What was your prompt?

I know it feels as bad as Reddit

Glad I’m on iPhone where I don’t have to worry about “launchers” and everything works out of the box.

TBF considering how slow/unreliable and infrequent it tends to be, it’s hard to believe anyone would use it if they didn’t have other options. Even in my city (where buses run 30 minutes instead of every hour as is common elsewhere), it takes an hour and 15 minutes to get somewhere that’s a straight 15 minute freeway drive by car. And it’s worse in larger cities where buses are delayed by traffic such that you miss your transfer.

And it’s not like improvements like BRT or light rail will change it much considering how often they run in boulevards with 35mph speed limits and stop lights vs the 65mph grade separated freeways. Even a grade separated subway would be slower than driving unless it had spaced out stops, but then walking to said stops would take a lot of time (plus we couldn’t afford one, especially not one that actually serves the sprawl).

Under these conditions, it’s understandable to not even bother considering it as an option.

You never see gas pumps on their own, they’re always attached to some sort of store, and from what I’ve heard has makes very little profit but brings customers so they’re both pretty closely tied together.

Yes I’ve never walked to the local gas station to buy gas but I’ve walked to the local gas station plenty of times to buy bananas, cigarettes, and various snacks. I feel like they probably asked “gas stations” specifically because it was a more familiar way to say “convenience stores” because in practice most Americans don’t visit standalone convenience stores much (and people probably think of the ones that cater specifically to alcohol/cigs/sketchy lottery tickets).

Or maybe they thought “grocery store” meant a giant Walmart-type building with an ugly parking lot and heavy car traffic.

Most gas stations come with convenience stores, and I’d imagine people would want to walk there to get quick snacks, munchies, and beer. Some (like Wawa and Kwik Trip) can be surprisingly nice, even featuring hot meals, free ATMs, and basic groceries.

I know they could have specified “convenience store” but most people’s experience with convenience stores is at gas stations, and it seems like a lot of the ones without gas stations are sketchy/alcohol-focused, or are ethnic stores with weird groceries.

I feel like it’s pretty rare to see them not attached to gas stations, at least in America.

Almost every gas station is attached to some type of store, mostly convenience stores, which usually have a modest selection of quick snacks, drinks, beer, sometimes basic groceries and hot meals too. When I hear “Kiosk” I think one of those touch screens that fast food restaurants use for ordering in place of human cashiers. I guess it’s also the name of the small booths in malls (and could conceivably exist stand-alone) but I couldn’t imagine them selling anything more than e.g. magazines and hot dogs. Aka far less variety than a gas station convenience store.

Oh and “grocery shop” sounds too much like “grocery store” (aka larger and less convenient), and I’ve never heard the term “elementary store” before (sounds too much like “elementary school” — is it a place for 5th graders to shop?)

I don’t think it’s fair to compare using Chrome to being a chain smoker. It’s a browser, just a tool, not something that makes me significantly happier while torpedoing my health. I could just as easily rot my brain with memes on Firefox. Yes, it’s not great to foster a monopoly, but there’s not much stopping me from switching if Google messes it up too much.

As for it being popular, I don’t think I’ve seen a single comment on Lemmy praising it besides my own, it’s all hate. Surely if Lemmy is an random sample of users you’d see someone else defending it.

• I use Google by default but it does let me choose a search engine — at my job I even use an internal one.
• No ads, I get more from Edge (which I use as a second browser)
• Yes to adblockers, Ublock Origin hasn’t broken yet

I see it plastered everywhere, every time I see a post about browsers or websites, people are hating on Chrome (and Chromium-based derivatives) and saying we need to support Firefox. I feel like I’m the only one who doesn’t care about the monopoly.

Why would I read a long, padded, ad-riddled article when I can get a quick and accurate TL;DR in the title and expert commentary in the comments?

And people wonder why nobody actually reads the article. Far easier to just read the headline on Lemmy and the expert commentary in the comments.