Suggestion: Officially Promote Google Services Alternatives?

[CharmCityCrab]

There are lots of threads, discussions, and bug reports about how Google services have a flaky at best record with supporting Pale Moon, or even simply providing Pale Moon users standard complaint versions of their web services. Often, randomly depending on circumstances only know to the people at Google, people are given pop-ups telling them that Pale Moon is out of date and encouraging them to switch to basically any of the major browsers, and providing links and logos for them, or blocking access to web pages, or providing broken webpages. For a lot of things, Google does work on Pale Moon most of the time, but where it doesn't, it isn't typically Pale Moon's fault- Google is behaving in an anti-competitive way trying to favor it's own browser, and acknowledging browsers only when they feel they have to because of their large user bases owned by powerful corporations who can sue Google if they don't.

Google has been apprised of these issues. I've issued my own feedback to them when an issue affected me a while back. I'm sure the developers have contacted them, probably repeatedly. Google was cited as the number one reason Pale Moon's attempt to take "Firefox" out of it's user agent string met with a backlash from users and had to be reverted.

So, I was just thinking, maybe Pale Moon should be recommending alternatives to Google services. Not telling users what to use or bundling anything, but maybe like a link from the homepage and the browser welcome page on first install that says "Pale Moon recommends:" and list websites and services that are similar to what Google provides from providers who respect our web browser, with a clear indication in writing that these are services Pale Moon recommends because they make an effort to work with all web browsers instead of just the big 3 or big four, and that Pale Moon receives no revenue from the recommendations (i.e. It's not an ad, it's a public service announcement).

For example, Google Music's MP3 store doesn't always work right with Pale Moon because Google is messing things up, so maybe we could recommend the Amazon MP3 store, or some independent legal seller of MP3s. If Google Maps don't work right, maybe we recommend Bing Maps or MapQuest or whomever. If Gmail doesn't work right, we recommend some other webmail company. And so on and so forth.

It's just a thought.

I like that the default search engine on Pale Moon is DuckDuckGo instead of Google (Though I personally use Bing because of the Rewards program).

Tell Google we'll remove the page when they start serving Pale Moon users the correct web pages based on Pale Moon's capabilities and stop prompting Pale Moon users to "upgrade" to different browsers.

I'm sure there are implications to this that I haven't thought of and maybe it's not a good idea. I just wanted to toss it out there for consideration on the off chance that wiser minds than my own think it might be a good play.

Obviously, this idea wouldn't involve Pale Moon impeding users' freedom to use all the Google services they want in any way they want- Google would still be available as a search engine choice, people would still try to respond to and patch bug reports about Pale Moon not working right with Google (When possible to do from the browser side of things), and so on and so forth. People who want to use Google in conjunction with Pale Moon could still do so and it'd be supported by Pale Moon in exactly the same way and to the same extent Pale Moon supports it today, and to exactly the same extent it does other content providers and services. Pale Moon would just be promoting their competitors who make more of an effort to work with Pale Moon users a little bit- and not in a Mozilla ads in the browser kind of way (Just a website or a first-run page on that start page site thing that Pale Moon uses by default, etc.). No bias in what we try to get working well in Pale Moon and no limitation of user choice, just a promotion of services that play ball with Pale Moon and other small browsers in a way that doesn't favor non-Google services over Google services within the browser code itself in any way. There wouldn't be some sort of obnoxious popup or embedded integration ala Firefox with Pocket. It'd just be a list, on a webpage.

[squarefractal]

That would require requesting some sort of agreement with the companies, which could happen only with the exchange of some money
Now money is not a bad thing in itself, but many people would start dismissing Pale Moon as adware. It has happened various times, for example, during the transition from Google to Duckduckgo, as well as when the default homepage was changed.

In addition, if money is exchanged, then the service providers will request to make a few arrangements for promotion of their services Pale Moon; such as the addition of bookmarks and search entries. Otherwise, they would indeed have no incentive to keep things working with Pale Moon.

I like that the default search engine on Pale Moon is DuckDuckGo instead of Google

This was done upon (semi-)popular request.

[Supernova]

I don't see at all why it would recquire PM to be paid ?

[_Poke_]

Most Google services work ok, even if some display in an "outdated" mode. The only services that seem to have actual problems are Youtube (with HTML5 limitations/unstable flash), that one part of Maps and the music store.

I use Gmail every day without issue, and have no problems with calendar, docs/drive, search, play, translate or anything else when I do visit them.

It is nice to have alternatives to Google, such as searching with DuckDuckGo but I don't see any reason to push alternatives so hard when the Google versions do work fine.

(Of course there are plenty of other reasons to try avoid Google, in terms of privacy and etc which is why I like DDG, but that doesn't seem to be what you're getting at.)

[dark_moon]

I thing thats not a great idea. You can't give a alternative to all websites in the browser.
The user have the control which sites fine and which not.

And changing the search engine to DuckDuckGo was necessary, because why should get google data/ users/ money from included ads then their is no support for Pale Moon. And even without that is DDG better because of data privacy and security.
Anyway the user have full control about the search engine too.

[Moonchild]

One thing I can do is create an alternative public start page at start.me that has alternatives to Google services. Please feel free to make suggestions as to what to include there (URLs and types of service). Please only include territory-neutral services and reliable services.