JemmyGoogle Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled
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Comments from other communities
gedaliyahI think people come down a lot harder on Firefox than they should. It's a great browser, and they do a lot for the freedom of the community and as an open source ambassador.
I feel like people generally feel that, given their prominence, they could do a lot more. This is certainly true. Their weird corporate structure, their half-baked experiments like Pocket or VPN, their Google ad money, these are all valid issues.
But do you know what else is supported by Google ad money? Chromium and every browser built on it. Do you know what has a far more corporate culture? Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc. Do you know who else had weird little money making experiments? Every other browser (Brave's Basic Attention Tokens, DDG's Privacy Pro, etc.).
Firefox makes a bigger target because of their relative popularity and long history.
JackbyDevIt has always felt so goofy to see people say "x" based Chromium browser is better than Firefox because Firefox takes Google's money but "x" based Chromium browser doesn't. Like... It just completely ignores the investment Google puts in Chromium lol. Google's money into Firefox equals bad, but Google's money into Chromium, oh, that's actually not bad because we just cover our eyes and ears and go "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" or something???
All that to say, I'm glad to see someone else explicitly share this opinion.
Isn't the only reason firefox gets google ad money is because google is afraid they would slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit? Firefox getting money from google doesn't seem like a valid criticism.
I believe it is because Google is the default search engine in Firefox.
It is, but I'm pretty sure they have to give all users the choice now in the EU, when you launch first time.
I think it's the other way around, Android has to ask you what you want your default browser (and search engine?) to be, but if you choose Firefox, it will still have Google as its default search engine.
Firefox's marketshare isn't big enough to count as a gatekeeper, I don't think.
When Chrome came out it was heavily promoted by everyone I knew (apart from my best friend) I tried it, didn't like the UI (still don't) and didn't see the point of it.
People talked abour how fast it was, and I felt that Firefox was fast enough, and Firefox just worked as I wanted it to, why change?
I kept stedfast with Firefox, apart from when the horrible Australis UI was launched, then I switched to a fork called Pale Moon, which I used for several years untill the current UI was launched.
Possibly linuxI have very strong doubts about the security of Palemoon
Why?
It is based on a old version of Firefox but I don't see evidence of them back porting security fixes
it actually WAS really good when it first came out and for a few years, it was also back during the days where google still kind of follows the "don't be evil" principle.
Carighan MaconarYeah there's a good reason we all started to use it, unlike Firefox it was far far quicker to boot up and load pages. And used significantly less resources, so there was really little upside to using Firefox apart from a few addons not being available for a while.
Yup, I used it for a year or two, then I found Opera, which was about as fast and also had an independent rendering engine. Around that time, the independence of the rendering engine really mattered to me, so when Opera switched to a Chromium base, I switched back to Firefox. Firefox has since caught up in perf and is the best non-Chromium browser for me (well, I use Mull on Android because FF isn't on F-Droid and has some defaults I prefer to Fennec).
Chrome was so lightweight and fast when it was launched. And it had a blazing fast Javascript engine. No other engine came close to it.
It was a pretty awesome browser back then during the "do no evil" era of Google.
Sure, I get what you are saying, but I never had an issue with Firefox and Javascript.
Oh, I understand. I'm just saying that the reasons were enough for a lot of people to give it a go, me included. You probably had a beefed up machine back then in 2008. I didn't, and launching a browser took several seconds, whereas Chrome launched like in one second or so.
Of course, Chrome started to suck and I came back to Firefox, especially when they caught up with Javascript.
Honestly it's more that Lemmy as a whole is just a big group of curmudgeons. Most discussions on here veer *strongly* negative, not limited to Firefox.
That was after the reddit migration. Lemmy was much better before the reddit doom-and-gloom gang made themselves home.
I don't see what's relevant about your argument. Whether they came from Reddit is irrelevant, they're here now and this is how they behave.
I've best heard it described as: people love Firefox to death.
People, use whatever you like, but if you actively discourage everyone to stop using it, we might lose it - and with it, Librewolf, Palemoon, Tor Browser, and everything that's not Chrome or Safari.
Not true.
Navigator died a horrible death, and Phoenix (later Firefox), being a fork of it, survived just fine.
Building a browser was a hugely different (and waaaay smaller) job back then.
But let me know when Servo or Ladybird are viable. Until then, don't burn any bridges.
My point is that none of those forks have to start from scratch if Firefox disappears. One of them will replace it.
As long as a browser is good enough for browsing the net, I'm okay with it.
I don't need, for example, DRM. If half of the web uses it, and a new browser alternative doesn't support it, then fuck it. The other half is still hundreds of millions of web pages for me to consume.
They won't have to start from scratch, but they'll fall behind on webcompatibility and security patches in no time.
I think you're assuming too much.
If Firefox disappears overnight, do you think the devs working for it are just going to sit down and twiddle their thumbs? They'll pick another project and carry on.
There are several examples of this happening. MySQL vs MariaDB, OpenSSL, PDF viewers, hell, even Linux can be included here too.
I want there to be a competitive market so that Firefox gets better. Without good competition it will continue to rot.
I don't understand the premise of this statement. Do you think Firefox doesn't have competition in the browser space?
It doesn't have competition in terms of a "private browser". As far as I can see there is only Brave, and Ungoogled Chromium which is soon to be an unviable option because of the switch to Manifest V3 for Chromium.
There are of course browsers like Mullvad Browser, GNU Icecat and Librewolf etc. but they are all based on Firefox, so I wouldn't really count them.
It only has Chromium which somehow is worse than Firefox. We need something that supports all the same features as Firefox but isn't a fork
Are you talking about the rendering engine? Safari still uses WebKit. Everything else was killed off by chrome. No one wanted to make addons for Internet Explorer, so they switched to Chromium as well.
It would be extremely difficult to put something new into the market at this point. If even Microsoft lacked the resources, it's hard to imagine anyone succeeding IMO.
We will watch Ladybug with great interest
True, I forgot that is happening. Hopefully it makes a big splash. It'll be interesting to see how they handle add-ons. I doubt that a modern browser can succeed without it. From my understanding, there may not be any interoperability with existing browser extensions.
That's certainly what I mean, but I can't speak for anyone else. I used Opera for years until they switched to being a Chromium-based browser, and Safari isn't an option on Windows or Linux, so I use Firefox. It's really not any more complicated than that.
That's exactly what happens if we lose Firefox - Chrome (and those based on it) now have all the power to disable all ad blocking - enabling Google's horrific privacy-less future
There’s still WebKit, which doesn’t suck anymore! (At least from my end-user standpoint)
At least for mobile—I cannot attest to the desktop version.
Which webkit based browser are you talking about?
I suppose anything on the iPhone cuz it’s all WebKit under the hood hahahah
web kit doesn't suck
I wouldn't go that far. Gnome web is coming along but it has a ways to go
kbalIt's a good opportunity for any Chrome users in the crowd to switch to Librewolf. It may be a small project but it's been around for a while and they haven't made any mistakes that I've heard about. Google has its various off-brand browsers using the engine, why shouldn't Mozilla get some? It comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled, and has none of the telemetry and ads of Firefox.
One thing to note about using forks is that they have no chance of being on corporate software whitelists, while firefox does. For that reason, adding to firefox numbers is potentially important. I've already seen companies wanting to only allow chrome/edge/safari (even while they officially support firefox ..)
Honestly Firefox is generally easy to maintain. Just update it once in a while and maintain some basic group policies
I don't care about telemetry that reports what features I use and sends crashes, only actual marketing telemetry. Is Fennec a good choice for me? Stuff like Pocket is annoying but you can sort of disable it in about:config. Basically, I hate stuff like Pocket but don't mind stuff like syncing or non-ad based telemetry.
Yeah IMO there is nothing in vanilla Firefox to complain about that you can't disable easily from the settings. You only need librewolf or the arkenfox user.js if you're a privacy nut.
"Privacy nut" might be a little harsh, as it's a valid concern.
I don't mean it as a derogative, but there's a certain point at which you have to either go whole hog on minimizing your digital footprint, or accept that some companies are gonna know more about you than you would maybe prefer. I think the Firefox defaults are much less onerous than, say, signing up for a loyalty program with any major retailer, and you can disable the few things that do any tracking.
ddittyDeleted by author
I found that some websites just don't work in mull, so it's a tough sell to anyone who isn't big on privacy
Mwas alt (prob)I also recommend iceraven (Note link uses github) which adds pc extensions to mobile and removes telemetry and more
landHave they implemented the update option yet, or does it still rely on unofficial methods for updating?
They provide official deb and rpm builds for linux, which get updated in the usual ways. I don't know about windows but the website says:
you can choose to install the LibreWolf WinUpdater, which is included in the installer.
The LibreWolf WinUpdater works great. You get a small pop-up when there's an update and it updates super quickly (in my experience in like 15 seconds).
qweertz (they/she)
heftigLooks like it's available in the Windows Package Manager Community Repository, so you can update it via winget update LibreWolf.LibreWolf or keep it up to date using the Winget-AutoUpdate tool.
SibboI don't see any issues with Firefox?
I've been using FF for more years than I care to remember, and with the exception of a couple of sites that weren't really that important, I've never had an issue. I certainly never had an issue running uBlock Origin and YouTube.
I flat out refuse to use anything even loosely based on Chromium on principal alone.
People like to bemoan the funding model, as well as the Mozilla Foundations broad overview and general "business vibe"
There's a few irritating ones on Android at least.
On desktop it's been solid since Quantum
Yeah same.
People on here love to go all doomposting on every little thing though, so for them stuff that they'll never actively interact with is automatically horrible. But them, I bet those very people are the ones that do "proper privacy stuff" like blindly turning on hardening settings, and then in turn also complain that Firefox "keeps making FF use more memory and be slower and not load pages properly" when they have changed so many settings that they'd in turn make a compelling case for why most companies don't allow so much fiddling with settings: It just leads to endless complaints.
Firefox's desktop market share is the lowest it has ever been, and its mobile share is zero-point-smithereens. not to be a party pooper but google and chromium's monopolistic hold is only growing stronger.
melroyExactly, so you have Firefox, Floorp, LibreWolf and even Waterfox. Just pick one.
Even tho I somtimes don't care about floss I enjoy firefox it's customizable
Firefox stands as the lesser of two evils.
The problem is that for the past 8 months, Mozilla has been accelerating making Firefox more evil, and if it continues at this trajectory, it might catch up to Google.
I'm not really sure what you mean. Firefox is pretty good, and I honestly think the privacy-friendly ads thing is a good initiative. If you're going to block ads anyway, it won't impact you, and if you won't block ads, having them be more privacy-friendly is a good thing. As long as Mozilla doesn't sell my browsing data (and there's no indication they are or will), I'm all for harm-reducing features/settings.
As long as Mozilla doesn't sell my browsing data (and there's no indication they are or will)...
Mozilla thinks so poorly of PPA data collection that they didn't tell their users, and then basically said their users were too stupid to be told. Consider, they hid this from their user base then Google hid "privacy sandbox" from theirs.
If you don't consider this an indication of Mozilla's bad will, and I'm not sure why you would ignore it, Mozilla FakeSpot already sells private data to ad companies. Directly.
...I'm all for harm-reducing features/settings.
Which this objectively is not. In what universe are advertisers going to use this instead of, not in addition to, other telemetry? Especially because this is a proprietary technique that works on 3% or less of browsers, whereas advertisers that cared about privacy could have just used different URLs in their ads to do their own private telemetry.
At best, this introduces data funneling through Mozilla corporate servers for no functional purpose.
They didn't really hide it, they just didn't advertise it. It was in the release notes, hence why the media picked up on it. And on release, there was a checkbox in the normal settings to opt-out, so it's honestly not that bad.
FakeSpot
That's an opt-in extension, it's not part of the core browser. I honestly don't know much about it, and their privacy policy isn't appealing, so I won't use it. If it becomes part of Firefox by default, I'll disable it.
In what universe are advertisers going to use this instead of, not in addition to, other telemetry?
What telemetry is this providing? AFAIK, Mozilla isn't providing any kind of personalized info, it's merely aggregated data.
And the reason they'd pick this is to get access to privacy-minded people who would otherwise block their ads, but may choose to exempt these ads. Mozilla has some anti-tracking features, and there's a significant subset of Firefox users that block ads out of principle of avoiding tracking. If websites want to get some of that advertising revenue, they'll comply. That benefits all Firefox users, because some sites may choose to use this method of targeted ads, which still provides the site with ad revenue without providing the advertisers with details on their customers.
That's the idea here. It's not going to happen on day 1, but having the capability means Mozilla can pilot it and see if websites are interested. And it's possible Mozilla's ads are more relevant because they have access to browsing history, not just whatever advertisers were able to figure out from their network of ads.
They didn't really hide it, they just didn't advertise it. It was in the release notes
Which the average person doesn't read. That's how you hide it.
They hit it worse than Google. You know, Google. The advertising company, Google.
They hit it worse than Brave.
And on release, there was a checkbox in the normal settings to opt-out, so it's honestly not that bad.
That checkbox should have been unchecked and not given a label that hides the true intent of the data gathering. The same way Google (as previously mentioned) also wraps their extra data gathering in the label of "privacy."
The terrible rollout, and the terrible corporate response, should be enough to give any person pause about trusting Mozilla. And in slurping up private telemetry, that is what Mozilla Corp requires from you: even *more* trust.
When a company goes behind your back, gets caught, and then tells you to trust them, do you trust them?
AFAIK, Mozilla isn't providing any kind of personalized info, it's merely aggregated data.
That's the sneaky part about Mozilla's careful marketing scheme. They collect data that is personal, they just pinky promise that they won't release anything but aggregate data once they've finished slicing and dicing this private data.
FakeSpot
That's an opt-in extension, it's not part of the core browser.
I'm talking about the corporate subsidiary that sells private data directly to advertisers. It sells browsing and search history. It is part of Mozilla, and I see very little separating its privacy practices from everything people unknowingly pipe into Mozilla servers through Firefox.
And the reason they'd pick this is to get access to privacy-minded people who would otherwise block their ads, but may choose to exempt these ads.
Again, if advertisers can already reach privacy-minded people without using Mozilla Corp as an intermediary, why wouldn't they do that and reach 100% of people? In what universe does a browser with a dwindling user base encourage anybody to use their proprietary tracking solution?
Here's a chart.
| Technology | PPA | Topics | Using different links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate creator | none | ||
| Needs you to trust 3rd party? | Yes (Mozilla) | Yes (Google) | No |
| ~% browsers it works on | <3% | >60% | 100% |
| Guaranteed privacy increase? | No | No | No |
If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don't trust the advertiser, why would you trust them to partner with a data slurping company?
not given a label that hides the true intent of the data gathering
I think it's pretty clear, the checkbox reads: "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement." There's also a link that explains what that means.
The real issue is that there should've been an advertisement that the option exists. I found it by reading release notes (I'm a nerd and am interested), but as you said, a lot of people don't read those. However, the impact here is also pretty low, since AFAIK companies aren't actually using this ATM, and generally speaking the data should stay with Mozilla. The official doc says:
A small number of sites are going to test this and provide feedback to inform our standardization plans, and help us understand if this is likely to gain traction.
I disagree that it should've been unchecked, because that completely kills the whole point of this pilot program. Perhaps it should only be there for people who have allow being part of surveys.
When a company goes behind your back, gets caught, and then tells you to trust them, do you trust them?
I don't think they've done that. I don't think there was anything malicious here, they just didn't think it was relevant to inform all users about, probably because only a handful of sites are using it.
So they haven't lost my trust. I was much more frustrated with their Pocket rollout than this, because Pocket really felt like it should've been a separate, opt-in service.
I will agree that Mozilla has made some questionable choices in the past, but this one doesn't really stand out to me. Maybe I trust them too much when they say no personalized data leaves my machine (but I have yet to see any evidence that it does).
It sells browsing and search history
But only if you use the extension. Mozilla doesn't collect that data w/o the extension being installed. If I opt-in (or not opt-out) to the PPA feature, that data will not go to that subsidiary, nor will it be associated with me in any way if it's ever provided to third parties. At least that's my understanding.
If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don’t trust the advertiser, why would you trust them to partner with a data slurping company?
Mozilla isn't an advertiser. Google and Brave are. So Mozilla is far more likely to limit what access to data advertisers have, so I'll trust them way more than Brave or Google.
Instead of removing it, I think Mozilla should expose some tools so ad-blockers can optionally allow privacy-respecting ads with some metadata (maybe that exists?).
I think it's pretty clear, the checkbox reads: "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement."
Nowhere does this explicitly state that Mozilla receives non-anonymous information from the user. If anything, they do their damnedest to obfuscate this fact.
But yes, I am shocked that they did not notify their users, and I am even more shocked that they use the excuse of being too confusing, especially after the collection of pop-ups I have found them display on far more trivial things in the past.
It sells browsing and search history
But only if you use the extension. Mozilla doesn't collect that data w/o the extension being installed. If I opt-in (or not opt-out) to the PPA feature, that data will not go to that subsidiary, nor will it be associated with me in any way
Mozilla FakeSpot is Mozilla. Their privacy policy specifically states that data can be transferred to their parent company, and it also states that data is sold to advertisers. On the other side, Mozilla's privacy policy says that "Firefox temporarily sends Mozilla your IP address, which we use to suggest content based on your country, state, and city. Mozilla may [read: *will*] share location information with our partners"...
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't even know if Mozilla considers Mozilla FakeSpot to even be a partner or just a core component of the company.
Mozilla isn't an advertiser. Google and Brave are.
Mozilla now owns a subsidiary that sells geolocation and browsing history information to advertisement companies. Mozilla now owns a subsidiary that processes advertisements. Mozilla's Firefox browser now contains a data aggregation and reporting utility that's turned on by default.
If that's not an ad company, what is? Brave is one too.
I switched back to Firefox two or three years ago. It was tough at first but now that I have it setup for me, I like it so much better than Chrome. Very little noise, ad-free most of the time.
Now I only use Chrome when I'm shopping because that's the only thing it's good for.
I couldn't help, so let me ask What about firefox stops you from using it for online shopping?
For shopping? That can also be done via Firefox.
I don't want to use Firefox for shopping.
Why not? I've never heard of anyone that uses a different browser to shop online.
Recently, Mozilla rolled out a shopping checking extension that only works on big monopolies like Walmart and Amazon, and has been criticized by small businesses for being unfair against their products.
The Mozilla subsidiary behind this, FakeSpot, also sells private user data to advertiser companies.
So I can definitely understand why you might run away from a company that's not honest about promoting an open and free web when it's pushing the monopolies with their tools.
If Google wants to specialize in being a shopping mall with ads, then I am more than happy to use it as such. I don't run ad blockers as I am fine with ads when I'm specifically trying to shop.
Aside from that, I just prefer to not connect my daily driver browser to accounts that I use where privacy isn't a concern for me.
That's definitely a reason hmm
I don't owe anyone a reason for my preferences.
I see, it's because of potential trackers and cookies. So if you use another browser it's less likely those companies can track you. (despite you have the same IP address). I'm just saying, if you do give your reason, we might can provide a better solution here. Like maybe a VPN.
I already run a VPN. Some of my computers use it, some don't. I don't really use the Internet on a couple of them.
I also run a mix of Linux and Windows machines. It all depends on my intention for that machine.
Chrome is Google for me. I don't (usually) connect my Firefox browser to Google.
Chrome is good for shopping? I feel like if anything it would be worse as it is a data collection machine
I see many people say to just use forks of Firefox. I use Librewolf myself. However, are such forks not very dependent on upstream Firefox not being completely enshittified? Will it be possible to keep the forks free of all new bullshit, or does that at any point become a too difficult/comprehensive task for the maintainers?
At that point the forks will become its own thing and depart from Firefox.
Which is ironically and exactly how Firefox came to be.
Netscape fucked up Navigator, some folks forked Navigator and created Phoenix - which then was renamed to Firebird, then Firefox. And somewhere in that timeline the Mozilla foundation ditched Navigator in favor of the fork.
But is it viable? I know very little of browser development, but my impression is that it is a lot of work to develop and keep the browsers secure. If Librewolf separated completely from upstream Firefox, would they be able to keep the browser secure without significantly expanding their team?
I ask in earnest, as I said I know very little about this.
For Firefox forks, it's viable since the forks aren't doing all that much in the grand scheme of things. That isn't to say what they're doing is in any way bad, it's just that there's no need to reinvent the wheel.
Firefox is a secure browser and already has 99% of the work done. Most changes which forks make can be done just by changing the config. Some unfortunately have to be made seperately, and that does require extensive testing. Some can even be lifted from other open-source projects.
Separating from source just isn't viable. Something nuclear would need to happen for any fork to decide to seperate from Firefox. If we just look at the Chromium side of things, Microsoft found it easier to switch to Chromium than to keep making IE/Edge from scratch, and Microsoft surely has a lot of resources to burn.
Firefox is a secure browser and already has 99% of the work done. Most changes which forks make can be done just by changing the config. Some unfortunately have to be made seperately, and that does require extensive testing. Some can even be lifted from other open-source projects
This is also true for Google's Chrome
As far as I know Google doesn't let some pretty basic stuff from Crome into Chromium, for example translation (might even go as far as the inbuilt password manager). Potential forks either lose those features or have to implement them seperately.
Now that Manifest v3 is rolling out, apparently Google is able to somehow block the change from being easily reverted which is additional developmental load (or just show ads). Manifest v3 won't impact Brave too much since it only applies to extensions, while their adblocking is baked-in, but it's worse than uBO.
Firefox is fully open-source and doesn't artificially make enabling adblock an issue which might attract more simpler forks (as opposed to Opera, Brave and Edge having companies backing them, Firefox forks mostly have volunteer developers or open source collectives making them).
Firefox has a lot of issues
I dunno... I mean, what are your expectations?
Ultimately I have actual problems in my life, my browser choice is an absolutely marginal decision I make when the actual goal is to visit a website that in itself is usually just a tiny component of something else - say ordering something, checking on a piece of information, etc etc.
It's kinda weird to even think so much about browsers - excluding when you are actively developing for/with them - that you recognize issues beyond a single big one like "Has no support for an adblocker". I can get behind that being big enough to matter in regards to which browser is usable or not.
But again, if you develop for Firefox or an addon for it, I can see why details matter and you'd probably have a long laundry list of issues, sure.
I dunno… I mean, what are your expectations?
Honestly, some sites just don't want to work properly. Firefox is my main browser. For some reason, Dicks Sporting Goods has like a 50% success rate on whether the page wants to load correctly. I fire up Brave when I'm looking at their website.
Use an extension to spoof your useragent, and it will probably load just fine
If it works intermittently like that it's probably just crap code, and it will be crap in any browser.
No, it's not intermittent; it's useragent specific. There are a lot of websites that will work fine in Chrome or Edge, won't work properly in Firefox, but will work properly in Firefox when you lie and say you're running Chrome
usually just a tiny component of something else - say ordering something
Funnily enough, when I go to a restaurant and they have receipts with QR codes (I think it's Clover), it just doesn't work in Firefox.
So what you're saying is, you're not the target audience for the article.
Sure, but the article author is quite likely not the target audience for Firefox.
Sure, but the article author is quite likely not the target audience for Firefox.
I don't follow the relevance of that statement.
"People focus WAY TOO MUCH on space rockets! I don't care about them that much!"
"Ok, that means the article is not for you."
"Sure, but the article author is not the target audience for space rockets."
Okay?
I mean is it so difficult to understand? That's not meant in an insulting way, but maybe I'm considering the point to be more obvious than it is depending on perspective (so the problem is me, I mean).
Ultimately, this always comes up, and then there's so many related points. "Firefox keeps being made worse", "Wow look how Chrome owns everything and Google forces it down everyone's throat", "Look how MS pushes Edge", and they all have in common that they seemingly misunderstand how people - excluding a niche like those over here - utilize their web browser.
That is, they don't. Do you honestly think about the brand and the specifics of your hammer every time you hammer in a nail? You don't. It has a specific used: To hammer in a nail. Does it do that? Cool! Is it perfect? You don't actually notice, because your mind was on putting in a nail, not admiring the hammer, customizing it, or complaining about how the serial number is written the wrong way. Not only do these problems never cross your mind, evaluating the problem presence never crosses your mind: You could not realize the problem in the first place, as your context for the action never establishes a perspective where the hammer in itself could even have problems of its own.
Or to loop it back around to browsers: A browser is not a concept that most users actively create in their mind. In particular not when browsing to web pages. They tap that icon, but only because it is the action needed to create the outcome. All further points are not only irrelevant, they're not points in the first place. They cannot be. The context does not have space for points about the browser.
And it's this inability to grasp the not only invisibility but also sheer mental inexistance of browsers as a category of software in most users that very many hardcore users and privacy nuts seemingly struggle with. Which makes sense. We cannot not think about it. But likewise, everyone else cannot think about it. And that second group is orders of magnitude bigger. And they use whatever their system ships with, because that's how their phone or laptop, well, works. Sometimes you buy a device where the icon for accessing web content is different. Yeah. Doesn't matter, tap it or click it.
That's not me selling users for stupid, either, another sentiment I see a lot. They are trying to put in a nail, and their actual problem is locked behind that. They are trying to solve a problem, and their brain has neither space for points about their browser, not for points about the concept of a browser as a whole. Because what they need that tool for is in itself just a secondary step in trying to solve an actual problem. Say, looking up whether it was 300g or 500g of flour for the recipe they're half-remembering.
Everything you said, I've already known. Most people don't care about their browsers/ad-ridden smart TVs (yuck), spying phones, etc, etc.
But the article posted here is not for them. It's for the people who care.
And that's all I'm saying. You pretty much said at the beginning "Who cares?" for which I replied "Well, clearly not you, but other people do care."
Librewolf works just fine, out of the box.
Stopped using librewolf as updating it was a really cumbersome and also it being downstream from firefox meant it received all the security patches and updates later. I have been using arkenfox user.js as my primary with a regular profile in cases where arkenfox breaks the website.
Maybe Ladybird can step in but I am still pissed that they do all communications overe proprietary services (Discord & Microsoft GitHub) which hurts the openness of the project.
Resol van LemmyIs GNOME Web that good? I'm actually asking because I have yet to use it.
The experience varies depending what you are browsing, but for me, it is plenty good. I can use my misskey account, github/gitlab account, can watch YouTube and few other streaming services as well (although how well or if they run at all depends on what streamingservice you use). Webkit GTK has few issues with touch screen devices, like backspace key of on-screen keyboard not working properly or stylus not working properly etc. Also, the PDF view feels a bit janky.
Got it. I'll take that into consideration once I try it out. Especially since I view PDF files on my browser a lot.
ambitiousslabI really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.
I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they've received show that there is real demand for an alternative.
But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.
There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.
I'm probably wrong, but isn't the Mozilla License non-permissive? It's likely more complicated than that. Non-permissive*
Agreed, it's licensed under the MPL, a "weak copyleft" license. Each file that is MPL must remain MPL, but other files in the same project can be permissive or even proprietary.
While I definitely think it's better than a fully permissive license, it seems more permissive than the LGPL, which is the main license of WebKit and Blink. So I don't feel it's strong enough to stop it being co-opted.
Ladybird is the best we have. At the end of the day the big part that matters is source code and the 4 freedoms
To nobody in the real world, the 4 freedoms could matter any less if they tried. That is not to say it's not important to have certain things be standardized and open source, but if you skew your perspective that much, you cannot find actual solutions: You aren't even recognizing the actual problem.
GPL is not good enough, a new browser meant to thwart Google should have a strict anti-corporate anti-commercial license, even if it doesn't fall under the umbrella of open source.
If you don't believe me, please consult proprietary vendor android distributions.
Good luck with that
Maybe you should make everyone sign a EULA and pay royalties
تحريرها كلها ممكنI used to be partial to Konqueror in the past. I wish it was still actively maintained and developed.
Mozilla == Democrats
Google == Republicans
{qt,gtk}webkit, netsurf, ladybird, textmode browsers == The actual way forwards
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk on US Politics
FUCK U.S. politics creeping in every non-US politics thread.
based, why are you a .world user then
Elaborate.
lemmy.world is full of former redditors that are largely responsible with bringing US political spam to lemmy as a result of the reddit API change exodus. Before (allegedly, I joined sdf some time after the exodus) lemmy largely consisted (and is developed by) leftists. Opening All on lemmy.world basically feels like you're on the front page of reddit, with all the same cancerous pro-DNC propaganda spam.
No, webkit is for all those anarchist, anti-establishment people. On a serious note, Gnome Web (Epiphany) is pretty amazing. Other than a few stuff like, Netflix not working (thanks W3C for giving us DRM /s. Also, google and widevine are the worst thing in tech) I have not yet found any particular issue. A very limited number of firefox extensions also work on it.
wvstolzingThe Nyxt browser -- webkit as rendering engine, extensible by Common Lisp -- was making good progress, though its progress slowed down considerably lately; and there are a few 'showstoppers' preventing everyday usage, at least for me.
Americans, unable to understand anything if they cannot delineate it in white vs black.
I'm warning Google that Google Chrome may soon be disabled on my devices.
It already is on mine, no trace of chromium or it's forks.
Discord, slack, bitwarden, steam, Microsoft teams, visual studio code, balena etcher . Anyone else know of any electron apps or heavily modified version of chrome?😄
Teams has switched to Microsoft's own edition of the same concept, "Edge WebView2". Now that Edge is just being Chrome wearing a rubber Scooby Doo mask, I don't expect the differences are vast.
Another fun iteration is Plex's desktop client, which uses QtWebEngine... however surprise! still the Chromium engine underneath.
Signal's desktop app is plain old Electron though.
Of the ones on your list, worth noting that Discord and Slack work fine with FirefoxPWA.
Holy shit I had not heard of Firefox PWA but I will use the shit out of this
I use the shit out of Firefox PWA. I just wish Mozilla would get off their asses and make it work out of the box vs having to install a third party app.
I do wish there were more native apps but alternatives to electron is always a good thing in my book.
Except for Microsoft, Microsoft can stop pretending their solution is demonstrably different from electron and chromium.
Discord bitwarden steam and teams all work fine for me in ff, i don't use the others
https://github.com/gamingdoom/datcord
Works like a charm.
Neat!
Until you do more than warn they don't care.
Linux Phones and Degoogled Phones surge in response.
What pisses me off is how many websites don't work right with Firefox now. There's been several times where I've had issues with a site functioning on Firefox and had to switch to a chromium browser.
I read that most sites work just fine if you spoof your user agent to windows and standard chrome
That's what I do and I haven't had a problem since.
This breaks any site that uses CloudFlare's Turnstile for me. It will loop forever and never let me through if my user agent is set to Chrome.
I've had some sites bug out on Firefox that I'm pretty sure weren't really related to Google or Microsoft in any way. I still use Firefox obviously, but it's annoying.
The point was that some sites neglect to develop for Firefox, and simply tell Firefox users to get chrome instead. Meanwhile Firefox works in most cases perfectly fine without any doing on the website's part if it is simply duped into believing that the firefox user is just a plain old chrome user as expected. Doesn't work for everything, but almost.
Oh yeah, I hate sites that do that.
This happens very rarely, but it does happen from time to time. When a website starts acting weird out of nowhere I keep a copy of Chrome installed just for that use and then promptly return to Firefox.
My insurance site (MyCigna) started working a couple months ago, but for years it failed to log in. It's those types of contracted apps that seem to fail the most for me, like apps you'd see on a company intranet.
I didn't ever have trouble with that site and always used it in ff
I have a friend who sends me tiktoks that refuse to load with firefox on my phone. I consider it a blessing
Libredirect extension will redirect to public proxitok instances so you could watch them without going to tiktoks site directly
proxitok is such a good name holy shit
I see this FUD all the time but nobody ever gives examples. Can you point to some specific sites that don't work with Firefox?
Costco Travel login page never loads for me in Firefox. Specific sites my kids use for school don't work either. I wouldn't say it happens regularly, but often enough to be annoying.
It's not FUD but there's usually more to it than just "Firefox". Usually has something to do with security plugins. There are sites that do not work properly with Ublock or Noscript installed, even when you turn them off for the site. I've experienced it many, many times. It happens to me most often ordering food, because a lot of local restaurants sites are janky as fuck, but I've also had issues with more well known sites. Southwest airlines has been problematic for a couple years now. My credit union also had issues with parts of their online banking app, but that thankfully got fixed after a year or two.
TL;DR - it's a real thing.
Walmart.com didn't work for me on FF for about a week, and it did work on edge and chrome (still broken on FF when I disabled all my add ons). However, they fixed it and it works now. I think it was just a problem with the build of the website, and wasn't intentional because it definitely works now.
I think that's what's more likely - temp problems that could affect any browser until their web dev fixes it. Not anything malicious like intentionally blocking a browser.
And then, it's just Walmart. It's nothing that really mattered.
I was worried about this when I originally switched from Chrome to Firefox earlier this year but I can honestly say I haven’t found a single site that I personally use that I had to go back to Chrome for. Any issues I had with any site were related to ad blocking using uBlock or DNS based blocking I also do.
It happens to me with some payments stores. Always need to go back to chromium based pos browser
The payment provider my local council uses doesn't work on Firefox, or Safari. I have to use shitty chrome on my phone. I refuse to install it on my computer.
Report it on https://webcompat.com/
I have issues with twitch. Given I only watch every 3 months for the POE announcement live stream, I just open brave for that one site. I have not tried to figure out if it's my setup or not
I've been watching Twitch on Firefox for years without an issue, so it's very likely that the problem is on your end.
Microsoft teams
Pizza hut
Most of my utilities online sites
T-mobile would be the last specific one. I couldn't navigate to certain pages within to make plan adjustments.
dialog boxes will just fuck off. I've never gotten webRTC to work properly, though that might be configuration skill issues, and or webRTC implementation skill issues, since it seems to only work on browser, not across two different ones.
I've seen sites just load asinine layouts, borked kerning, completely fucked text handling. Just goofy shit.
In some cases i've seen sites have no download buttons on firefox. I don't know why, it's confused me a few times though.
Bambulab store
Apple Podcasts for me
Something I've been on recently. Microsoft Teams maybe?
The local Uber eats clone here has the submit order button off screen. Reuters on Android sometimes has the top bar of the webpage shift down over the content. A video conferencing site used by my medical provider won't connect the video. The 3rd party comment section on our local news site sometimes lays out the controls off screen. The Lemmy PWA on Android used to crash on startup (recently fixed yay!!)
FF is my daily driver and 99% of things work fine, but I've definitely found a few sites where they clearly didn't test it. I still have Chrome installed for those rare occasions I need it.
And I don't even necessarily blame Firefox for this. I used to do web dev back in the day and I remember making my shit work across multiple browsers. Maybe Firefox is doing it right and Chrome is doing it wrong, but everybody targeted Chrome because it has a zillion percent of the market.
Duolingo
TradingView
I use this every day with Firefox and Librefox with no issues.
I use firefox and keep Chrome on my PC for this reason. Off the top of my head:
I can't use Siyuan correctly, my main editor, in Firefox. It only registers the initial backspace key press.
I do telehealth, and the voice/video will not work in firefox no matter what I try.
Live-reloading for Ruby on Rails projects doesn't seem to work on firefox.
Firefox has been, and still is, my primary browser since before Chrome even existed so, definitely not FUD. Also, it's generally not Firefox's fault either, but instead the developers of websites that don't work in Firefox are usually doing something that isn't standards compliant.
First to come to mind is that I can't log into the account management part of the pet boarding company I use when in Firefox. Another scenario is that a lot of movie streaming sites won't give Firefox video higher than 720p so in that case, Edge is often the only browser that can receive 1080p video. From my understanding the movie studios are the ones to blame for this.
Dev tools were borked on FF for me. Entire tab was blank
Start page
I only have Chrome installed for the rare occasion where a site doesn't work in Firefox. I feel like we've gone a bit backwards as of lately in building websites that are browser agnostic.
I just read about this extension today. Seems interesting. The description says It's supposedly doing more than just switching the UA.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/
Does this happen in you work environment or on your private managed system? I raise this question because I started to realize that governing firefox apparently is a hard task. Never did I experience a faulty site on my private desktop devices but on my work stations. Im currently running firefox 115.13.0esr.
My home system. I'm not doing any extra security on it, either.
You shouldn't be required to do so. You also neglected my presumption. Thank you for replying.
Such as?
The only problem I run into is sites that use Bluetooth or USB APIs to talk to a local device. Both Firefox and Safari don't implement them due to security concerns.
Ohh yeah, VIA for QMK keyboards is guilty of that shit
T mobiles website is the most recent I had issues with. Navigating to certain pages within t mobiles site would cause "something went wrong" or just a redirect loop.
I was recently trying to add tickets from ticketbastard to Google wallet to be able to use them offline. I have chrome disabled on my phone. Surprise surprise it doesn't work with any other browser except chrome. The ticketbastard app just throws an error and nothing happens. Took me a lot of searching to realize it was because chrome was disabled.
Unfortunately for work I may have no choice:-(. *Several* of our daily work products I've tried on Firefox without success. Those also don't have ads.
I wish there were better alternatives. I may try out LibreWolf but I could not imagine it somehow being easier, though with enough effort put in the end result may be all that matters. Until the first update (possibly forced on the server end even if I don't on mine) that breaks everything and I cannot do my work for the day, in which case I will *absolutely* go crawling back to Chrome, bc they have us by the short hairs there.:-(
Use chrome only where you need it.
Prexactly:-)
I went through the same thing with MSIE. Corporate mandates and stuff. Businesses are sometimes wrong.
No, they are always *right*! (^Especially^ ^when^ ^they^ ^are^ ^wrong...^)
My company just plain old won't install Firefox without a good reason.
I'm stuck using chrome or edge. Once the ad block stops working on chrome, I move over.
I really hate the corporate IT.
I was at a job that was slowly transitioning from a medium sized company to a larger one, initially we were allowed just install and use whatever on our machines, but gradually IT started implementing policies where if we wanted to add something it had to go through a request system and usually it would be denied.
As a software developer this was just infuriating, it would hold up work, force us to use shitty software (like Chrome and Edge) and there would often be fuck ups where installing a new version of software would require removal of the old one and installation of a new one - which would trigger the approval process again.
Like - I get it - some people can’t be trusted, but we were some of the key devs for the companies product, we know what we’re doing.
I was rather happy to leave that part of the company behind when I left.
If you have other potential employers in mind, the IT environment at your current employer and other potential employers is maybe one factor to keep in mind in making decisions as to where to work.
There are some IT policies that are no-gos for me at potential employers. I ask during the interview process.
On my work computer I don't have admin rights but still I could install Firefox with no problems. It installed itself for local user only.
Yeesh... I would reconsider working there if possible, but being able to (checks notes) pay rent and afford food and medical care may just make up for it.:-| Hopefully you don't need to surf the web much at work.
Google needs to be broken up by government.
It saddens me to agree with this. Who knew Google would become as oppressive as fucking MICROSOFT?
« Don’t be evil »
😬😬😬😬
They ditched that in 2018. It was long overdue. At least somewhat honest about themselves.
Most smart people who understood capitalism did.
I hear the term 'broken up' a lot in media and discourse, but it's never explained. In your eyes, what actually happens when a government 'breaks up' a corporation? I mean, what are the steps, objectives, and outcomes?
Not being adversarial, I'm just curious.
Not the person you're asking, but my general understanding is that different products would be required to be their own companies, so advertising, Android, and Chrome would all be separate businesses.
I envision it like AT&T's break-up, where the singular Google is broken up into regional companies that will (hopefully) have to compete with each other.
It really wouldn't change anything in the long run. Any company that creates a browser is gonna need some form of income and people aren't willing to pay for a browser. What would be their incentive to continue to work on the browser when they aren't being paid?
Same as Firefox. Let search engines (including google) pay them a fair market rate to make them the default browser.
So, what they're saying is: Chrome will have severely decreased functionality and users will no longer be able to protect themselves from sketchy ads that contain scams, malware, and other nefarious bullshit (often hosted on Google's own ad networks)?
What are you expecting, a corp to... ah... uh... *not* be evil, or something? :-P
Thank you very much for summoning Jeff Goldblum's voice into my head.
I... uh, found a way:-D.
Google is primarily an ad company
It did not always used to be this way, though it was always headed here.
Users can still use ad blockers. Users will be safer from malicious extensions sending all your web traffic to an untrusted party.
Whew, kinda weird to find a Google employee on lemmy. I would have thought there were rules against that in the would employee handbook.
I don't work for Google. Are you in a cult or an anti-opensource PR firm? Why would that be your first instinct in response to facts? Go read the beginners guide to MV3. Maybe you could learn a thing or two before talking about feelings.
You gave no facts, just opinions.
And if you aren't aware, astroturfing is a thing.
Of course they're aware, they're doing it right now.
I gave you facts about MV3. It is also explained at the beginning of the uBOL GitHub page which even acknowledges MV3 adds protections to users with some filtering tradeoffs. Those tradeoffs can be implemented in other ways but it is more work and would require other software. I am not here saying Google is perfect or that MV3 is perfect, but it does make installing extensions more secure for the average user. If you don't agree then be specific. This vagueness that you keep utilizing without providing any details at all to try to make a point is a clear sign that you honestly have no clue what you're talking about.
Yeah, that's not even how Ublock Origin fucking works, what a hilariously ignorant take.
Did I say that the author of uBlock Origin actually reads your traffic? No I didn't, so stop the bad faith arguments. I said that MV2 exposed users to malicious extensions that were able to do that. Most features of uBO work fine with uBOL. Not everything does though, and I do acknowledge that. I'm just saying MV3 does make a majority of users safer overall.
Nope
Yep. Facts.
You seem to be struggling with the term "facts"
Is your feelings facts to you? Which fact specifically am I struggling with? Do you have anything concrete to say at all or are you just going to keep being vague because of feelings?
Seeing all your traffic is required for an ad blocker to function correctly.
An ad blocker doesn't need to see your traffic to function. That is the point of the declarative APIs. It is supposed to help protect users from malicious extensions and some forms of malicious software.
Yes, it absolutely does.
An adblocker has unconditional complete control of my browser because I want it to have unconditional complete control of my browser, because it cannot do what I want it to any other way. Taking that control away from me is malicious by definition. It's more malicious when every single person on the planet with a shred of tech knowledge knows with certainty that it's for the sole purpose of boosting Google's ad revenue at the expense of their users.
Sadly I'm far more attached to ad blocking than I am to a browser.
Frankly, at this point I might even be more attached to blocking ads than browsing.
I guess you want the internet to be a place for finding useful information, and/or the entertainment you choose to access, over it being a long uninteruptable stream of infomercials for crap products you have no interest in? Then groogle is not for you. In fact groogle is not for humanity.
Yeah, we saw this coming. When Manifest v3 first talked about.
Google an ad company are killing ad blockers. Yeah, that sounds right.
I might finally get a six-pack!
FTFY
I wish, but I don't see it happening. Most people are just content with seeing ads absolutely everywhere, I just don't get it.
I wouldn’t mind the basic shit like a banner here or a side bar there. But the fucking obnoxious mid page ads, auto playing videos, scam link shit can go die in a hole.
I used to not mind them, now I do. They over did it and I can't go back. I will block ads untill I can't and then I'll probably climb a clock tower with an Uzi.
I won't really climb a clock tower with an Uzi.
Since those are semi-regularly vectors for malware now, even those are not safe to allow.
It's things like this that keep me using an ad blocker. I was researching when sunflowers develop their seeds, for crying out loud.
Edit: this was on Opera. It's.. fine.
MV3 doesn't kill ad blockers. uBOL (uBlock Origin Lite) blocks ads, is by the same author and uses MV3. The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.
Some of these "features" that classic uBO used are available in MV3 but requires different permissions. Some of them could also be implemented with native messaging. The main uBO author though feels slighted by Google and went on a trash talking campaign against Google, and to be fair had a few good points. Anyway, most people on social media now care more about how Chromium and Firefox makes them feel now irregardless of facts. They think their emotions somehow are the same as facts.
Then allow a savvy user to choose to keep MV2 mode via an opt-in control instead of depreciating years of hard work by non-malicious extension authors. uBlock Origin is, in fact, the ONLY browser extension I use in Chrome, as Firefox is my main browser.
I agree they should have tried to find more ways to keep the old behavior. MV3 rollout has already been delayed for a long time, and now users merely get a message. I'm not sure that the community (mostly Google contributors) won't give in or try to find a way to keep MV2. However, what was done with MV2 can now be done with MV3 with native messaging or other network tools... I think the concern is that allowing an exception makes it much easier for a malicious extension or software to get users to agree not realizing what they're agreeing to. Furthermore, the declarative approach is actually preferable by many. You get most of the same features without exposing all your traffic to an extension.
And yet the likelihood of Google publishing a malicious extension is quite low. Not sure why you're so adamant about defending their shitty anti-adblock actions, making excuses for a mega corporation.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Steam, Arch Linux, NixOS, Flathub, etc. all end up publishing malicious software in their stores and package managers. It is inevitable. If you're not worried about sandboxing then you might as well proxy all your traffic using third party software.
The fact that something is possible does not make it frequent or likely.
From my understanding, MV3 kills vital features of ad-blockers in that
uBOL GitHub does a pretty good job of explaining some challenges, and some of them are better tracked in the issues.
Your second point isn't accurate though and MV3 does support dynamic rules.
Some? Or all?
uBlockOrigin would still loose some of its features and capabilities nonetheless, even if a sub-set of them could be implemented in other ways. Not?
The modern Internet is completely unusable without an ad blocker. Way to remake ie6, Google!
Even with an ad blocker, it gets more unusable every year that goes by
DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT OUR COOKIES OR CUSTOMIZE THESE BULLSHIT OPTIONS???
The only options I want are Girl Scout thin mints or peanut butter cookies
Missing Samoas, those are delicious.
I already know a few people who were just marginally digitally literate, and now they can't read things like news articles and access several kinds of services anymore, unless someone helps them, because they don't property know how to close invasive popups and solve captchas.
The internet is literally becoming unusable for some people.
I'm in my mid 60s and know a few people that never even heard the term "browser extension" before. How they tolerate using the web with no ad blocking is beyond me.
Every time I turn off uBlock and reload a webpage I'm like "JFC this is eye cancer".
Got my boomer mom to finally install an ad blocker. She was tired of looking at a webpage, having an ad give some kind of script run error, and then it reloads back at the top. It’s a big problem on the cooking websites she goes to.
I would rather go back to the days of shitty pop-ups you can just close. These ads are far worse, and none of them even make sense.
https://based.cooking/ doesn't have everything, but it's growing and the site is very clean.
What a really interesting initiative. I will try to contribute some things in their repo.
This is amazing and thank you.
meanwhile firefox lists it as recommended and also lets you use it on firefox mobile.
It has made mobile browsing usable again for me.
Same. Firefox Mobile had been a laggy mess when I used it a few years ago, but a combination of some really aggressive advertising and the announcement of manifest v3 caused me to give it another shot about a year ago. It's a dramatic improvement in phone browsing.
Almost as if a browser company that's not also an advertising company has no reason to fight ad blockers.
I've got some bad news for you. Mozilla bought an ad company.
i mean they bought a privacy preserving ad company to offer an alternative for companies to google, which is what they should be doing.
because like it or not people depend on ads for their sites.
Wait until people find out you can make the government ban ads - https://www.euronews.com/2014/11/26/grenoble-europe-s-first-ad-free-city/
I like their future (so far).
Ban billboards. Very different. And are there ones owned by the city.
Honestly, not a huge win.
Banning billboards is actually pretty huge. I live in Maine where billboards are banned and the mental break from being constantly forcibly advertised to is so nice. Every time I travel anywhere else I realize what a huge difference it makes.
Sadly that news isn't how it is right now. Picking a random spot in Grenoble using *Google maps* and searching for the first tram station, I find 6+ billboards.
You can always fork firefox. People used to use website not requiring javascript at all and it worked well. Some people still use even w3m f.e. when graphics card driver goes bad after update and they need to watch some docs on the internet. Most current browser have most features you would ever need
You could fork Chromium too.
Forking is indeed the way forward when Mozilla loses its way a little more. For myself, I switched to Librewolf about 6 months ago, along with replacing Thunderbird with Betterbird after using it since the Phoenix days.
I cannot remember what prompted the move to Librewolf, it may have been the AI stuff they were pushing at the time, or possibly the update that forced the tabs into my titlebar without having to go into about:config to fix it. Or the fact that Firefox was constantly pushing me to sign up for an account. There were quite a few gripes that added up over time lol
Betterbird restored some removed things I liked pre-supernova as well as a native systray icon under Linux and that was enough motivation to make the switch.
It *is* time for a new browser to enter the market. Either Ladybird or something built with Servo seems likely.
And my nerd bros try to get me to donate
Adblockers are the largest *consumer* boycott in history.
Google isn't just disabling an extension, they're attacking a boycott comprised of 200,000,000+ people, all around the globe, standing up to forced manipulation of our beliefs and habits by profit-hungry corporations.
If Google presented me with ads for things I might be interested in and in a non-invasive way, wouldn’t mind looking at them at all.
Instead I get ads for the seemingly random shit I have absolutely zero interest in buying. How they are consistently wrong about my spending habits is unbelievable. I have two fucking hobbies! I don’t see ads for anything relating to them. Ever.
Ad blockers block more than just shitty ads. They also block malicious ads.
Also, there's like 10 per webpage, and then you have the damn pop-ups when you scroll 🤬
Sounds like you need to give Google more private information
I never thought about it that way. Interesting. Thanks!
You're correct, and now people will boycott Chrome. Firefox and Brave are good / accessible / easy to get for most people so...
Firefox my beloved.
Anyone else been having issues of not being able to load YouTube videos past the first few seconds on Firefox using ublock? I couldn't find any recent information online. I don't know if this is part of the war on ad blockers, or unrelated.
It's been a side effect of the server side ads apparently, but reloading the page fixes it for me.
I watched several videos today on Firefox with ublock origin and no issues. Haven't run into issues with ads yet.
Yeah, yesterday. I just kept refreshing. FF + unlock + not signed in, seems to trigger it
Haven't had that issue, nope
Saying this about any corporation's product is guaranteed not to age well.
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Chromium (Google Chrome's base) is also open source.
And yet, we're still at a corporation's mercy as to whether everything Chromium-based gets ruined by Google's fuck-what-the-users-want policies. Like with Manifest V3. And JXL support. And extensions on mobile.
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Except now you have to maintain a branch that's missing everything after that release upstream.
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Users do want MV3. The people complaining about it are in the minority.
Users don't know what the fuck Manifest is period. They just click the internet button. And for the longest time that meant the E with a loop around it. Now that means the multicolored circle.
Users know that they want more security. MV3 makes a major of users that use Chrome safer from malicious extensions.
Why the hell would a user *want* MV3?
Because it makes a majority of users that use Chrome much safer. Do you do any basic research? Do you need me to point you to the getting started guide?
the minority of people complaining about it are the only ones who know what it even is
So is Android. So is Chromium. So is React, and Flutter. So is Java.
Open source doesn't mean FOSS.
Open source does mean FOSS. It doesn’t mean community-oriented.
No it doesn't. Different licenses dictate what you can and can't do with open source software. Some are more restrictive than others. Open source simply means that the source code is freely available.
It absolutely does. Open source is not simply source-available, it means that it follows the open source definition. https://opensource.org/osd
I'm grateful for FF, but they also annoy me at times. Just little stuff probably not worth bitching about in detail. But also a peek at the potential for problems that you're talking about.
So of course I'll bitch about it.
I call it the "stop whatever you *think* you'd rather do right now and pay attention to *our product*" type shit.
Imagine you have a combination wrench and whenever you take it out of the toolbox it starts yammering at you about how great of a wrench it is and all if its shiny features. Fucking ridiculous, right?
So why do we tolerate software that does that?
Way too much software does this pushy shit. Just stay outta my face and do your actual job, software.
Because people have the attention span of a goldfish and if you aren't reminding them every 5 seconds of the features they have available they'll forget they do in fact use them and then complain to support because they can't spend 5 seconds on the help page.
I say this, not in defense of mozilla, but in frustration at having to deal daily with these kinds of issues. You can put giant screen-size arrows on where to go / what single "do the thing" button to press and people will still forget 5 seconds later.
Good point. That's true, there is definitely that side of it. I think what you're talking about is less obnoxious than the stuff that feels forced and make-the-boss-happy promotional. Push notifcations for no reason, etc. It's a spectrum from necessary to uneccessary, and there's too much of the latter IMO.
We're so fucking used to ads we don't even always realize we're getting pushed propaganda
Mmm mmm mmm, Bill Cosby tells me to love my puddin' pops!
........i feel sleepy......
Firefox is a foundation, not a corporation. And I'm already using Fennec instead of the official release.
No. Firefox is a product. Mozilla is a corporation AND a foundation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
Yeah, it's strange just how readily the blinders go up wherever Mozilla is concerned. They're a corp, just like any other; if they had the money and leverage, they'd be just as aggressive as Google. Have people already forgotten that time they laid off 200+ employees and then gave all the execs bonuses?
E: Apparently y'all *have* forgotten. In 2021, Mozilla laid off a few hundred employees. CEO's salary doubled that year. Fuck Mozilla, they're no more your friends than Google or Microsoft; they're the same evil, just *smaller-scaled* evil, is all.
But they haven't threatened to undercut ad blocking yet, so as a *comparison* they are better.
Absolutely, but Mozilla is pretty much owned by Google anyway, and falling in love with these companies as wide eyed fanboys never looks good when they eventually turn.
It's okay to like them while they do good and then change your mind when they turn evil.
I wouldn't say "owned", but the rest... yeah:-(
Who provides the majority of their funding?
You forgot to also mention that they are a cult where you get attacked if you say anything negative about Mozilla.
Looking around, I don't think that's true. Lots of bad things are freely said about Mozilla and the people running it.
You forgot to not shill for an actual corporation
I'm not shilling for anyone. If you want to discuss actual technical details I'm happy to do so. If you're here just to share your feelings absent facts then I don't care what you have to say.
"this is way safer for users" may as well be feelings. It's not backed up by anything but a clear boner for Google
Librewolf, my beloved.
This is the first I've heard of LibreWolf. Is it compatible with Windows 7? And also, why is it good?
You really shouldn't connect windows 7 to the internet.
https://librewolf.net/
A summary from its site and known technical details:
As for Windows 7, nobody should really need to install Librewolf anyway on such a device. No device running Windows 7 should have access to the internet at this point. If you are asking about compatibility intending this use case, you have bigger problems to worry about than your choice of browser. If you just need to view HTML files graphically, even Internet Explorer or an older firefox ESR will do.
Looks like it should run on Windows.
Edit: sorry, didn't read far down enough. It's only built for Windows 10, but they recommend this?
Picture this in your minds eye: a Windows 7 machine running a browser with still working Flash and Java plugins, connected to the internet in 2024.
what do you see?
i see a flourishing ecosystem of worms, viruses and rootkits, all trying to be the one species to get to be the one who does the most damage to the prey species, the common user.
Sounds like an interesting experience to me. Admittedly I hadn't looked that far into it. If Win 7 is a must I'd say just go with latest Firefox.
❤
You're overreacting. Firefox knows their users. I am a huge "stan" for Firefox, but I will delete it like a time traveller if they make it impossible to ignore ads. I will salt the earth and poop on Firefox's grave and actively avoid it everywhere... *However.* If I'm wrong, there will be a Next Thing...
Yeah I'm using Fennec, which doesn't have that. But as long as it's a flick of a switch to disable, I don't really mind. Still a million times better than manifest v3.
At least link the full article and not just the headline... smh. Here is also the follow-up article with comments from Firefox's CTO. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Firefox-defends-itself-Everything-done-right-just-poorly-communicated-9802546.html
If you use a DNS solutions you can block all the telemetry shit. Frankly FF has been phoning home in a lot of undesirable ways for many years even before this, like most browsers.
Firefox is no longer an adversary to Google for the browser market, if it ever was. FF has become a vassal of Google that with its tyranny is dictating the course of the internet, such as WEI that as far as I know it was abandoned at least for now.
Yeah I know. https://blog.windscribe.com/windscribe-expose-mozilla/
🧐
Not entirely true.
Besides the fact that Mozilla sucks, Firefox is an amazing piece of software. It's PITA that it's about to be enshittified.
Could turn out to be a good thing. All power users will dump Chrome practically overnight, a huge boon to the alternatives, that could actually give them enough momentum to compete with Google for a change. I'm sure they've considered this, probably an empty treat.
I'm not sure how wide the intersection of power users that use uBO but also haven't heard of the manifest v3 deprecation coming since like 2019 actually is, but that could be because I'm the type of person to randomly recommend browsers to people and discuss them a lot.
me too. a long time ago i practically forced everyone around me to switch to chrome. now I'm doing the opposite.
I for one have been in denial and probably won't switch away until it literally stops working. So, there's hope.
Every browser is either chromium (open source captured by Google) or exists because of a Google search contract (this represents 80% of Mozilla's revenue), Google can't lose
That's pretty optimistic, as tons of power users are still eating that Windows crap, too.
Thanks for reaffirming why I refuse to use Chrome.
Thank you Google I hope shitty moves like this drives enough people away to better browsers like Firefox. It desperately needs a bigger market share.
Not only a bigger market share. What's keeping Firefox alive is the financial support they get from Google. If enough people move from Chrome to Firefox without Firefox also securing finances from elsewhere, Google could easily kill Firefox by just not giving them money and we'd all be left with just Chromium.
I think the real reason Google is funding Firefox is because they're afraid of being targeted in antitrust lawsuits. As long as Firefox is around, they have someone they can point to, to say they're not a monopoly.
This 100%. You could maybe argue that Safari exists, but that is Apple exclusive I think, so it would probably not work as an argument.
I'm using Firefox or forks.
With the direction FF is taking it's gonna be forks for now.
The only thing that held me back from using LibreWolf over Firefox was that it disabled (automatic) dark mode on websites. I understand this is part of the "resist fingerprinting" configuration. There's a workaround now ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1732114).
In about:config update these 3 preferences:
Dark Reader
Oh no *uses Firefox* Anyway....
Good riddance then. Fuck chrome
That’s a funny way to say “you should uninstall chrome rather than leaving it unused” but I hear you Google. 🫡
Well, I'm forced if I want to use casting to androidTV or chromecast. Edit: fx-cast exists.
Yeah, there isn't a very good alternative other than occasionally getting lucky that it's compatible with VLC streaming.
I think it usually works with VLC (but usually not performant), but I don't think there is an alternative for cast on android (without gapps)
I guess it's a good thing I'm on Firefox now instead of Chrome.
IT guys will stop using it...
Which means they'll stop deploying it as the default browser on some large enterprises, it won't ship as defaults in pre-baked images going forward.
Average joes and janes will use Safari and Edge depending on OS.
Where is their growth going to come from after this change? Chromebooks? lol.
I hope they do it, it will hurt them in the long run.
You can bet 300 new uBlock replacements to spring up practically overnight, some of them scams, reducing trust in the Google ecostystem.
Unfortunately it's a bigger problem.
Google doesn't plan to block uBlock Origin itself, but the APIs it uses to integrate into Chrome in order to function. This will effectively disable all adblockers on Chrome. uBlock won't be removed from the Chrome extension store, it will just have 90% of its functionality removed.
Additionally, this isn't a Chrome-only change, but a change in the open source Chromium, an upstream browser of Chrome all other Chrome-based browsers use (essentially everything aside from Firefox and Safari themselves).
The change itself is involved in changing the browser's "Manifest", a list of allowed API calls for extensions. The current one is called Manifest v2 and the new one was dubbed Manifest v3.
Theorethically Chromium-based browsers could "backport" Manifest v2 due to the open source nature of Chromium. However that is unlikely as it's projected to take a lot of resources to change, due mostly to security implications of the change.
Vendors of other Chromium-based browsers themselves have little to gain from making the change aside from name recognition for "allowing uBlock", which most users either wouldn't care for or already use Firefox, so the loss for Google isn't projected to be large, just as the gains for other vendors.
TLDR: uBlock won't be removed from the Chrome extension store, but the mechanisms through which it blocks ads will be blocked. The block isn't a change in Chrome but in Chromium and affects all Chromium-based brosers (all except Firefox and Safari). Other vendors could change that to allow adblockers but it's projected to take a lot of time and resources.
There is already a "lite" version of uBlock origin that conforms to the new manifest and will still work.
There are still a few features missing, some can't be implemented but others will be.
The 'block element' picker is the big one that can not be implemented in the lite version.
Also included block lists can't update unless the extension itself updates.
Those seem like really big hurdles. How can those be worked around?
Is it not possible to trigger a manual block list update?
It's not something that can be worked around. It's specifically a design feature of manifest v3 to restrict these types of things.
Your options are to accept this or use a different browser.
Is it by the same author? Nik Rols, iirc?
Raymond Hill (gorhill) is the author of uBlock Origin, uBlock Origin Lite, uMatrix etc.
I remembered... poorly.
No, they will not, if they didn't already. Because convenience it key.
The browser war is over, and humans lost, corporations won. Google and other huge corporations control the biggest websites and most of the access to content on the internet.
They just need to make it inconvenient to use ad-blocking browsers.
They built their business on advertiser gambling, which seem to be flawed concept, because they keep on squeezing that tube for every penny more and more, in a race to the bottom.
But they are still in control of both browers and content so they have options to keep squeezing more.
So you want to use a ad blocker? Well, the browser that supports them might not be white listed (anymore) by the bot detector, and you have to solve captchas on every site you visit, until you come to your senses and use a browser, where ad blocking is no longer possible.
Oh, and all that is ok, because of "security". Because letting the users be in control of their devices and applications is "in-secure". They are just doing that to protect you from spam and scams, just trust them! Trust them, because they don't trust you!
I'm looking into the possibility of moving my organization to FF. Office of about 200 endpoints. The sticky wicket that I don't fully understand is Auth passthru to 365.
Does this help at all: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/windows-sso
You're absolutely right.
That said at least I'll take this as my cue to peace out of the mainstream web and only use Links2.
"IT guys"? Chrome has a 66% market share globally.
Its not the IT guys themselves, its the aggregate influence. One large school campus flips the switch to Firefox on their next image deployment its a drop in a bucket, but when 1000 schools, 2000 government agencies and 5000 businesses all suddenly stop using Chrome the graph starts to move, because laypeople just accept the default.
IT guys are like browser-influencers, they tell their parents what to use, friends, and so on. We all used to recommend Chrome, I don't anymore.
Google Chrome is about to be disabled? Got it.
...Oh, no! Anyway. Just giving people one more reason to *finally* make the switch to Firefox or something different.
Google Chrome warns about disabling uBlock Origin. I warn Google Chrome that they're being a little bitch & they're going to lose users.
Oh no, they are about to lose the $0 that uBlock origin users bring!
They know they will lose users and they don't care. They will make much more per user selling ads than before. Google is an ad company. They're not a browser company, or a mobile OS company, or an office suite company. It's all about ads.
Not necessarily. They still get money from selling user data. So they likely still care about losing users who use adblocking to at least some degree.
Google doesn't sell user data, they sell user eyeballs. There's no incentive for Google to sell user data since they're an ad company and the only people who would buy the data are competitors.
Maybe you're right, I don't have any certainty in this. But I don't buy google's word on this for a second.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/11/tech/google-ai-lawsuit/index.html
https://www.tampabay.com/news/2021/05/07/google-selling-users-personal-data-despite-promise-federal-court-lawsuit-claims/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/05/07/google-selling-users-personal-data-despite-promise-federal-court-lawsuit-claims/
Corpos like to lie, and their promises to not sell data is worthless. Even if they're not outright selling data directly, or "anonymizing it" before selling it, at a bare minimum they're still abusing the hoard of data they have to make a buck. They want that data and get large amounts of it through people's broswers, even with adblockers installed.
Your first link talks about Google consuming data for its AI
Your next two links (which are talking about the same thing) talks about how other companies are abusing Google's adbid system to try and collect correlated data against their own.
Love it or hate it, Google has been pretty transparent that they use your data for advertising, but nothing there talks about Google selling your data to third parties.
Good point, but also it's not that they will lose all of the user data they sell if people switch off Chrome, just the parts that chrome collects.
If they were blocking ublock users from accessing any google products then it would be purely a 'we only care about ad revenue'
It would be very interesting to see the internal data they use to make these decisions, but also knowing tech these decisions were probably made by a series of mid level managers sufficiently sucking the air out of the room until a critical mass was hit to make this happen
They absolutely also get data through means other than their browser. But they data they get off of the browser directly is probably a shit load.
1000%
I'm sure a bunch of bean counters were involved as well.
They also gain people spreading word of mouth advice to never use chrome
If you also spread the word about uBlock, same rule applies.
Sounds like another reason not to use Chrome.
🖕
🖕🖕
backup has arrived
🖕🖕🖕
Hmm, not sure how I managed that...
Eww
Google sneezes and your future is stolen by an ad that's selling it back to you. Google is too big to exist.
Let this be my warning to Google that I will never go back to their browser when they do. Challas! ✌️
I reckon they're absolutely shaking with fear by your warning.
I am user. Hear me roar!
I honestly can't wait to see how this plays out. Only Chrome, chromium and edge in their pure forms have dedicated to doing this. Most of the Chrome forks have said they're going to fork and keep it running. It's certainly going to give Firefox a shot in the arm, but there's no lack of other competition either.
I don't know how long the forks will be able to backport new features to their forked codebase.
I think the only sensible solution is to just switch to Firefox.
Eventually Firefox will switch to V3 anyway so it's kind of just delaying the inevitable.
It sucks that this is the future of the Internet.
Manifest v3 is already supported in Firefox (they must support it to keep the extension ecosystem alive), but they implemented it without the user-hostile restrictions.
Oh, I wasn't aware of that, I thought the user-hostile restrictions were inherent to Manifest v3 and they were unavoidable.
Okay, maybe just maybe Firefox squeaks by unharmed then.
edit: I literally just had someone else tell me just now that "It’s not something that can be worked around. It’s specifically a design feature of manifest v3 to restrict these types of things."
So which is it? I'm kind of getting mixed signals here.
edit 2: Oh, it sounds like Google has additional arbitrary restrictions on content blocking functionality, beyond what Manifest V3 itself has.
It’s probably 95% of windows users then who are affected by this.
Especially those at work who can't install their own software.
Oh yeah easily.
What I'm scared is publishers taking this as a reason to simply start banning Firefox and other browsers.
Or google to lock parts of its ecosystem behind chrome only.
Yeah but can't you just get a thing that tells things that you're using chrome when you're not
Yeah I've got an extension for it, it just changes the user-agent string.
I use it on YouTube because for some totally not suspicious reason Firefox won't play videos but when I spoof it to Chrome everything works fine.
User-agent is being deprecated, so it won't work forever.
Also note that if people keep their UA as Chrome permanently, hit counters will count them as Chrome users, and the number of Firefox users will go down.
What is that relevant to? Genuinely curious.
The comment I replied to was mentioning user-agent. User-agent is being deprecated (replaced by client hints) so changing the user agent will eventually stop working.
At the moment, the stats for browser usage rely on user agent as recorded by stats software used by various sites, so if you make Firefox pretend to be Chrome, you'll be contributing to the Firefox user percentage going down.
Right but why is that relevant? What good or bad does a number going down do? If Firefox wanted to keep track they could just count the number of downloads right?
I've noticed significant YouTube quality degradation when using Firefox, but no issues with Chrome.
Got a link for the extension by any chance?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
Not always doable as they could be relying on non-standard features that are only in Chrome.
Not exactly the same thing, but my employer requires us to use Chrome for all internal stuff, as they're using Chrome Enterprise Premium as part of their endpoint security solution, and of of course that only works in Chrome.
It takes more than changing your user agent to msk which browser you use. It's trivial to know which browser you're really using if they really want.
I'm pretty sure it's much easier to mask your browser than detect the correct browser. In the end you're just hitting a server for data, you fully control the call that is made.
There are things you can't do with extensions alone, like change how certain JS and CSS internals work.
Oh, publishers don't want my traffic? Oh, nooo...
Publishers don't care about traffic thay only costs them money.
An ecom site decides to block 5% of web traffic and potential sales?
Now tell the marketing team you are turning away 1 in 20 potential customers because (well, not really sure why) and see what they have to say.
There's already plenty of business web apps that require chrome. I specifically use a business focused web app that not only requires Chrome, but ONLY CHROME ITSELF and no chromium derivatives. That's the first time I've come across that. I had previously seen chrome requirements, but they worked just fine on ungoogled chromium. Not this one, nope. Regular Google Chrome and nothing else. wtf is that garbage.
You can get past these with a user agent, lying about which browser it is. However, they aren't testing for other browsers, so their site maybe as buggy as hell. As yet Firefox doesn't do a WINE and match Chrome, bug for bug, so sites work as intended. Google have cause IE6's return.
It was indeed buggy, which was when I reached out to support. They immediately asked if I was using not Google Chrome itself, but a Chromium offshoot like Brave or Vivaldi. I was using ungoogled chromium, so they told me it won't work. I switched to regular google chrome and it worked great. I wonder what on earth they're using that's part of Google Chrome that makes it work and not part of any other chromium projects.
Monoplistic web hell scape.
Glad I've finally migrated to firefox...
They started putting ads in Windows, a few users switched, but most still continue Windows.
Google will roll this out and a few users will switch, but most will just keep using Chrome.
We've already established that most users don't seem to care.
Seeing that half of my extensions (it was seriously like 10 of them) were going to be disabled is what pushed me to finally switch to Firefox because if I have to find alternatives to them it might as well be on another browser
I am one that switched. I have Linux Mint which I use 99.9% of the time, and a windows 10 laptop that I use 0.1% for that one windows program.
I think more people are wanting to get out of the grip that google, apple, and Microsoft have over them. Many are overwhelmed because they are in so deep. It took me months to get out, which I did about 6 years ago. I never looked back though. I know people that want out, but are not strong enough to commit to switching all their services and apps.
The reason for this is because switching from Windows to Linux is a lot bigger change, requiring a fair amount of technical know-how, and even knowing that Linux exists in the first place. Swapping browsers is easy in the technical sense, it's breaking the habit that's the hard part, but if they piss people off enough all it takes is uninstalling it in order to break the habit, not a drastic paradigm shift. I'm a long time Chrome user, like over a decade and with the recent "unverified download" nonsense unless you enable their invasive tracking has put me over the edge. I had both the Chrome and Firefox icons pinned to the taskbar and just out of habit kept clicking it, I finally removed it last week
I'm not so sure about that. Windows despite its ads is still generally usable or at least readable, but adblockers affect almost every website, and in a much more extreme way, without which renders some websites virtually unusable. As someone else said, installing another browser is also far easier than taking backups, installing an entirely new OS, implementing your backups, and learning an entire new OS which may not readily support the software you have licensed from windows for most users.
Users care a lot about convenience. I expect that they weigh installing and learning linux etc as less convenient than the ads in windows which is why they would not switch, but I expect when it comes to this case, they would weigh installing a different browser with adblock as much more convenient than using the internet with ads on every single website.
"This destroys the Chrome"
"We used the Chrome to destroy the Chrome"
Then it's goodbye Chrome.
I rlly hate how some sites don't work on Firefox
The more people use Firefox, the more web devs will be forced to ensure their website works on Firefox.
True
I'm showing my age, but back when IE was basically the only browser and Firefox (Firebird back then) launched, people often lamented that things didn't work in Firefox. The solution? People used Firefox and web developers were forced to make their shit work in Firefox. When Chrome came out, suddenly we had three real options and the way to make everything work? Open Standards.
Now, Chrome is in the position IE was back before Firefox came around. How ever will we make sure things work in Firefox??? Use Firefox. If enough people dump Google's malware browser, the web has to go back to supporting multiple browsers through open standards.
Real
Thing is Google's influence on Firefox is making it a worse company and browser as AI and privacy invading features take over.
Have you reported issues for them? It's in the menu somewhere. If Mozilla get a lot of reports for particular sites, they reach out to the webmaster and try to work with them to improve Firefox support - usually by removing proprietary Chrome-only features or by removing reliance on Chrome bugs that don't exist in Firefox.
You can also report the issue at https://webcompat.com/, just search to see if it's already been reported first.
You can do that?
Yeah. Just double-checked on my computer. Open the menu then click "Report broken site" near the bottom.
Oh okay
Same. For me, the big one's my bank that requires its users to use Chrome, else it won't let you log in. I got around this by using an agent-switcher extension in Firefox.
Which sites?
Snapchat
And nothing of value was lost.
I need it for one of my irl friends
User agent switcher. I have zero issues since using it.
Gonna try later
There it is. Firefox and Librewolf will guide us out of this mess.
Glad I have firefox as well but also looking forward to a cool new project called Ladybird. https://ladybird.org
Not sure if its the right one but glad there are more projects out there trying to jump into the game. (I know extensions are a long way off for it but i see it as hope.)
Also please consider running pihole or adguard home. Or any other full home DNS add blocker. It will help.
Ladybird looks great! Very much looking forward to an alpha linux release so I can use it and give all kind of feedback.
Looks like what I'd want to use, but to reach broad support it needs a Windows client as well.
laughs in firefox
Google Chrome warns of a drop of users. There, I corrected the title.
*Yuge!* > here, you forgot this.
that’d be great but i’m pretty sure like 90% of chrome users don’t even know what an extension or even an adblocker is. they’ll just keep using chrome because that’s the browser everyone else uses unfortunately
Very firefox, very legal very cool.
Please just us in using Firefox.
Google copying mrkrabs lol
If you use anything Google, you are the product. This has been pretty obvious since the early 2000's, yet people dive right into all the crap they release.
Counterpoint: so what? I'm not going to start paying for a search engine, or maps, or the dozen other Google services. Yeah, if I search for a lawn mower I will see lawn mower ads everywhere... and that's actually better than seeing dishwasher ads or dating site ads.
I use Google since the beginning, and the o ly thing that would make me stop is if the quality of the product goes down (like the recent AI summaries that apparently they show in the US).
Agreed, people always forget that Google is a company or to make money, they don't provide all of these services out of the kindness of their hearts.
Actually if everyone paid for software instead it would be very cheap. Maybe like $1. Think about it, it only takes a tiny fraction of the people that use free open source alternatives to make a donation to keep those products going. I use all the alternatives to google. The only google product I use is YouTube. And I find alternatives VERY affordable and voluntary donations mostly. Take for example Microsoft Word and Excel, I switched to LibreOffice 6 years ago. It's 100% as good. We are here on Lemmy instead of Reddit. And Firefox is every bit as good as chrome. I get it that once your are in the google system it's hard to get out, and is a lot of learning and work to move over, but daym it feels good once the only google you use is YouTube. Supporting a load of little projects instead of the mighty google feels good also. The alternatives have come a long way. I made I list of alternatives and as a project switched over one by one. I have never looked back and don't miss all the google demands for phone numbers etc. I am now in control instead of google.
I use Firefox (and chromium and even chrome at work) and lemmy, but nothing comes close to Google search, maps and YouTube content. I tried ddg and openstreet maps, not even close. Partially because of crowd sourced, privacy invading features like location tracking for traffic info. I even pay for YouTube premium, easily the cheapest entertainment around. The ads in the free version is crap because how disruptive they are, and I prefer to pay the creators than use an ad blocker (although new pipe is on my phone and yt-dlg on my computer for videos I really like and want to preserve).
For email Google has features that other clients just don't, even tho I ran my own server, DNS domain with dkim, etc, I still prefer Gmail for 90% of my emails. Only friends and family get my non-gmail account. Spam filter, calendar integration, mobile Client, threads, consistency, customization...
Same for office. While I do have Libre office installed (and Next Cloud on my server) I mostly use Google Docs. I never know who I will need to share a document with, or open on mobile or somewhere else, Google docs just works.
I also loved Google Reader and used Google domains, but I don't want to talk about that :D
Wow you use a lot of tech! Good share, thanks. I'm with you with Google maps, however check out "Organic Maps" I was very impressed with it (here in the UK) it finds shops and businesses, but no reviews obviously. I still use Google maps most of the time (on a separate phone that lives in the car), but Organic is really impressive, way ahead of the other map apps, definitely one to watch. Paying for YouTube is a great idea. I may do that also actually. I run a server with Mail-in-a-box for email. Yes it is just email basically, but I personally do not need or use more than that. And I love having unlimited aliases that all point to my main email. Also NextCloud is amazing yes. I love NextCloud. The other services you use I just don't have a need for. But yes google = convenience. I bet there are good alternatives to document sharing. And I use Hover.com for domains.
Chrome who?
It's an outdated fork of Safari, i think.
Firefox ftw.
I've actually been using Waterfox lately though because for some reason there's a video codec issue on Firefox that makes YouTube videos not play correctly.
I watch YouTube just fine on Firefox.
Some plugins to Adblock but that’s it.
I'm not sure why it happens. It happens on every PC I have Firefox installed on (three of them). I should probably try and reduce my extension count to see if it works lol.
For other Chromium browsers or those who don't see this yet, enable
chrome://flags#extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-warning.Sadly, this won't stop Google from killing off Manifest V2.
Google's core business is selling ads. So anything that aligns with selling ads is the path they'll take. Their users are the product.
Chrome really needs to be broken off from Google, the largest ad company owning the largest browser is clearly a huge conflict of interest
Google needs to be ended.
When people say things like this, I wonder if they understand how impossible it is. Google is not just a company. It is a 2 trillion dollar *entity*. Even if Google search entirely fails, it will still persist. At this point, you may as well say, "The wind needs to be ended." You don't end the wind. The wind already won. It will outlive you, me, and our children.
What we can do is protect against it. We can deal with it. We can contain it. We can redirect it and repurpose it to be helpful. But ending it? That doesn't happen.
IBM fell. Ford fell. Facebook (the social media site, not the company) fell. Yahoo fell.
Sure, they haven't stopped existing, but their relevance is nowhere near their peak. There's no such thing as "too big to fall".
They said the same about the divine right of kings.
When people say things like this, I wonder if they understand how impossible it is. The King isn't just a powerful man. He is *a divine being*.
I mean money is just as made up as the divine right of kings, and it will end one day.
Most people here have a device in their pocket with either Google hardware or Google software. If even the nerds with a passion against ads can't not buy something from the biggest ad company, who can?
Proprietary software sucks, use an open source browser like Librewolf.
Chromium is technically open source, but yeah, screw Google chrome
I'm aware, however Chromium (or rather Ungoogled Chromium) should only be used if a website doesn't work on a Firefox based browser.
Thank goodness there is more than one browser available.
And most are chrome.
I know everyone is doing the "use Firefox" thing, but please remember that Acer alone sold almost a million Chromebooks globally in 2023.
Sure, many of those people probably weren't going to use it anyway, but plenty were. I installed it on my daughter's Chromebook that she was forced to use for school.
I'm pretty sure you can install Firefox on those too can't you?
Looks like you can, but if you have an older Chromebook (which most schools definitely have), it takes more work than I think a lot of people would be willing to do.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/chromebook/
Also, at least in the case of my daughter's school Chromebook, the Play Store was disabled.
https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/supported-devices.html
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chrome_OS_devices
Sorry... are you suggesting people install Linux on their kids' school Chromebooks? You know we don't own them, right?
As long as you reset them before returning them it should be ok ;p
Good thing I stopped using Chrome
And a hearty Rest In Piss to Chrome as well
I use chromium for one thing, and it's casting live sports to my Chromecast. My plans to implement a HTPC have just been expedited.
I use Firefox but when I watch twitch or wherever, I need Google chrome's live caption to see what streamers say.
Firefox please get this feature asap. So I can delete Google chrome for good.
No idea where you'd like to use live captions, but n maybe this helps:
https://github.com/abb128/LiveCaptions
*Laughs in Librewolf*
Will a pihole fill this void?
Switching to Firefox might!
I'm already on Firefox, I just meant in general
its also available on firefox, de manifested version of chromium are likely to crop up, idk. Depends on how cancer it is to rip that shit out.
Re-manifested? To fix it you have to reenable manifest v2. That should be simple for a while but will get more problematic over time.
de v3 versions, obviously. Mozilla has no intentions of implementing it, and if chrome kills v2, it's not impossible that mozilla can hit them with an anti trust case and win, considering this is arguably what that would be.
But it will probably start to break on individual shitty websites over time, as per usual unfortunately.
Not at the same level. Ublock can remove way more granular spam and ads than pihole, which is limited at DNS requests. I use both... Running Firefox of course.
To an extent. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if sometime in the near future they force the use their own DNS servers within their browser instead of respecting your network configuration.
The best solution to circumventing Chrome's bad behavior is to not use it.
Edit: speiling
Man you gotta edit this again, you miss spelled spelling.
You misspelled misspelled.
I'm just living up to my username!
i've got a few using the mv3 'lite' version of ubo here. seems to be sufficient--for now.
I only use chrome for things that require my Google account.
use google container for firefox :)
Neat!
Never a better a time to join Mozilla Gang.
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Good thing I ditched Chrome the moment I heard about their plans.
Now what would be impressive is if they ban uBlock origin from working on firefox mobile. That would be a whole new kind of sinister
Gee, what a shame. Good think I switched to FireFox. Hey, does anyone know how to make chat work on FireFox?
chat?
Some of us never left Firefox.
Is "chat work" something like sex work but clothed?
Deleted by author
About that you can check this new extension : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/
Yet I feel it's better to avoid using it and report web compatibility problems. Always masking user agent could led to believe only supporting chrome is sufficient.
It would be if sites were truly incompatible, but developers know Chrome/Chromium dominates the market and instead of bothering checking compatibility with firefox, they just preemptively block Firefox since that's an easier "fix".
That's assuming the vendor isn't Google and doesn't have a vested interest in Chrome hegemony.
Still. Finding a site that doesn't work and reporting it absolutely is the way to go.
I'll just side load it. Fuck you Google
Cool, just let me know. My girlfriend uses chrome. I'm happy to set her up with Firefox whenever y'all want to jump the shark.
I cannot really be happy about being on Librewolf, because I am very afraid Firefox might eventually ditch MV2 as well. Mozilla is dependent on Google and is known for questionable choices, so...
Firefox supports MV3, with some tweaks such as the WebRequest limitations added by Google's MV3 being removed from the Firefox implementation. I don't think they will remove it
Google forcing Firefox to do such a move sounds very anti-competitive. I don't know if that would ever happen.
How do they force them? Just curious so asking
Google pays Firefox hundreds of millions of dollars a year to be their default search engine. In 2021, this accounted for 83% of Mozilla's revenue.
Google bankrolls Firefox basically.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates
They don't! Mozilla "by themselves" just "agrees" that MV2 is obsolete because they "prioritize security".
Would there likely be a fork at that point for those that wish to continue?
This would be the same problem as in Chromium - you theoretically can, but in practice maintaining it with zero support from the original company would get increasingly hard.
Safari is ok too…
Apple Products get flak in these parts
Safari is trash. Especially on iOS.
If only it was also available on Linux. I really like using it on my Mac.
Their new UI made the browser unusable anyway. Looks like a child toy to me.
I don't really love Firefox's default UI but I can customize it with about:config and userChrome.css to fit my taste.
what's a google chrome
What’s a computer 🥴
I know this reference
Just wait till they do this again with vision pro 2. Oh wait it hasn't sold well enough. Lol!
Could a grease monkey script do something similar? I'm probably just talking out of my butt, but it seems like GM can sometimes do things easier or better (or just at all) that extensions can't or won't do.
If GM can do it then uBlock can do it. The problem is restriction of APIs
Ah, gotcha.
The one and only thing keeping me on Chrome... well, Ungoogled Chromium... is the webassembly performance which is just abysmal in comparison on Firefox, sadly.
Lol like anyone smart still used Google.
How could they even allow this? Isn’t ublock an independent plugin?
Also, how about other chromium browsers?
EDIT: click bait headline, chrome is just deprecating a dependency it uses and ublock isn’t using the new version yet.
Edit 2: I didn’t realize v3 was nurfed intentionally,
Fuck google
This was all about the news probably 2 years ago. Chrome uses a new api manifest that does not allow for changes in websites like blocking specific type of content. Once manifest v3 is fully implemented and enforced there will be no way for ublock origin to work correctly anymore.
Didn’t realized v3 was nurfed on purpose, should never give google the benefit of the doubt.
The word "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your edit. The replacement for that dependency doesn't allow an extension to work as an ad blocker as effectively as the thing they are deprecating. This is deliberate.
Added a second edit :)
I'm not worried about this at all. I don't use Chrome anyways. I use Brave. It has a built-in ad blocker that works pretty well and I don't see that going away.
Here's the concern with Brave since it's Chromium based:
source
My emphasis, not theirs
I don't really use Brave as I don't want to support the Chromium/Blink/V8 monopoly, but aren't it's built-in "Shields" functionally equivalent to uBO but not reliant on the extension APIs?
Probably, hopefully, who knows for sure. That's the problem with using an open source project run by a corporation.
Daily plug for Cromite: https://github.com/uazo/cromite
Chrome, but it doesn't suck, doesn't track you, and it has good, fast native adblock.
Also in some linux repos now. I know its in CachyOS. And it's on Android, too.
Have they committed to maintaining manifest V2 into the future?
Not sure about that, but the built in adblock and privacy featurres won't be killed by V3.
Bring back Internet Explorer.
As someone who started in tech support in 2000 and is a software developer now: absolutely not.
I don't think I've seen that sentence.
It's 2024, madness rules these times. Witness the fall of Rome, heralded by a blue "e".
You spelled Netscape Navigator wrong.
I mean that’s just Firefox :p
Netscape Navigator is spelled "Firefox".
I tried to look that up on Alta Vista but kept getting a 404 for that site.
I would rather eternally sign my soul over to Chrome-hell than spend 5 minutes with Internet Explorer ever again
That's one way to say that you like the smell of lead-based gasoline.