, mind you telling? As far as I'm aware, currently it's a choice between Chromium based browsers and Firefox and its forks. So really just 2 options in the grand scheme of things.
But I mean, it's the same thing as this FB/IG case, no? Only worse because even if you pay, you still have ads.
The biggest Czech website (Seznam.cz) recently changed their policy and now force you to choose between: free tier with personalised ads or paid tier with anonymous ads. Yes, you're reading it right, even if you pay, it doesn't get rid of ads, they just stop tracking you. I have no idea whether it's legal but the EU should definitely take a look.
Edit: Ok, I think they only offer you this choice when you're using an account. I tried it in a private tab and it seems I can decline personalized ads there. Does that make it legal? If yes, then they're some sneaky bastards.
Not to mention that even if you personally managed to switch to something else, if you're not doing some completely solo work, you will still receive files from others (or may be expected to send files to others) in Adobe format. So even if you wouldn't be using it, you'd still have to pay for it to stay competitive. At which point you may as well use it because of what you said, that most of the alternatives are missing those expert features. So in professional setting, there's unfortunately no escaping Adobe. Someone would have to come up with an alternative feature full package of apps covering all bases (because Adobe isn't just Photoshop and not just graphic design but an entire interwoven ecosystem used in various related fields) and then work really, really hard to push the industry toward it. And it would still probably take a decade or two. So realistically, it would have to be or become some big corporation that would likely turn evil too as the time goes. Or some open source miracle like Blender that would have to attract enough big sponsors.
Not defending Adobe, just saying how it is. I have enough grievances about their software (how they managed to fuck up something as simple as Acrobat is beyond me) but you just have to deal with it or look for a job in another field. (I'm lucky enough that Adobe is only secondary software for me but even then I still can't escape it.)
who find Firefox difficult to use
WTF? HOW? How is it difficult to use? It works like any other web browser?!
It's still a terrible metric to compare the safety of modes of transport and the Wiki article just below the table explains it well:
The first two statistics are computed for typical travels by their respective forms of transport, so they cannot be used directly to compare risks related to different forms of transport in a particular travel "from A to B". For example, these statistics suggest that a typical flight from Los Angeles to New York would carry a larger risk factor than a typical car travel from home to office. However, car travel from Los Angeles to New York would not be typical; that journey would be as long as several dozen typical car travels, and thus the associated risk would be larger as well. Because the journey would take a much longer time, the overall risk associated with making this journey by car would be higher than making the same journey by air, even if each individual hour of car travel is less risky than each hour of flight.
If people made similar trips with cars as they do with airplanes, cars would lose in the per journey metric big time.
I think I get what the guy is trying to say. Per journey, air travel might indeed end up being statistically less safe (how many times a year an average person flies vs. how many times they drive their car) but of course the question is whether that particular metric is any useful. Surely if you replaced all airplane trips with car trips, more people would die.
This Wikipedia article contains a table, which if true, confirms it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comparisons
If you sort it by Journeys, you'll find that 117 people die in an airplane per billion journeys, while only 40 die per billion car journeys. But the article points out exactly what I said before.
Funny example that illustrates how important the choice of metric is, is the Space Shuttle which is statistically incredibly unsafe per journey (17,000,000 deaths per billion journeys) and even per hours (only skydiving coming first by a small margin) but is safer than bicycles and only twice less safe than cars per distance traveled because of those insane distances it covers in orbit.
Edit: Not that I do not know whether the table counts only commercial flights or all airplane/helicopter journeys. And also the statistics is pretty old (1990-2000) and only covers the UK, so you may still be right and commercial air travel in the last decade might be safer per journey than cars globally. Can't find a better statistics.
Do those electric unicycles without a seat count? Because those are weaving through traffic at insane speeds all the time where I live.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would refuse to switch from away Chrome. It's not like the other browsers lack functionality or are slow. The only problem they might encounter is some rare incompatibility which is the result of Firefox (and its forks) small market share and web devs not caring enough.
I've never used Chrome as my primary browser and I don't think I missed anything. I started using Opera years before Chrome was even a thing (back when everyone was using IE) and then when the old Opera died, I didn't think even for a second about switching to Chrome and went straight to Firefox. Which could at least be highly customized to bring some Opera exclusive features (eg. mouse gestures, tab grouping) back.
To be fair, let's be glad that 80% of people don't use an ad block. If it were the opposite and 80% did use ad block, web services would be much more aggressive in combating ad blockers and many more of them would end up pay-walled (although it seems we're heading there anyway).
On one hand, I feel kinda bad that my ad-free experience is only supported thanks to those who do undergo the torture of ads, on the other hand, the companies have only themselves to blame. If web ads were decent, only limited to sides and headers or even between paragraphs of web pages and didn't cover the content you're trying to view, didn't try to trick you into thinking it's part of the content, didn't lead to malicious websites, didn't autoplay videos with sound or didn't put unskippable ads before and inside videos, I would have never felt the need to install an ad block.