There's something shady going on with a lot of gmail. They really don't want companies to reach out directly to their customers (same for non profits).

IE, check out this dark pattern: If you're getting spam miscategorized (which happens a lot for mail lists of a certain size), it's not enough to just click not spam. You'd think clicking that would whitelist that address. Nope. You have to go to the trouble of setting up a filter to override gmail's spam behavior. If you don't, the mails will keep getting sent to your spam, even if you clicked not spam. They go out of their way to make it difficult for users to receive trusted mail.

I strongly suspect it's because they don't want companies using free email messages, and would rather those companies use paid google adwords.

Google doesn't even comply with their own mailing best practices. Youtube doesn't do even single opt-in mail, but does automatic subscription + manual opt-out instead, which is against their own rules.

Anyway, google shouldn't get a free pass on this. It's a conflict of interest, and they should be broken up.

I find it way preferable to take contract gigs than FTE (full time employee) gigs. Granted, the FTE gigs typically offer an order of magnitude more pay, but all that stock/equity is inevitably tied up in a year or more of service. But as a contractor, you get paid exactly for the hours you put it and can leave whenever you want. They may not let you go to the employee movie days, but I've always had the nicest bosses as a contractor (probably because they're good bosses, but they're also aware senior contractors can walk if treated very poorly).

Best of all, the IP agreements are actually sane because you're not an employee. I hate when FTE contracts try to claim all of your side projects as the company's inventions, sometimes even retroactively.

Anyway, I know that contracting isn't a good fit for everyone, but I hope this doesn't end make up making it harder for those who do like the contract lifestyle.

The whole reason I use firefox is for privacy, and if I gotta end some buried config variable I may as well just switch browsers (plus I was already irked for Firefox getting rid of RSS & too heavily pushing pocket)

What privacy focused alternatives do people recommend? Ideally a browser that:

* Has smart default settings privacy-wise
* Is quickly updated with security patches (doesn't lag days behind mainline chrome/firefox)
* Maintains compatibility for popular plugins