- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Reminder to switch browsers if you haven’t already!
- Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
- The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
- Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.
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I’m sorry. I’ve seen this so many times today and I can’t stand it anymore.
I hate this article photo. What the fuck is that shit?? Gloveless fingers? Digit warmer? Turtlefinger sweater?
Agreed, but also
How can you not kinda love it
i’m with you it’s really camp
Finger sweatbands for epic googling activities
Been here since Kevin helped the project out?
The silver lining here is that you’d hope that more people will simply adopt Firefox. It’s user share has been too low for too long given how great it is
They messed up 10 years ago when for some reason it took ages for Firefox to load compared to Chrome, and sadly it never really recovered the user base even though the performance is vastly improved.
To be fair, even in 2006 the Mozilla corporation was never going to outspend Firefox
Especially not given how much Mozilla wastes on executive compensation ;)
Their user share was pretty okay for a while, but bombed when Chrome first released because it was much more performant. Unfortunately, that stigma never quite fell off and they lost a huge opportunity to overtake the market.
How was it more performant? As I remember it, Chrome was loading websites not noticeably faster than Firefox, as website loading speed depended and still depends mainly on your internet connection and hardware anyway.
As I remember it, Chrome exploded because it was pushed onto users at every possible opportunity while Firefox depended (and still depends) on users actively looking for it.
Used Google or Google products? Get ads for Chrome. Wanted to download Google Earth? You had to activly uncheck a box such that Chrome wasn’t going to be installed as well. Meanwhile no ads and not the same amount of exposure for Firefox.
That way they achieved a critical mass and snowballing did the rest. There were so many users using it that it was considered a good choice just because it was used by many people.
Regarding the performance aspect, if there even was a noticeable difference, it was worse than Firefox. Where else did the “Chrome eating RAM” memes come from?
I think you are misremembering. Chrome won at the start because it was fast as fuck and Firefox was not. Firefox caught back up in the 2016 time frame iirc and they’ve been back and forth ever since.
Ironically chrome was named so as a goal was to reduce the chrome of the UI and focus on the web content, something recent versions of chrome and Firefox have abandoned in favor of massive swaths of whitespace and giant chrome buttons (on Firefox you can enable “unsupported” compact mode to reclaim some of the space if you’re on a laptop)
For work, I use Chrome, but only because Firefox’s profile management is (more or less) nonexistent. Once they have that, which I understand isn’t too far out, I’m ditching Chrome entirely.
Have you thought about installing a Firefox fork? On my Work PC I use Firefox for work and Floorp for personal browsing.
won’t stop pihole
Man for real.
Laughs in Firefox
How long until the majority of the Internet is inaccessible to non-Chromium browsers because the pages “don’t support them”?
If it don’t work on Firefox I won’t use it. There are better FOSS options anyways
Sure as long as it’s not my bank or my employer or the gov official website for accessing my taxes…
I remember back in the day, doing all of my browsing in Firefox, and having IE6 on my desktop for the random few websites/tools that only worked in IE for one reason or another. That is becoming a reality already with Chrome, I need to occasionally use WebUSB, which only really Chrome supports, because Mozilla quite rightly refuses to implement the spec.
“WebUSB is a JavaScript application programming interface specification for securely providing access to USB devices from web applications”
Holy Hannah, NO!!!
Might as well allow a website to direct write to your hard drive unprompted again.
Does noone see how BAD this stuff is?
Stop creating attack vectors with glowing neon signs on them.
Except it’s a very good thing for 2FA USB keys which prevent people from gaining access unless they have physical access to the key. Also useful for USB gamepads etc
Web engines are nearly OSs at this point. It’s aready possible to flash a phone ROM in two clicks with a webpage. Most apps are also already rendered in browser engines anyway, that includes things like steam. The APIs might sound evil until your favorite FOSS project uses them to make your life better.
Unfortunately, if Mozilla refuses to implement stuff like PWAs or advanced APIs it’s locked out of that side of innovation both good and bad.
It’s aready possible to flash a phone ROM in two clicks
That’s precisely the kind of access that a web browser should NEVER, EVER have.
If you think 2 stage download keylogger apps getting into app stores is bad, wait until it can be done with a banner ad. Or by viewing a comment on a post.
I would close my bank account and such to a different bank. It takes literally 5 minutes to open one online.
And yes, I would not work for a company that doesn’t support Firefox
I would also keep pestering support of the government website, that one I will have to give to you
I don’t think that’s going to be the case. People will find workarounds. The whole point of these alternative browsers is to use the web in whatever way the developers think their user base wants to use it. If the web is inaccessible to non-chromium browsers then people will spoof their browser to the site to look like a chromium browser.
That isn’t necessarily going to be possible. There are many diverse fingerprinting techniques, I really don’t think it would be trivial to spoof them all. User agent is easy but stuff like TLS fingerprinting is much harder to spoof.
If we get to the point where the corporatocracy can force us into a limited set of compliant browsers then the web as we know it has ended. I don’t think they’ll go that far unless they decide to go whole hog. That level of control will likely look to wipe out any useful plugins like ad-blockers or other privacy features. I didn’t want to go down the slippery slope argument, but that’s pretty much what will happen if they go that direction.
We’re kind of already there - there’s Chromium, Webkit and Gecko and that’s about it, two of which are controlled by the biggest ad companies in the world, and the third is heavily subsidised by the first. Mozilla was effectively forced into implementing DRM into the browser already, and there’s plenty of other “””standards””” published and approved by Google that Mozilla is pressured into implementing but doesn’t want to for security and privacy reasons.
I definitely expect it’ll get worse.
I remember the “works best on IE” warnings of old, looks like we might be heading back there.
Honestly the way the internet is going do you need access to the majority of the internet? I feel like its pretty dead as it is now already.
Lemmy will still work because we mostly use Firefox, and i bet the same will hold true for many others.
Basically the moment mainstream internet becomes google only you will see nerds build new websites specifiably to cater to the non google crowd and i trust random internet nerds a hack of a lot more than a monopoly corporation.
BRING IT ON GOOGLE!, YOU CAN INITIATE THE PUSH TO CREATE A NEW BETTER INTERNET. ^Create demand for freedom trough your suppressive enforments^
Oh yeah nothing bad could ever happen from effectively removing an entire section of the population from certain parts of the Internet completely.
I can’t imagine that ever going badly.
For this reason, we must still take a stand against this stuff.
Laughs in Waterfox
Laughs in earthfox
Laughs in airfox
Laughs in avatarfox
Laughs in electrofox
Laughs in long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony fox
Laughs in Captain Planetfox
Wait, wrong 5 elements
With your powers combined, I am Internet Explorer 7!
laughs in icefox
Firefox Forever!!
It’s weird that I’ve been on firefox for the vast majority of my life and I always had this perception that “everyone” was using it. Here in lemmy you hear about it all the time, my friends use it, I see it on my newsfeeds etc
But when you check the market share it around 2.8% while chrome is 65.1% https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
I was at my parents house last week because i had to help them with their laptop. I told my mom about firefox and she was very confused because she doesn’t seem to understand that google chrome is a browser and that every browser can access google search or their banking site.
It took a bit of effort to explain that firefox works the exact same but is safer and faster.
She is now using firefox on her phone because i showed her ublock origin works with it to block ads.
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that google chrome isn’t the internet and what exactly a browser is.
I feel like “most people” only learn “one technology per category”. They know of, one operative system, one browser, one app to mindless scroll, one program to edit text. As a developer it shocks me a little because I’m always eager to try new programming languages, technologies and ways to interact with things. I guess most people only know about edge/safari because they come pre-installed
How is that shocking?
I use Linux, Firefox, Lemmy, nano. Why would I change?
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that google chrome isn’t the internet and what exactly a browser is.
It’s been that way for a lot longer than chrome has been the big one, it used to be the same with internet explorer…
I remember a point around 2015ish where a lot of web apps went from recommending Firefox and Chrome for the best experience to just Chrome. Now I often see “don’t use Firefox” as a support tactic.
This post reminded me to try out Brave. It’s based on Chromium but purports to block ads and trackers…
Anybody else use it?
Edit: Interesting. Anyone care to explain the downvotes? I know nothing about this browser other than it purportedly blocks Youtube ads, which are driving me nuts.
Edit2: Well shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
I had no idea about this guy. Ok, so completely not an option.
My brother uses it, just remember to look through the ad settings. There was a toggle at one point to allow their approved ads or something like that.
i tried brave recently after finding out it’s open source, and that setting is off by default. ended up keeping firefox, because on android somehow the new tab page in brave is even worse than in ff. too tricky to access bookmarks.
I still to this day don’t know how to get back to the tab I was on in firefox-android if I get to the new tab screen. It’s been 2 or 3 years since the redesign.
you need to close keyboard, hit the tab icon on the address bar and select the tab. easier way is to open some recent website and either close the current one or swipe from the address bar. it’s stupid.
No I’m pro lgbtq folks having rights
Too bad for your little black and white worldview those are the same people against adblockers. The good thing is this world has sensible people like me who could give less of a fuck who’s feeling is getting hurt and only care about our browsing experience. The rest can go die for all I care.
What the actual duck are you talking about? I genuinely can’t figure it out.
As with others, I use Firefox for my main browser, and Brave when I need a Chromium-based browser for something. I don’t see many ads…
Consider ungoogled chromium instead. Brave is not great, it just has the advantage of being heavily promoted by the middle part of the (privacy nerds) and (want privacy because their beliefs are rejected by most of human society) venn diagram.
I use that on my personal computer, but at work I’ll occasionally hit sites other than what I’m debugging, and Chromium has ineffective ad-block, whereas Brave has reasonable ad-block. I can’t control the network at work like I can at home, so I can’t really rely on something like a pi-hole or whatever.
As a web browser with an embedded ad-blocker, it works fine. I’m not going to stop using something because someone distasteful is using it, I’ll stop using it if it no longer meets my needs. It blocks ads and renders as Chrome would, so it works well enough for me.
I disable the crypto nonsense and pretty much only use it for debugging work stuff. Sometimes that means I need a JSON formatter or something, and those sites are riddled with ads w/o an ad-blocker.
oh, hrm. Im not sure what specific build you’re using, but the one I’m using has mechanisms for installing normal adblockers like ublockorigin. note: afaik, this doesn’t solve the problem indicated in this thread – I’m operating on the basis that the blocking functionality will be nerfed. However for me, I use it purely for (stuff that doesnt work in firefox) and my jellyfin server (since firefox is kinda particular about hevc videos…you can kinda get them to work in windows, but in many cases I dont fully understand jellyfin still tries to transcode to 264).
worth stating that “because someone distasteful is using it” is a reasonable misunderstanding due to me assuming some knowledge. Brave was created because firefox kicked a homophobe out and he wanted to make a browser. Said person is also clearly a cryptonut, which makes him a yet more negative person in my book. Now, unrelated to that base, you have a lot of people out there who are promoting it by my personal experience in more privacy centric groups is that these promoters are often quite…unsavory. Is that enough to stop using software? not necessarily. Is it enough when there are far better options out there? to me, absolutely.
At home, it’s whatever ships with my Linux distribution. I use it mostly for web dev testing (I dev on Firefox, test on chromium) for personal projects, and for my kids to play certain games (Firefox works most of the time for that).
Brave was created because firefox kicked a homophobe out and he wanted to make a browser.
Sort of, but I don’t think that’s really telling the whole story.
Brendan Eich was the CEO of Mozilla for many years and was the initial creator of JavaScript. He was ousted because he made a private donation to block gay marriage legalization in California. There is no evidence that he was or is a homophobe, just that he didn’t believe that gay marriage was something that state should legally recognize. By all counts, he was pleasant to work with regardless of sexual orientation, the issue was that someone found out about his donation. He didn’t harm anyone and wasn’t unfair, he just made a private donation.
I think he was a great CEO, and Mozilla needs a technical CEO imo (in fact, everything started going downhill around when he left). I disagree with him politically, but if I avoided every product where I disagreed with the executive team politically, I’d have to avoid pretty much every product (and quit my job).
So I need a better reason to avoid Brave. I’m not sure what the plan is for their cryptocurrency, and I honestly see it as more of a gimmick than anything. It’s easy to disable, so whatever, it existing doesn’t impact me.
I also don’t actively recommend it to anyone, I always recommend Firefox or a Firefox derivative. The only time I recommend it is if someone needs a Chromium-based browser and wants ad-blocking, and Brave works well for that. If they just need Chromium and don’t need ad blocking, I recommend Chromium.
If you have a better alternative, I’m interested. I literally just need a Chromium-based browser that works on macOS (what I use for work) with proper ad blocking. I don’t need to sync anything, it’ll only ever exist on that one device. I also need something for Linux, and open source is more important than ad blocking there.
I’m also interested in Brave Search since it uses its own index. I currently use DDG, but search results are kinda crappy so I’m looking for alternatives.
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
I use Firefox everywhere which means I have ads blocking everywhere, including and especially on Android. All my tabs are synced and are easily transferred between devices.
If we want to be honest, Firefox on Android has way worse performance than Chrome.
(But I still use it instead of Chrome)
It depends I think. I found Chrome to be a tiny bit faster but then ads bogged the page down so most of the time, Firefox is faster for me.
In some very rare cases when I need to disable ads blocking, Chrome is indeed faster but I’d rather abandon websites rather than disable ads blocking.
So if you love ads, Chrome is better. If you hate ads like I do, Firefox is miles ahead.
There are other ways to block ads. Adguard does a great job on Android. It establishes a local VPN, so it can do HTTP[S] content filtering in addition to DNS blocking.
Can’t use my VPN and adguard at the same time iirc, unless android has two active VPN “slots” now. Can’t bring a pihole with me 24/7 either as much as I would like to.
There’s always nextdns.io that can be configured to use ad blocking filters on the dns level. You can set it up on your phone as well
Can I use it in conjunction with my normal VPN? AFAIK android has only one active VPN slot available at a time.
Yes because there is no need to setup another VPN. You only configure the DNS settings (Private DNS). I know that Mullvad on PC has an option to use custom DNS server
Long live Firefox.
hear ye
Pretty great outcome for firefox really.
I don’t think firefox numbers will get a huge & immediate bump, but I think that over time it will support a reputation for firefox as being cool different and just plain better.
I can’t imagine raw-dogging the internet without an ad blocker in 2024. I’m aware that most people aren’t bothered by ads, but surely… surely some people might be interested in blocking them if they become aware that it’s possible and easy.
They already don’t let you add ublock origin to chrome on mobile. I had to teach my elderly mother to use Waterfox with the extension, but as a plus side she can now turn on desktop-site and and turn the screen off without interrupting her hokey crystal meditation flute music [3 hours].
Are they going to do this on Edge? Please don’t judge me. I love the “Continue on Mobile” feature.
Is that only for Chrome or all Chromium-based browsers?
First one, then the others eventually.
Just use Firefox :)
I’ll stick with Safari thank you very much. I don’t trust Firefox any more than I do Chrome. They have too much of a history of shady stuff.
OK, they asked about Chromium, though.
Switching from Chrome to Firefox is like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
Not even remotely
