moonbat wrote: ↑2019-09-10, 03:43
CharmCityCrab wrote: ↑2019-09-09, 21:56
You may not be a big phone user, but a lot of people are.
And all of them are goddamn sheep who use the phone as a media consumption device(not that it's suited for anything else) for mindlessly swiping through Instagram/Tinder/Snapchat/what have you, i.e. using apps and not the browser.
Watching videos has replaced reading as the primary activity on the net, and they use dedicated apps for Youtube or Facebook or whatever else they watch on.
I'm not saying I'm the average phone user, but, for what it's worth, the browser tends to be towards the top of my power consumption and mobile data used numbers on my phone. I actually intentionally use the browser instead of the apps for news sites and YouTube, among other things. I was literally posting to this forum while I was getting my oil changed earlier, I think. If I wasn't, that's certainly something that's happened in the past.
I also send a fair number of emails and text messages from it, as well as take pictures, none of which are consumption activities. I edit my fantasy football lineup from my phone at times- granted, I use the app for *that*, but it's not pure consumption.
A computer is usually preferable, but I'm not going to take my laptop out places or take it to bed with me when I'm trying to fall asleep and whatnot, it's not fun to use in those settings and I feel good about setting some boundaries and stretching things out between devices so I can pretend I'm not just staring at a screen all day (Instead I'm staring at *various* screens.
Big difference.
).
It also avoids always making the same repetitive movements with a keyboard and track-pad on the one hand or a touchscreen on the other.
Besides, the mobile web is a mess without a good browser and a good content/ad-blocking extension (at least). It's not just the ads and how easy it is to accidentally "click" on stuff with one's finger, it's also that everything has social media buttons and top and bottom panels that scroll with you and this, that, and the other. The extra content and cosmetic blocking filter lists and individual custom additions become a really big deal with that, and one needs a fully featured content/ad-blocker to go that route, not one of those integrated ones on non-extension-based browsers where at best there are two settings to toggle.
I see Firefox for Android as the only decent mobile web browser out there right now, and I feel that's problematical, because the second they go down the wrong path or discontinue that, what do we have left? I'll have to fall back to something that's considerably worse. I'll still be able to do better than Chrome, but we could use a broader browser ecosystem than currently exists for Android (Don't even get me started on iOS where everything is reskinned Safari- one of the many reasons I'm not an Apple guy.).