My first reaction: this feels like it's adding a lot of noise and clutter to the interface, but also a lot of powerful collaboration tools. Personally, I've been using Dropbox to sync files between my devices, so this redesign is clearly not targeted toward me. But if it works, it might help Dropbox make inroads in the business/enterprise market that Box seems to be dominating so far.
The whole thing looks like something out of the 80s. Like a bad VCR science video that you know still gets played when it comes time for the kids to learn about atoms.
I really don't get why they are throwing away a nice, clean, smooth interface to embrace a new big "touchy" UI even on the browser and the desktop.
I understand it's important to implement a native App for smartphones and tablets, but I do not like at all the trend to transform the desktop UI with big buttons, huge padding everywhere etc. (GMail style).
Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us).
The primary reasons:
- Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it.
- Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever.
- Dropping support for file systems outside ext4. One of my machines uses Linux on ZFS, now I need to LD_PRELOAD shims to make Dropbox work. No, I am not switching back to ext4 for you, Dropbox.
- The camel that broke the straw's back: raising the prices from 10 to 12 Euro per month. It is not like we can't afford it. But storage and bandwidth gets cheaper, but Dropbox gets more expensive. We do not need the new features: why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space? And no, I don't want Smart Sync, which puts itself in ring-0 through a kernel module.
If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems, we would still be happy, paying users. They wouldn't have to add anything (though the File Requests feature was nice). Just don't bother me with nonsense and let me do my work and share with family + friends.
We ended up with two solutions: for family, we now upload photos to Smugmug with a password-protected gallery. The simplest plan is good enough for us and is ~50 per year.
For file sync, we switched to Resilio Sync. I had used Resilio Sync before for moving large files. It's not perfect, but gets the job done and is very fast. We use two encrypted-only peers: our NUC that acts as our home NAS, plus a Hetzner server with 200GB storage (for 15 Euro per month), which is easy to scale up if we need more storage. So, there are two always-available peers.
We back up everything with restic and Arq on macOS to the NAS and to Backblaze B2. But we were already doing that when we used Dropbox.
The new setup also simplifies things a bit: before we needed Dropbox + Boxcryptor to encrypt data on Dropbox, but now untrusted nodes just use Resilio's encrypted-only peer functionality.
I did briefly consider NextCloud, but support for end-to-end encryption does not seem to be mature yet.
I’d love to use Smugmug but their video support was pretty bad the last two times I tried using it. Google and Apple photos seem to be the only photo and video platforms that actually work.
Same. It isnt as nice as Dropbox as there doesn't seem to be any linux support, so I use Grive running as a cron job.
It does run on ZFS though. I never realised Dropbox didn't. I guess that puts to rest that ocasssional nagging thought that maybe it would be worth the extra £8 or so to move to Dropbox.
It has to do with how they use xattrs to manage the syncing. They now only support a single FS on each OS. You could certainly argue that other filesystems have the necessary capabilities, but Dropbox decided to only support ext4. It’s probably the dominant filesystem for Linux, but in a community as diverse as Linux, that means leaving out a lot of other potential customers.
>in a community as diverse as Linux, that means leaving out a lot of other potential customers
After reaching a certain critical mass, maintaining additional features and functionality to reach potential customers is counterproductive. It directs resources away from the core product and customers. Given that Linux users probably represent the long tail of Dropbox customers, supporting anything other than the most mainstream configuration seems wasteful.
In this case, I should have just as easily said “paying customers” because there were a decent amount of people already using Dropbox (and paying for it) that had other than ext4 filesystems. I know many people that got bitten by this also had encrypted home directories (Ubuntu ecryptfs), which was also not supported and fairly common.
I personally use Dropbox heavily because it is an easy way to sync shared folders between all of the people I work with (mix of Mac and Windows). However, it’s really difficult to also use it with the Linux servers I also need to sync data to/from. In the end, I created a developer account and use a script that is linked to that account to copy data to/from Dropbox on demand.
Would it be nice to have a supported solution for this? Yes
Do I expect a supported solution from Dropbox? No. There are too many variables and I don’t expect Dropbox to be able to handle everything. I’m just happy that they make a solution possible for me to manually use.
> Given that Linux users probably represent the long tail of Dropbox customers ...
You also need to account for network effects. Every startup I have been at in the last decade went like this:
The engineers are using Linux, so for everyone to collaborate, a solution that works on Linux too is needed. That is a list of one - Dropbox, and they got their business accounts, and professional accounts.
Now Dropbox is dropped, or on the way out in all those places. Their lack of multi-account support (and I don't mean the nonsense they do pseudo merging accounts) also made it a huge pain anyway.
> After reaching a certain critical mass, maintaining additional features and functionality to reach potential customers is counterproductive. It directs resources away from the core product and customers.
This seems like an odd take in the comments section of an announcement of all new features that many people don't seem to care about. My ideal Dropbox would be able to sync with every filesystem under the sun since easy synchronization is their core product. Not integration with Slack or Trello or some weird workplace workflow.
Your feedback resonates with me when I think about my experience with nearly every new software I come across. If it isn’t a monthly subscription (or the yearly option where I am ‘saving’ money) being shoved down my throat, more than likely I am being propositioned to pay for features that I simply don’t care about.
One example, Airtable, has paid plans. In order to get the feature I want, I need to upgrade to the second paid plan for $24 per month. I don’t care about the additional collaboration features. I don’t care about having 10gb or whatever for attachments. So tired of this pricing scheme.
Unfortunately this is basic business economics. When you want to drive overall revenue, it's often cheaper to boost an existing customer and sell them more stuff rather than go try to find an additional new customer.
One thing that bites me is that a lot of products are marketed at businesses rather than consumers. There are things I’d use for myself or my family, but the pricing is not conducive to that. Leankit is a great example. I’d love to use it, but it would be way too expensive to justify. Basecamp is the same way (didn’t used to be). The additional features that are used to justify the high price are things that only a business would need, and therefore not useful to me.
I get it, selling to businesses is where the money is at (and probably a lot less hassle than consumers). If I ran a SaaS company I’m sure I’d do the same thing. Still irks me that so many things are unavailable due to the high cost.
I'm getting tired of their constantly dropping support for older versions of MacOS (I don't upgrade MacOS often because every new version is a net productivity hit for me), and their upgrader daemon that
A. Cannot be shut off, and
B. Upgrades my Dropbox client whether I want it to or not. Even with Google's very determined auto-upgrader, I finally figured out how to shut it off. Not Dropbox.
Here we go again. Every constant-growth oriented company with happy customers eventually decides to go to war with said customers as a last-ditch effort to extract more revenue, and thus forces them to its competition.
That’s a bit harsh. While I understand not wanting to perform a new OS update (at least not immediately) or not being able to (they deprecate old hardware too) I do understand that it’s a matter of resources and that most people are going to be on a handful of your most recent releases, so it makes sense to spend your time on those.
At the same time (most) people don’t actively seek to disable updates for things until something goes wrong. If your app is working on my current OS and filesystem it’s incumbent upon you to recognize that and not automatically push out an update that breaks that.
For something as relatively simple as Dropbox’s original functionality (all files from folder x are synced to their server and every other machine on your account) it also seems like a relatively reasonable ask for them to version things and continue to support that functionality for quite a long time.
> it also seems like a relatively reasonable ask for them to version things and continue to support that functionality for quite a long time.
Or... just don't force an upgrade. Notify me at some point that it might not be 'supported' after a certain date, and subject to data loss, etc. We understand with many other pieces of software that after a certain date, they may still 'work' but we won't get support.
There's certainly some security risks to deal with there, and perhaps reminders closer to cutoff dates would help?
But, yes, basically agreed.
relatedly, I've had dropbox on and off, but felt pushed in to paying for it, and resented that push (and ultimately never did). Had multiple client years ago all 'love' dropbox and wanted to work that way. They all loved that it was 'free', but... when I had to work with 5 of them, each sharing up to their 'free' limit with me, it put me over the free limit in to 'pay up' territory. Not a 'break the bank' amount, of course, but it bugged me that I needed to fork out.
> Or... just don't force an upgrade. Notify me at some point that it might not be 'supported' after a certain date, and subject to data loss, etc. We understand with many other pieces of software that after a certain date, they may still 'work' but we won't get support.
> There's certainly some security risks to deal with there, and perhaps reminders closer to cutoff dates would help?
That was actually my whole point. If you have security updates to push, then push them. An automatic push should not break my existing functionality under normal circumstances. There will always be extraordinary situations where it’s required, and at some point you do have to make the tough call that the hundred people still using something will just have to deal with it... but it shouldn’t be the norm.
To clarify, when I said, "dropping support for older versions of MacOS" I didn't mean "product still works but you're on your own." That's what most companies do and I have no problem with it. Dropbox doesn't do this. With Dropbox, the client program stops working entirely for no good reason and on arbitrary dates when they think your OS is too old. I find this entirely unacceptable.
>- Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever.
I contacted support a few weeks ago because I couldn't find the file(s) I was looking for. They keep changing the UI. They told me to use the search feature. That feature is lacking and it doesn't help that I don't know the filename since it was an uploaded photo from my phone. I left them feedback that the UX sucks and that they need to stop changing things for changing sake. Things are/have gotten worse regarding their UX. I think their devs are thinking and selling themselves on their ideas of what improvements are rather than current customers. If they want to try new things, leave the existing product alone and a launch an entirely new(er) product like DHH and basecamp do without disrupting their own existing paying customers![1]. Don't upset happy customers and give them a reason to re-evaluate your offering and other options.
I'm considering the same thing and switching to iCloud Drive as my family is heavily invested into the Apple ecosystem. The next versions of iOS and macOS will support shared folders, which was the one thing holding me back.
Also really annoyed about the price change. It seems to me like they know most people don't use the full 1 TB, or anywhere near it, so it's practically meaningless to extend to 2 TB. You really have to want to use all their collaboration tools to make paying $12/mo worth it. Otherwise they're just sucking up more margin.
I recently started paying for iCloud for phone backups because it's so damn cheap, and I don't leave my desktop on (with itunes running) often enough for our phones to backup to anymore.
Only thing preventing me from moving from free Dropbox, is just the hassle. I guess I should. Also, I sync Dropbox to my Synology NAS, but it's not for any purpose other than just having another copy Just In Case.
>Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years.
Wow. I literally never see UI clutter, because I never log into the site, and only rarely use the iOS apps. DB is mostly just multi-system sync & versioning for me, and in that regard it works GREAT.
Same here, the only UI I see is the green icon next to the file that gives me assurance that it works, and the occasional syncing animation.
However with the price increase and not being even close to hitting even the old 1T limit I think I will be looking for something else, which sucks because I really like the product and have been using it for almost a decade at this point, or more.
The UI got worse when they broke it, what, 4, 5, probably 6 years ago now? It USED to be a menu bar icon with a green check showing it was up to date. Now its just a box. Now when I click the dropdown I can either view a "notifications" or "recent files" tab, neither of which I want. One of my notifications (the oldest of the 3 that show on the screen is A YEAR old. It used to look like an OS X menu. Now it's just some weird list with arbitrary icons spewed all over the screen that's utterly inconsistent with everything else on my system.
Yeah I wouldn't mind paying less for less storage space, I'm only using it nowadays to keep a live backup of photos I take (also because pulling photos from the iphone onto a windows PC doesn't seem to work anymore?), using only 3.4% of the 2 TB of storage.
I felt similar and the price increase was last drop. I use it mostly to store originals of pictures and video however that also means that they are little bit forgotten.
Whole family is on iOS so after I found out that Apple Photos can merge raw and jpg into single item in their UI, it was no brainer to switch to iCloud and import all the images/videos into Photos and rest of the files into iCloud.
As a bonus I can share storage with whole family in iCloud, which is not possible with Dropbox.
Dropbox seems to have prioritized enterprise customers and de-prioritized consumers as customers. Most consumers would need a solid storage and sync solution, and nothing more. So you’re likely not the target customer any longer.
> If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems
Seems like there's a really clear "SKU" that could be continued and refined, alongside this new initiative, to keep people like yourself happy, paying customers. Why would they be so shortsighted to think everyone would want this new thing?
"If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems, we would still be happy, "
A thousand times, yes - are you listening Dropbox?
If you don't do this, you're going to get 'Zoomed' (i.e. basic company like Zoom comes along and eats your lunch for just doing the basic offer)
why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space?
I don’t understand how anyone outside of photographers and people working with audio or video could need that kind of storage.
I have used Dropbox and Google Drive with around 1TB of Logic Pro X projects before, but that’s a ton of data to keep laying around (without using selective sync) and represents much more than the “active” projects I actually need to keep handy.
As a normal personal user, I’m probably closer to your estimates of 200-300GB of data and that’s mostly iPhone photos data. I currently stored my photos with Google but am planning to move my data over to iCloud since all my devices are Apple and performance seems better.
I strongly feel this is a bad direction for Dropbox. Many companies have tried to integrate tools together. It's always half-baked simply because those tools aren't designed to be integrated. I find it kind of odd Dropbox would be bragging about a dropdown menu to create a Google doc. Surely if that's important to me I get Google drive - the integration will be better because the same company makes the different tools and you can actually stay within the eco-system. If Dropbox are planning to compete with this it's very difficult to see how they win over Google.
The integration with Google makes sense because they already own the tools that you're moving between. It seems really funky to have Dropbox crash that party. If you're trying to integrate with tools outside of the Google eco-system maybe dropbox atleast tries to allow it, I just can't see how it'd be anything other than clunky though.
Personally what I value is just basic cloud storage with a decent automatic sync. Obviously storage has turned into a commodity and dropbox are trying to compete on a new level, it just seems boggling to me that this is the direction they've taken.
> Personally what I value is just basic cloud storage with a decent automatic sync.
Similarly. That was the biggest appeal to me back when I first discovered them and they were giving out bonus space for their free plan depending on the number of people that any one user referred. On top of this shift, didn't Dropbox just limit the number of computers one could have their data synchronized between? These moves seem bad overall.
The limit on number of syncing devices has me exploring other options - I'm an oldschool Dropbox user, I got most of my storage space with referrals years ago, and I consume about 6GB on the free plan. I don't need 2TB. I don't really even want 2TB, and I'm certainly not going to pay over $100 a year for 2TB. I'd pay some smaller amount of money for the ability to sync additional devices without storage that I'll never use nor need, but nobody does a-la-cart pricing.
Apple will sell me 50GB on iCloud for $0.99 a month. That fits my needs much better, I just need to go through the exercise of making sure their web interface isn't horrible on my one remaining Linux system.
In fairness to Dropbox, I'm probably not the kind of user they want at this point. They got their mileage out of my early referrals, and I've never paid them a cent.
You (and I) were definitely part of the problem, but limiting the number of devices was brilliant on their part as it forced me (and many others) to think hard about my options. Unlike you however, I came to the conclusion that 1) Dropbox are far superior to the competition for me (eg., I regularily build and test out of a Dropbox folder), 2) I actually get enormous value of it. $120 (they raised the price) is worth it.
I am also unimpressed with this new desktop app which solves a problem I don't have, but as long as their core syncing tech. remains functional, I just want them succeed.
> ...as long as their core syncing tech. remains functional, I just want them succeed.
I feel likewise. But I'm afraid their core tech will slowly fall into neglect as they cast about for new revenue streams - and in this particular case that core tech does too important a job for me to tolerate even moderate neglect.
The limiting isn't really the problem, because its smart like you said.
The problem is free -> $120 a year is a big jump. I don't need 2TB of space. I probably don't even need 10GB of space. But I would pay $50 for more space and more devices.
When I had to renew my Apple developer account for PhotoStructure to sign binaries, I tried to log in on my Linux desktop and was getting back http 500 server errors. On a whim, I tried on my Mac and the same URL stream worked.
Realize they aren't prioritizing cross platform testing or support. I found that other people had reported the issue a while ago.
I don't need 2TB either, but I do need a cross-platform solution where the incentives of the company are aligned more or less with mine in providing the service.
iCloud will always primarily be about Apple devices, which I like well enough and have several of, but maybe won't always. Microsoft's offering will probably be the same from the PC side of things. Google will offer me the world for free but data mine the hell out of it.
Dropbox seems to really care about cross-platform experience. Except in rare cases, it just works. It's just folders from my POV. And so... I pay them about $100 a year and they provide this service. Seems to have worked out pretty well for me.
if that's important to me I get Google drive - the integration will be better because the same company makes the different tools and you can actually stay within the eco-system. If Dropbox are planning to compete with this it's very difficult to see how they win over Google
I agree with you completely, Google should have squashed Dropbox like a tiny, helpless bug that it is in comparison. Yet reality disagrees and they haven't.
Google can't even deliver a proper client for Google Drive on Linux which is a system many Googlers use. It all remains a mystery to me.
Look at things from another perspective: this drop-down menu that gets extended with all these “pluggable capabilities” is the very same menu, conceptually, that you get when you right-click in the empty space of a folder in Windows Explorer or the macOS Finder.
As far as I can tell, Dropbox’s vision is of having the same sort of thin-client experience of having an app that represents “your files” and lets you do things do those files like an Explorer or Finder would—but with this app providing these integrations regardless of your platform (Windows/macOS/Android/iOS/ChromeOS/Linux) or cloud provider.
This is already the play that Slack used: despite Google Hangouts being integrated better with the Google enterprise ecosystem, people still use Slack instead, and take advantage of its integrations with Google apps instead. Regardless of platform or ecosystem, Slack supports your use-case, such that it’s easier to get everyone in an organization to agree on Slack than to get them to agree on a platform/ecosystem. Dropbox thinks it can pull off the same play, for the “file explorer” use-case. Dropbox wants to add enough functionality that the “best-practice workflow” for an enterprise—the one that onboarding docs get written about, the one they train people in—will involve using Dropbox to move files around and open them in various apps, because that’s simpler than the docs they’d have to write to explain how to do the same thing in the different paradigms of each platform the enterprise supports.
It’s an enterprise B2B play, though, and sadly, there’s already a neutral third-party “Windows Explorer in the cloud” that has beat them to capturing this market: Box. They’re definitely trying to fight Box over market-share here, and I’m not sure they’ll manage it; Box focused much more on things enterprises really want from the start (like document security—IBM can put its customers’ data in Box without worrying, etc.)
I might not be fully understanding your point but I would disagree with the idea that just because many companies have tried to integrate tools together and failed that it must point to some inherent flaw in the idea itself. Instead it should just point to inherent difficulties in executing the idea.
All of our tools having silos of data and only having difficult to implement one-to-one integrations seems broken- it does not feel like it has to be this way as part of the nature of the software.
Here are two reasons we have not yet seen this executed well:
1) If you're Atlassian or Microsoft it's likely perceived that it's not in the best interest of your business model to spend a non-trivial amount of resources on deep integrations with 100's of popular 3rd-party apps but instead it's much easier to see how it is in their best interest to just clone those popular apps and deeply integrate them into your suite. This way they keep users using their software and are able to charge for the new app (or eventually charge more for the suite).
2) So then there's space left for a software solution to enter the market that does world-class deep integrations with the 100's of popular SaaS api's and a great UI/UX that makes working across all of these apps intuitive- potentially an entirely new level of usability in modern productivity workflows. But as a startup idea this actually does tend to fail and I think it's primarily because it's a non-trivial engineering problem to build these integrations and a startup, with scarce engineering resources, is forced to choose ~1-3 integrations to start with as their initial customer-facing version. This then results in a product that is not compelling and just seems like yet another one-to-one integration solution.
It seems that if a new level of software interoperability enabling a new level of user experience is to happen the startup would have to be very well funded with a decent "stealth mode" runway. Or a large software company would have to throw a decent chunk of resources at the idea (not PM's convincing the business case for an integration piecemeal).
And then there's one other way this could happen:
If you look at Android and iOS you see that they already have thousands of productivity apps integrating deeply with their native API's. And already this has enabled things like iOS Actions Extension API where you can send something like a pdf to any app you have installed that registers its ability to handle pdf's. On Android features like Slices allow an app developer to put a "slice" of their UI into other apps based on the intent or action happening on the other app. I can see a future where Apple and Google increasingly push their mobile operating systems to the desktop-size screen and the productivity user base. While it may seem unlikely now it may be that iOS and Android are best positioned to introduce a new level of software interoperability to the modern enterprise productivity market in the form of a better desktop experience.
> All of our tools having silos of data and only having difficult to implement one-to-one integrations seems broken- it does not feel like it has to be this way as part of the nature of the software.
The problem is completely self-inflicted and caused by greed. It isn't difficult to make software interoperable - you actually have to work hard to make it non-interoperating. Which is precisely what aforementioned companies did by creating data siloses exporting just tightly-controlled APIs, guarded by ToSes preventing interop from happen organically. SaaS companies broke interoperability on purpose.
I use Google Docs / Sheets both at work and for some personal stuff.
I would never use Google Drive because it's a piece of shit. Whenever I used it I ended up with data being corrupted and this happened for both the standard Backup and Sync and the new Drive File Stream. Files being corrupted or missing is the worst scenario possible for a file sync service. Not to mention it's really, really slow and inefficient.
I keep using Dropbox because it's the only one that works.
Also I don't get what the point of the Google Docs integration is, but who knows, I might end up using it.
> Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:
There would be a folder.
You'd put your stuff in it.
It would sync.
They built that.
Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea.
"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!"
No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.
"But," you may say, "this is valuable data... certainly users will feel more comfortable tying their data to Windows Live, Apple's MobileMe, or a name they already know."
No, shut up. Not a single person on Earth wakes up in the morning worried about deriving more value from their Windows Live login. People already trust folders. And Dropbox looks just like a folder. One that syncs.
"But," you may say, "folders are so 1995. Why not leverage the full power of the web? With HTML5 you can drag and drop files, you can build intergalactic dashboards of statistics showing how much storage you are using, you can publish your files as RSS feeds and tweets, and you can add your company logo!"
No, shut up. Most of the world doesn't sit in front of their browser all day. If they do, it is Internet Explorer 6 at work that they are not allowed to upgrade. Browsers suck for these kinds of things. Their stuff is already in folders. They just want a folder. That syncs.
That answer is 8 years old. Files seem to be disappearing from a large number of problem domains, in favor of webapps. That doesn't bode well for Dropbox if it is a trend that continues.
Hiding file systems is both en vogue and maddening for people who actually work with files. Which is everyone, even if they don't know it. The amount of assistance I've had to give even technically-competent users when it comes to even finding where the heck their data even is has skyrocketed over the past couple of years.
!!! I have experienced this. It's primarily people with shiny new macbooks who can't figure out where any of their files actually are even though they are constantly editing them!
Eventually there's going to be some serious blowback. You can't expect people to efficiently use their computers if they can't even find their godamn files!
>No, shut up. Most of the world doesn't sit in front of their browser all day.
well, I've got bad news for the guy. Just being a data storage company is probably not a great business strategy because the web and competition have become ubiquitous.
I disagree. If you have a niche, and you do it WELL, you can do that. And Dropbox did.
But now they are messing that up. And not just this. They implemented a 3 device limit, and the next level is super expensive. Unlike any of their competitors. I'd say that is not a great business strategy.
I've looked for Dropbox alternatives, and none of them match up in ease of use or features. A folder you put stuff into and that syncs to everything else (with optional selectivity so that your 250 GB music library isn't synced where you don't want it) is amazing, and that it works on everything from iOS to Windows to Linux is amazing.
It'd be great if the clients were native and faster or whatever, but shipping beats perfection.
Previously when they bought Mailbox or when they introduced Paper (which I never used...) I thought they are up to something exciting and innovative regarding how we work/do common workflows. Now it looks like they outsource the most important parts to others and accept being the glue in between. Integrations are just not that exciting
They added smart sync and 1TB extra to “plus” accounts, which is nice after their pathetic use of Finder integration + OS notifications to nag users to upgrade to the next paid tier (on a paid account!). It’s what they should have done in the first place.
Can someone summarise the changes in a couple of sentences? I haven't got a clue what the differences are after sepdning a couple of minutes on the site.
It looks like Dropbox is completely focused on the business market and not improving the consumer experience anymore. I've stuck with them for years because of the linux support, but am probably going to jump ship soon. My main complaint is the lack of a way to build a shared photo library with my spouse. Both Google and Apple support this.
I just want my files backed up and sync’d across device.
iCloud changes look promising. May be time to ditch Dropbox. If only Apple would have a good app on Linux and let me run Mac OS time machine into iCloud.
I pay for both and pCloud is cheap but inferior (for me) in two ways:
1. pCloud doesn't support file permissions or symlinks, thus you can't use it as a real filesystem (eg, building and testing software out of it).
2. pCould is a "cloud fs" (the files aren't on a host filesystem), whereas Dropbox is syncing a host filesystem. The difference is very visible in performance.
If the first issue was fixed (I've asked them many times, to no avail), I could live with the second.
Number 2 pCloud way is to add sync folders, you do that from the Sync tab in the preferences dialog. Sadly the command line client doesn't let you add the sync folders. An alternative for the GUI is to edit the sqlite configuration file.
In my experience pCloud works fine for me having the Documents, Music and Pictures folders synced, and having many other folders as cloud only.
The lack of Time Machine backup into iCloud is just baffling to me. That 2TB package has lots of room for backup. If they're worried about eating too much into shared space then let me pay for a time machine partition.
99% of client-side rendered pages would provide a superior user experience with server-side render. SSR is what the web was designed for after all. CSR is merely fashionable, not better.
99% of client-side rendered pages would provide a superior user experience with server-side render.
If you're loading a single page and then unloading it that's right. If you're interacting with a page it's often a lot faster to make a small request to fetch new data and just update the part of the DOM that needs to change rather than unloading everything, fetching the new page and all the associated resources that aren't cached, parsing the new page, and repainting everything.
SSR is what the web was designed for after all.
That's plain wrong. Using a browser to launch an application was one the use cases in Tim Berners-Lee's original memo about the web in 1989 - "If one sacrifices portability, it is possible so make following a link fire up a special application, so that diagnostic programs, for example, could be linked directly into the maintenance guide." (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html). There's no suggestion that the user would have to leave their browser when they clicked such a link.
Fast forward 10 years from Tim's proposal and Microsoft added XMLHttpRequest (via ActiveX) for fetching fragments of data to IE5 in 1999. We've had 20 years, which is 2/3 of the time the web has existed, of client-side applications. You may well have a preference for server-side rendering but you don't get to claim the web was designed for server-side as a fact. It's not true.
Two things: Ajax is a good idea and I have no problem with it. CSR for updates is not an issue. My problem is with using it for whole pages that cannot render at all until a huge JS program has been run. When you're building a SPA, this is fine. But most web pages (like the original blog post here) shouldn't be SPAs.
Second, I didn't remember that clause from TBR's memo, so thanks for the reminder.
it's not a webpage. It's an application that happens to run on browser platform.
If you downloaded a regular software and the exe file was 5MB that would be considered small nowadays, yet if a web application fetches that in JS it's considered large.
(sidenote: not defending the gifs they're just idiotic)
It depends what you can do with it. Downloading a full 5MB app just to be able to scroll down and show text and a few images can be seen at big. Why not use a webpage ?
Anyone else think this client-side app trend has gotten in the way of recognizing a great case for a server-side render (or even a cached page)?
10 - 15 seconds to load a page is the result of poor code rather than 'because it's a client-side app'. Consequently you need to compare a poorly built client-side app with a poorly coded server-side app, or a poorly configured cache, for it to be a fair comparison. And, sadly for us all, there's every chance it'll be just as slow if was rendered somewhere else.
The answer to slow pages is to build them better no matter what tech is being used to drive them.
In the case of this page specifically, loading 17.3Mb of gifs is the main problem.
The really fun thing is that it requires work to break this.
By default, pages on the web progressively load gifs and images. You have to put in more work just to make your user experience worse.
It's the same thing I see on some sites that use `div`s as links instead of normal `a` tags. Someone had to go to all of the trouble of adding click handlers, tab indexes, extra styling and classes, just so the page would be less semantic for screen readers.
Took me some good 20 seconds. All i could see was the spinner, but the page had a long scroll, meaning that the content was there. What was it still trying to load?? And in the end it loads this fugly website full of massive pictures. Where have we gone wrong as developers?
pCloud looks pretty good - I happen to be shopping around for a Dropbox replacement too. But just a heads-up, when I checked around online I found these [1] [2] [3] comments. It sounds like they have a tool that runs internally to detect piracy and it sometimes picks up false positives, which might cause your account to be deleted?
From their terms[1]: "pCloud will have the right to investigate and prosecute breaches of any of the above to the fullest extent of the law. pCloud may involve and cooperate with law enforcement authorities in prosecuting users who breach these Terms. You acknowledge that pCloud has no obligation to monitor your access to or use of the Site or Services or to review or edit any User Content, but has the right to do so for the purpose of operating the Site or Services, to ensure your compliance with these Terms, or to comply with the applicable law or the order or requirement of a court, administrative agency or other governmental body."
They also have the usual "we'll take down anything that Disney tells us to" DMCA arrangement. Are other clerd providers better?
I have contacted them and it seems they use hash file organization to look up for these blobs, and also it would be stupid not storing your porn on the zero-encrypted folder they have... If you want to keep your pirate files there it might be the same logic dunno :D
Have a look at Nextcloud. It is a FOSS alternative that works just like Dropbox without all that bloat. It works surprisingly well on most platforms and is nicely customizeable:
https://nextcloud.com/
There are several providers that setup an instance for you with an admin login. I cannot stress enough how happy I am with that solution.
This will fail. Drop.io (acquired by Facebook) was the model they should have pursued. I need an environment to share info with clients and this isn't that.
My office uses Dropbox Business extensively, and I'm not excited by any kind of "new" Dropbox. Businesses need to trust in the stability of their tools, and this signals to me the exact opposite of stability. I haven't got any clue how this could interfere with the workflows we've already established. Major product changes like this give me anxiety.
I really love Dropbox Paper, so I get part of the collaboration story.
What I don't like is that it's so hard to share a file, or to send an image in a chat -- all paths lead to dropbox links instead. When I get a Dropbox link on mobile chat now, I know it's going to take nearly a minute to see the content. Why?
They probably think of it in terms of control. One of their big upsells is controlling access to shares. They don't see it as a problem that you have to save it to the device then share from that because it's not for you from their perspective. It's for people sending project assets to collaborators.
I think it makes a lot sense for the dropbox link to be the default, especially on mobile.
I almost never want to download the file over LTE to my smartphone and re-upload it to a different web service and waste (2 * filesize) of my limited mobile bandwidth to share a file.
Oh, yes, Dropbox links. I started telling my coworkers that if they share a file via dropbox, I will not even try to open it. The experience is so abysmal (the wait, then their ridiculous interface that turns a PDF into a buggy JavaScript application), that I don't even try to click on those links anymore.
589 comments
[ 9.4 ms ] story [ 925 ms ] threadEDIT: Oh god the front page is just as much of an acid trip now.
The primary reasons:
- Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it.
- Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever.
- Dropping support for file systems outside ext4. One of my machines uses Linux on ZFS, now I need to LD_PRELOAD shims to make Dropbox work. No, I am not switching back to ext4 for you, Dropbox.
- The camel that broke the straw's back: raising the prices from 10 to 12 Euro per month. It is not like we can't afford it. But storage and bandwidth gets cheaper, but Dropbox gets more expensive. We do not need the new features: why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space? And no, I don't want Smart Sync, which puts itself in ring-0 through a kernel module.
If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems, we would still be happy, paying users. They wouldn't have to add anything (though the File Requests feature was nice). Just don't bother me with nonsense and let me do my work and share with family + friends.
edit: not that interesting anymore, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20164674
For file sync, we switched to Resilio Sync. I had used Resilio Sync before for moving large files. It's not perfect, but gets the job done and is very fast. We use two encrypted-only peers: our NUC that acts as our home NAS, plus a Hetzner server with 200GB storage (for 15 Euro per month), which is easy to scale up if we need more storage. So, there are two always-available peers.
We back up everything with restic and Arq on macOS to the NAS and to Backblaze B2. But we were already doing that when we used Dropbox.
The new setup also simplifies things a bit: before we needed Dropbox + Boxcryptor to encrypt data on Dropbox, but now untrusted nodes just use Resilio's encrypted-only peer functionality.
I did briefly consider NextCloud, but support for end-to-end encryption does not seem to be mature yet.
It does run on ZFS though. I never realised Dropbox didn't. I guess that puts to rest that ocasssional nagging thought that maybe it would be worth the extra £8 or so to move to Dropbox.
It did. For years. But recently they added additional code to intentionally cripple it on non-ext4 systems.
Messing up working setups for existing users like that is just plain unprofessional.
I’m leaving, and this was the main reason: effectively no Linux-support.
Edit: after reading this announcement, I’m absolutely terrified. Setting up Nextcloud is now next on my to-do list.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a product pivot go this bad. I wonder how all the engineers at Dropbox feels about this.
Out of curiosity, why does Dropbox even need to care what the filesystem is?
https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-clien...
After reaching a certain critical mass, maintaining additional features and functionality to reach potential customers is counterproductive. It directs resources away from the core product and customers. Given that Linux users probably represent the long tail of Dropbox customers, supporting anything other than the most mainstream configuration seems wasteful.
In this case, I should have just as easily said “paying customers” because there were a decent amount of people already using Dropbox (and paying for it) that had other than ext4 filesystems. I know many people that got bitten by this also had encrypted home directories (Ubuntu ecryptfs), which was also not supported and fairly common.
I personally use Dropbox heavily because it is an easy way to sync shared folders between all of the people I work with (mix of Mac and Windows). However, it’s really difficult to also use it with the Linux servers I also need to sync data to/from. In the end, I created a developer account and use a script that is linked to that account to copy data to/from Dropbox on demand.
Would it be nice to have a supported solution for this? Yes
Do I expect a supported solution from Dropbox? No. There are too many variables and I don’t expect Dropbox to be able to handle everything. I’m just happy that they make a solution possible for me to manually use.
You also need to account for network effects. Every startup I have been at in the last decade went like this:
The engineers are using Linux, so for everyone to collaborate, a solution that works on Linux too is needed. That is a list of one - Dropbox, and they got their business accounts, and professional accounts.
Now Dropbox is dropped, or on the way out in all those places. Their lack of multi-account support (and I don't mean the nonsense they do pseudo merging accounts) also made it a huge pain anyway.
This seems like an odd take in the comments section of an announcement of all new features that many people don't seem to care about. My ideal Dropbox would be able to sync with every filesystem under the sun since easy synchronization is their core product. Not integration with Slack or Trello or some weird workplace workflow.
One example, Airtable, has paid plans. In order to get the feature I want, I need to upgrade to the second paid plan for $24 per month. I don’t care about the additional collaboration features. I don’t care about having 10gb or whatever for attachments. So tired of this pricing scheme.
I get it, selling to businesses is where the money is at (and probably a lot less hassle than consumers). If I ran a SaaS company I’m sure I’d do the same thing. Still irks me that so many things are unavailable due to the high cost.
A. Cannot be shut off, and
B. Upgrades my Dropbox client whether I want it to or not. Even with Google's very determined auto-upgrader, I finally figured out how to shut it off. Not Dropbox.
Here we go again. Every constant-growth oriented company with happy customers eventually decides to go to war with said customers as a last-ditch effort to extract more revenue, and thus forces them to its competition.
At the same time (most) people don’t actively seek to disable updates for things until something goes wrong. If your app is working on my current OS and filesystem it’s incumbent upon you to recognize that and not automatically push out an update that breaks that.
For something as relatively simple as Dropbox’s original functionality (all files from folder x are synced to their server and every other machine on your account) it also seems like a relatively reasonable ask for them to version things and continue to support that functionality for quite a long time.
Or... just don't force an upgrade. Notify me at some point that it might not be 'supported' after a certain date, and subject to data loss, etc. We understand with many other pieces of software that after a certain date, they may still 'work' but we won't get support.
There's certainly some security risks to deal with there, and perhaps reminders closer to cutoff dates would help?
But, yes, basically agreed.
relatedly, I've had dropbox on and off, but felt pushed in to paying for it, and resented that push (and ultimately never did). Had multiple client years ago all 'love' dropbox and wanted to work that way. They all loved that it was 'free', but... when I had to work with 5 of them, each sharing up to their 'free' limit with me, it put me over the free limit in to 'pay up' territory. Not a 'break the bank' amount, of course, but it bugged me that I needed to fork out.
> There's certainly some security risks to deal with there, and perhaps reminders closer to cutoff dates would help?
That was actually my whole point. If you have security updates to push, then push them. An automatic push should not break my existing functionality under normal circumstances. There will always be extraordinary situations where it’s required, and at some point you do have to make the tough call that the hundred people still using something will just have to deal with it... but it shouldn’t be the norm.
I contacted support a few weeks ago because I couldn't find the file(s) I was looking for. They keep changing the UI. They told me to use the search feature. That feature is lacking and it doesn't help that I don't know the filename since it was an uploaded photo from my phone. I left them feedback that the UX sucks and that they need to stop changing things for changing sake. Things are/have gotten worse regarding their UX. I think their devs are thinking and selling themselves on their ideas of what improvements are rather than current customers. If they want to try new things, leave the existing product alone and a launch an entirely new(er) product like DHH and basecamp do without disrupting their own existing paying customers![1]. Don't upset happy customers and give them a reason to re-evaluate your offering and other options.
[1] https://businessofsoftware.org/2015/10/david-heinemeier-hans...
[0] https://www.dropbox.com/events
Also really annoyed about the price change. It seems to me like they know most people don't use the full 1 TB, or anywhere near it, so it's practically meaningless to extend to 2 TB. You really have to want to use all their collaboration tools to make paying $12/mo worth it. Otherwise they're just sucking up more margin.
https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/11/share-icloud-drive-folders-ip...
Only thing preventing me from moving from free Dropbox, is just the hassle. I guess I should. Also, I sync Dropbox to my Synology NAS, but it's not for any purpose other than just having another copy Just In Case.
Wow. I literally never see UI clutter, because I never log into the site, and only rarely use the iOS apps. DB is mostly just multi-system sync & versioning for me, and in that regard it works GREAT.
However with the price increase and not being even close to hitting even the old 1T limit I think I will be looking for something else, which sucks because I really like the product and have been using it for almost a decade at this point, or more.
At least it used to be clean. Now it's not.
Well if you're using ZFS you can create a zvol for your dropbox folder and format it in ext4 and it'll work: https://pthree.org/2012/12/21/zfs-administration-part-xiv-zv...
After numerous attempts, I decided to stop battling tools which aren’t working for me, so I just uninstalled Dropbox instead.
Their loss, not mine.
Seems like there's a really clear "SKU" that could be continued and refined, alongside this new initiative, to keep people like yourself happy, paying customers. Why would they be so shortsighted to think everyone would want this new thing?
A thousand times, yes - are you listening Dropbox?
If you don't do this, you're going to get 'Zoomed' (i.e. basic company like Zoom comes along and eats your lunch for just doing the basic offer)
I don’t understand how anyone outside of photographers and people working with audio or video could need that kind of storage.
I have used Dropbox and Google Drive with around 1TB of Logic Pro X projects before, but that’s a ton of data to keep laying around (without using selective sync) and represents much more than the “active” projects I actually need to keep handy.
As a normal personal user, I’m probably closer to your estimates of 200-300GB of data and that’s mostly iPhone photos data. I currently stored my photos with Google but am planning to move my data over to iCloud since all my devices are Apple and performance seems better.
The integration with Google makes sense because they already own the tools that you're moving between. It seems really funky to have Dropbox crash that party. If you're trying to integrate with tools outside of the Google eco-system maybe dropbox atleast tries to allow it, I just can't see how it'd be anything other than clunky though.
Personally what I value is just basic cloud storage with a decent automatic sync. Obviously storage has turned into a commodity and dropbox are trying to compete on a new level, it just seems boggling to me that this is the direction they've taken.
Similarly. That was the biggest appeal to me back when I first discovered them and they were giving out bonus space for their free plan depending on the number of people that any one user referred. On top of this shift, didn't Dropbox just limit the number of computers one could have their data synchronized between? These moves seem bad overall.
Apple will sell me 50GB on iCloud for $0.99 a month. That fits my needs much better, I just need to go through the exercise of making sure their web interface isn't horrible on my one remaining Linux system.
In fairness to Dropbox, I'm probably not the kind of user they want at this point. They got their mileage out of my early referrals, and I've never paid them a cent.
I am also unimpressed with this new desktop app which solves a problem I don't have, but as long as their core syncing tech. remains functional, I just want them succeed.
I feel likewise. But I'm afraid their core tech will slowly fall into neglect as they cast about for new revenue streams - and in this particular case that core tech does too important a job for me to tolerate even moderate neglect.
The problem is free -> $120 a year is a big jump. I don't need 2TB of space. I probably don't even need 10GB of space. But I would pay $50 for more space and more devices.
Realize they aren't prioritizing cross platform testing or support. I found that other people had reported the issue a while ago.
iCloud will always primarily be about Apple devices, which I like well enough and have several of, but maybe won't always. Microsoft's offering will probably be the same from the PC side of things. Google will offer me the world for free but data mine the hell out of it.
Dropbox seems to really care about cross-platform experience. Except in rare cases, it just works. It's just folders from my POV. And so... I pay them about $100 a year and they provide this service. Seems to have worked out pretty well for me.
These days it's been apple being lazy with cross platform, not microsoft.
It's recently stopped syncing for me because it now only supports ext4 filesystems, for some reason - and I currently have everything on btrfs.
I agree with you completely, Google should have squashed Dropbox like a tiny, helpless bug that it is in comparison. Yet reality disagrees and they haven't.
Google can't even deliver a proper client for Google Drive on Linux which is a system many Googlers use. It all remains a mystery to me.
Despite it being promised at the launch of Google Drive, several years ago. I finally moved off of Drive to nextCloud as a result.
The strength of Google Drive is in the collaborative document editing. Not the "drive" aspect of it.
Today anyway. It didn't start out like that.
As a sort of global filesystem, it fails miserably IMHO and always did. Even if it were available on Linux, I wouldn't use it for that purpose.
As far as I can tell, Dropbox’s vision is of having the same sort of thin-client experience of having an app that represents “your files” and lets you do things do those files like an Explorer or Finder would—but with this app providing these integrations regardless of your platform (Windows/macOS/Android/iOS/ChromeOS/Linux) or cloud provider.
This is already the play that Slack used: despite Google Hangouts being integrated better with the Google enterprise ecosystem, people still use Slack instead, and take advantage of its integrations with Google apps instead. Regardless of platform or ecosystem, Slack supports your use-case, such that it’s easier to get everyone in an organization to agree on Slack than to get them to agree on a platform/ecosystem. Dropbox thinks it can pull off the same play, for the “file explorer” use-case. Dropbox wants to add enough functionality that the “best-practice workflow” for an enterprise—the one that onboarding docs get written about, the one they train people in—will involve using Dropbox to move files around and open them in various apps, because that’s simpler than the docs they’d have to write to explain how to do the same thing in the different paradigms of each platform the enterprise supports.
It’s an enterprise B2B play, though, and sadly, there’s already a neutral third-party “Windows Explorer in the cloud” that has beat them to capturing this market: Box. They’re definitely trying to fight Box over market-share here, and I’m not sure they’ll manage it; Box focused much more on things enterprises really want from the start (like document security—IBM can put its customers’ data in Box without worrying, etc.)
All of our tools having silos of data and only having difficult to implement one-to-one integrations seems broken- it does not feel like it has to be this way as part of the nature of the software.
Here are two reasons we have not yet seen this executed well:
1) If you're Atlassian or Microsoft it's likely perceived that it's not in the best interest of your business model to spend a non-trivial amount of resources on deep integrations with 100's of popular 3rd-party apps but instead it's much easier to see how it is in their best interest to just clone those popular apps and deeply integrate them into your suite. This way they keep users using their software and are able to charge for the new app (or eventually charge more for the suite).
2) So then there's space left for a software solution to enter the market that does world-class deep integrations with the 100's of popular SaaS api's and a great UI/UX that makes working across all of these apps intuitive- potentially an entirely new level of usability in modern productivity workflows. But as a startup idea this actually does tend to fail and I think it's primarily because it's a non-trivial engineering problem to build these integrations and a startup, with scarce engineering resources, is forced to choose ~1-3 integrations to start with as their initial customer-facing version. This then results in a product that is not compelling and just seems like yet another one-to-one integration solution.
It seems that if a new level of software interoperability enabling a new level of user experience is to happen the startup would have to be very well funded with a decent "stealth mode" runway. Or a large software company would have to throw a decent chunk of resources at the idea (not PM's convincing the business case for an integration piecemeal).
And then there's one other way this could happen:
If you look at Android and iOS you see that they already have thousands of productivity apps integrating deeply with their native API's. And already this has enabled things like iOS Actions Extension API where you can send something like a pdf to any app you have installed that registers its ability to handle pdf's. On Android features like Slices allow an app developer to put a "slice" of their UI into other apps based on the intent or action happening on the other app. I can see a future where Apple and Google increasingly push their mobile operating systems to the desktop-size screen and the productivity user base. While it may seem unlikely now it may be that iOS and Android are best positioned to introduce a new level of software interoperability to the modern enterprise productivity market in the form of a better desktop experience.
The problem is completely self-inflicted and caused by greed. It isn't difficult to make software interoperable - you actually have to work hard to make it non-interoperating. Which is precisely what aforementioned companies did by creating data siloses exporting just tightly-controlled APIs, guarded by ToSes preventing interop from happen organically. SaaS companies broke interoperability on purpose.
I would never use Google Drive because it's a piece of shit. Whenever I used it I ended up with data being corrupted and this happened for both the standard Backup and Sync and the new Drive File Stream. Files being corrupted or missing is the worst scenario possible for a file sync service. Not to mention it's really, really slow and inefficient.
I keep using Dropbox because it's the only one that works.
Also I don't get what the point of the Google Docs integration is, but who knows, I might end up using it.
That reminds me of a pretty famous Quora answer (here https://www.quora.com/Dropbox-product/Why-is-Dropbox-more-po...) that described why Dropbox succeeded:
> Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:
There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync.
They built that.
Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea.
"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!"
No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.
"But," you may say, "this is valuable data... certainly users will feel more comfortable tying their data to Windows Live, Apple's MobileMe, or a name they already know."
No, shut up. Not a single person on Earth wakes up in the morning worried about deriving more value from their Windows Live login. People already trust folders. And Dropbox looks just like a folder. One that syncs.
"But," you may say, "folders are so 1995. Why not leverage the full power of the web? With HTML5 you can drag and drop files, you can build intergalactic dashboards of statistics showing how much storage you are using, you can publish your files as RSS feeds and tweets, and you can add your company logo!"
No, shut up. Most of the world doesn't sit in front of their browser all day. If they do, it is Internet Explorer 6 at work that they are not allowed to upgrade. Browsers suck for these kinds of things. Their stuff is already in folders. They just want a folder. That syncs.
That is what it does.
Eventually there's going to be some serious blowback. You can't expect people to efficiently use their computers if they can't even find their godamn files!
With iOS13 this also erodes, but going against the trend was beneficial for them up to this point.
well, I've got bad news for the guy. Just being a data storage company is probably not a great business strategy because the web and competition have become ubiquitous.
But now they are messing that up. And not just this. They implemented a 3 device limit, and the next level is super expensive. Unlike any of their competitors. I'd say that is not a great business strategy.
Reminds of Evernote which eventually had 50:50 management/development split
It'd be great if the clients were native and faster or whatever, but shipping beats perfection.
Previously when they bought Mailbox or when they introduced Paper (which I never used...) I thought they are up to something exciting and innovative regarding how we work/do common workflows. Now it looks like they outsource the most important parts to others and accept being the glue in between. Integrations are just not that exciting
They added smart sync and 1TB extra to “plus” accounts, which is nice after their pathetic use of Finder integration + OS notifications to nag users to upgrade to the next paid tier (on a paid account!). It’s what they should have done in the first place.
Thank you
If only Fastmail would build a product like this, them I would trust...
I'd have local backups, so I don't think I'd trust it any less with my data than I trust Dropbox.
iCloud changes look promising. May be time to ditch Dropbox. If only Apple would have a good app on Linux and let me run Mac OS time machine into iCloud.
1. pCloud doesn't support file permissions or symlinks, thus you can't use it as a real filesystem (eg, building and testing software out of it).
2. pCould is a "cloud fs" (the files aren't on a host filesystem), whereas Dropbox is syncing a host filesystem. The difference is very visible in performance.
If the first issue was fixed (I've asked them many times, to no avail), I could live with the second.
In my experience pCloud works fine for me having the Documents, Music and Pictures folders synced, and having many other folders as cloud only.
Anyone else think this client-side app trend has gotten in the way of recognizing a great case for a server-side render (or even a cached page)?
edit: Took 93 seconds to load a couple of the gifs which seems to have blocked rendering of the entire page. <sigh>
If you're loading a single page and then unloading it that's right. If you're interacting with a page it's often a lot faster to make a small request to fetch new data and just update the part of the DOM that needs to change rather than unloading everything, fetching the new page and all the associated resources that aren't cached, parsing the new page, and repainting everything.
SSR is what the web was designed for after all.
That's plain wrong. Using a browser to launch an application was one the use cases in Tim Berners-Lee's original memo about the web in 1989 - "If one sacrifices portability, it is possible so make following a link fire up a special application, so that diagnostic programs, for example, could be linked directly into the maintenance guide." (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html). There's no suggestion that the user would have to leave their browser when they clicked such a link.
Fast forward 10 years from Tim's proposal and Microsoft added XMLHttpRequest (via ActiveX) for fetching fragments of data to IE5 in 1999. We've had 20 years, which is 2/3 of the time the web has existed, of client-side applications. You may well have a preference for server-side rendering but you don't get to claim the web was designed for server-side as a fact. It's not true.
Second, I didn't remember that clause from TBR's memo, so thanks for the reminder.
If you downloaded a regular software and the exe file was 5MB that would be considered small nowadays, yet if a web application fetches that in JS it's considered large.
(sidenote: not defending the gifs they're just idiotic)
10 - 15 seconds to load a page is the result of poor code rather than 'because it's a client-side app'. Consequently you need to compare a poorly built client-side app with a poorly coded server-side app, or a poorly configured cache, for it to be a fair comparison. And, sadly for us all, there's every chance it'll be just as slow if was rendered somewhere else.
The answer to slow pages is to build them better no matter what tech is being used to drive them.
In the case of this page specifically, loading 17.3Mb of gifs is the main problem.
The main problem is that for some inexplicable reason the text of the page isn't shown until those gifs are loaded.
By default, pages on the web progressively load gifs and images. You have to put in more work just to make your user experience worse.
It's the same thing I see on some sites that use `div`s as links instead of normal `a` tags. Someone had to go to all of the trouble of adding click handlers, tab indexes, extra styling and classes, just so the page would be less semantic for screen readers.
Is google drive better?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/am2xbn/pcloud_allo...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcloud/comments/aedoeq/so_i_want_to...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/6d9yyb/pcloud_allo...
They also have the usual "we'll take down anything that Disney tells us to" DMCA arrangement. Are other clerd providers better?
[1]: https://www.pcloud.com/terms_and_conditions.html
There are several providers that setup an instance for you with an admin login. I cannot stress enough how happy I am with that solution.
Big company: iCloud or OneDrive
What I don't like is that it's so hard to share a file, or to send an image in a chat -- all paths lead to dropbox links instead. When I get a Dropbox link on mobile chat now, I know it's going to take nearly a minute to see the content. Why?
I almost never want to download the file over LTE to my smartphone and re-upload it to a different web service and waste (2 * filesize) of my limited mobile bandwidth to share a file.