Ask Paul: May 19 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.

Feeling Brave

DKRowe asks:

Have started the switch to Brave and it has gone well so far. Just recently though, searches in Brave for local or map-based queries seem to be producing poorer results. Have you noticed this? Not sure if it is related to the news at the end of April that they have finally stopped the use of Bing.

I don’t like or use Brave Search, and it wasn’t as good as Google before the removal of Bing either. You can change the search service in settings and, unlike with Edge, this option is not hidden.

Different people have different experiences, I guess—my brother-in-law actually uses DuckDuckGo, which is weird to me because he’s not a tech guy per se—but Search is one of a handful of Google services that are just too useful to ignore. (I put Photos and Maps on that list, too.) Even Apple can’t get rid of Google: it’s the default search engine on iPhone. Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years at different times trying to figure out a way to “de-Google” my life as much as possible, but you give up too much.

This will seem semi-unrelated, but my move to using NextDNS on my smartphones is perhaps best seen as such an attempt, because the real issue with Google is that it tracks everything you do online and then sells your private information to advertisers. Brave stops this in the browser, and NextDNS stops this on my phones. Until it doesn’t: people ask me from time to time how it’s going with NextDNS, and I never have any issues (at least that I notice). But yesterday, we dropped off our car for service and had to rent a car. The rental has Android Auto (and Apple CarPlay) in it, so I was eager to try it again. But it wouldn’t connect, and the phone noted that a VPN might be causing the problem. So I disabled NextDNS, I think for the first time ever, and then it did work. I’ve used Google Maps in my car literally hundreds of times and that’s never been an issue. I’m curious why Android Auto would trigger this.

Related to this, rbwatson0 asks:

Taking your advice and moved to the Brave browser. Do you use the “Brave Rewards”? Also, do you use any additional extensions or have any recommendations?

Perhaps I should write up how I use Brave, though it’s not that complicated. Here’s what I do.

From a UI perspective, I remove the Brave Rewards, Sidebar, Wallet, and VPN buttons from the toolbar because I don’t use any of these features. Except for the first one, this is simple: just right-click it and choose “Hide.” For Brave Rewards, you have to open it once first, then right-click it and choose “Hide.”

From a configuration perspective, I just change the search engine to Google as noted above.

Then I sign in to Gmail so I can access my email. And then I enable Brave sync. From my phone or another PC, I email myself the sync code, and then I use that in Brave to put this PC in the sync chain. From there, you have to configure which features you want to be synced: I sync bookmarks, extensions, settings, the theme, passwords, and addresses/payment info. (I don’t sync web apps, history, reading list, or open tabs because I don’t see the need or don’t use those features.)

Sync happens quickly, and my extensions appear. They are Dark Reader (dark mode for web pages), Google Translate, Grammarly, Momentum (home page/new tab replacement), Postlight Reader (reading mode), Save to Pocket, and Simplify Twitter Web UI. What I don’t need are anti-trackers or ad blockers: that’s all built-in.

(I may still write about configuring Brave. The only truly unfamiliar bit here is sync, but I’ve grown to really prefer this system. It works great.)

So about Brave Rewards.

I like the idea of it. It’s a system that allows creators to get paid when Brave displays ads on their websites or lets its users send direct tips. It’s a well-intentioned attempt by Brave to work around the horribleness of advertising on the web that makes so many sites, including this one (for non-Premium members) such a chore to use. Because, let’s face it, Brave is blocking the ads that are the unfortunate lifeblood for creators on the web, so you could argue otherwise that it was doing harm.

I’m one of those creators, and I can tell you that the financial situation with the ad-supported web is tenuous, and even with the volume of ads one must display these days, it still almost doesn’t make sense financially and results in horrific usability issues. That’s all on Google, Facebook, and other advertising clearing houses, of course: we’re at their mercy. But I feel like the model we have on Thurrott.com, where it’s free with ads or paid with no ads, is a good (not perfect) model because there is at least choice. And I go against my own economic well-being when I recommend that people use Brave or ad blockers. Because the web is terrible otherwise.

Brave Rewards is a good idea, but it’s small, and it’s just one of many ways in which creators can get paid directly by readers/viewers. And it’s specific to Brave, which has negligible usage share. I’m certainly not telling anyone not to use it. And I could be convinced to try it. But right now I do not.

Bypassing Windows 11 hardware requirements

spacecamel asks:

I have a laptop on Windows 10 with an 8th gen i5 so I am just short of the requirements for Windows 11.  Do you still recommend upgrading to Windows 11 since I know what to do?  Now that we are two plus years into Windows 11, do you still think Microsoft does not care about upgrades and will not block updates from them?

Before getting to the heart of this question, there was a discussion in the comments about whether this CPU is, in fact, supported by Windows 11. The easiest way to check is to just download and run the PC Health Check app, but Microsoft’s documentation does list many 8th-generation Intel Core i5 chipsets as being compatible. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.

But looking at the question more generally, my expectation has always been that Microsoft would put a watermark on the Desktop but not really block usage. Oddly, I’ve never seen a watermark, though I check from time to time, and have seen reports.

The good news is that, should a watermark appear, there is a Registry change you can make to remove it. By all accounts, if the PC runs Windows 10 well, it will run Windows 11 well.

To your point, yes, if you know what you’re doing, there’s no reason not to try the upgrade. After all, you can always reinstall Windows 10 if something unexpected happens. I wrote about the upgrade process here.

Bing and Samsung

rob_segal asks:

I saw Samsung isn’t going to switch to Bing. I never expected them to. I also just looked at Statcounter’s desktop search engine marketshare. Compared to the end of last year worldwide and in the US, Bing is dropping, even with the AI chat press coverage. What are your thoughts on the current state of Bing and where it could go in the future?

Laurent will be writing this up later today, but for those that hadn’t seen this, The New York Times reported last month that Samsung was examining whether it could replace Google Search with Bing on its smartphones. This led to a lot of typical pontificating online, the most obvious example being the assumption that Samsung couldn’t do this because of the requirements of Android licensing, but my retort to that is that Samsung is by far the largest Android phone maker on earth and has its own secret deals with Google and can probably do whatever the hell it wants. But it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about licensing, because Samsung was looking into this. Which we know now because The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Samsung will not make this change, confirming the news.

And there is some nuance to this story. Samsung wasn’t going to replace Google Search on the phone, it was going to replace Google Search in its own Internet app, which is its in-house web browser. And it felt that making this switch would be low-impact because so few people use the app. Most just use Chrome.

And this is where things get bad for Microsoft and Bing, though the reasons are obvious to me: Bing is such a terrible brand that even making such an innocuous change is impossible today. “Samsung has decided it won’t further internally discuss the matter at this time given concerns over how the switch could be perceived by the market as well as the impact on its wide-ranging business relations with Google, [its sources] said.”

This article is confusing. As noted above, everyone seems to know that Samsung is required to use Google as the default search engine on its devices because it licenses full Android from Google and not just AOSP. But the WSJ notes that “Google has lucrative contracts with Samsung and Apple to ensure that Google’s apps or services are default options on devices sold by the world’s two largest smartphone makers. Google pays Apple between $8 billion to $12 billion annually” for this, and it “is known to have a similar type of search deal with Samsung, though the sum is estimated to be significantly smaller, according to industry analysts.”

What’s most interesting to me here is that Samsung is infamous for replacing/duplicating as many Google apps and services on its devices as possible. And so moving to Bing for just its Internet app, or even moving to Bing generally across the phone, makes some sense in that context. That Bing is so bad (or at least perceived to be so bad) that it won’t even use Bing in a single app is a huge problem for Microsoft.

But it’s also an obvious problem because Bing is terrible, both as a brand and as a product, and my expectation is that its first-mover status in adding AI to search will do nothing material to change this market. Google is still Google, it’s been working on AI for years, and its AI prowess comes from inside the company and doesn’t require an outside firm. In the end, Google Search will have AI too and it will still be better than Bing.

As for Samsung, the WSJ article notes that it “isn’t permanently closing the door on Bing as a future option,” so anything is possible if Bing somehow pulls off a miracle. But I think the Bing brand is as tarnished as Zune and it will never matter. And that Microsoft should have never used Bing to push its AI work with consumers in the first place: the Co-pilot brand they’re using all over the place would have made more sense. (Seriously, as the Bing chatbot entered mainstream news discussions, you have to think that most people were curious that Bing was still a thing.)

But maybe the bigger issue is Microsoft. I think I’ve observed publicly that this company is viewed as the Oldsmobile of technology and it’s not a go-to for younger people aside from some Xbox fans. It really is the new IBM, in perception, a giant legacy technology firm that supplies back-end services—plumbing—to the world’s biggest companies. It’s not something people seek out online, or in stores. It’s not cool, hip, or modern. It’s not desirable.

Google is no Apple, I guess, but younger people use its products and services regularly. They probably have more experience with Google Docs than Microsoft Office in many cases, too. Whatever the case, it is a public-facing consumer company with a small back-end cloud business. Microsoft is a gigantic back-end cloud business with negligible consumer offerings (aside from Xbox, which is sort of its own brand, really).

Photo scanning

wolters asks:

Paul…my mom has decided to sell her home in New Mexico and downsize. She gave me all of our old family photos and I want to scan and preserve them. What are you using these days for photo scanning?

Four years ago, I used a refurbished Epson FastFoto FF-640 High-Speed Photo Scanning System to scan in all of our photos. I finished that job rather quickly, and I since loaned the scanner to a friend, who did the same, and now it’s making the rounds in a group of shared friends. For that kind of work, that type of photo scanner is just key.

That said, I’m not totally “done” with scanning, as we have a few bags full of items to scan that could not be scanned with that type of scanner. Kids’ drawings, larger photos, documentation, whatever. All kinds of stuff. And for that, you need a flatbed scanner of some kind. I had a decent one with 600 dpi capabilities, but while we were getting ready to move earlier this year, I discovered it no longer worked, so I tossed it. And we moved into our apartment with those bags of items to scan and an HP all-in-one printer that includes a flatbed scanner. I would have otherwise given it away, but I’ll use it to finish the job, so to speak, this year.

Good luck! It was incredible to fully scan all of the photos we had in photo albums. And organizing them and backing them up to online services (I use Google Photos and OneDrive) is time-consuming, but totally worth it.