So … can we like finally dismiss Google Chrome as the obviously awful idea it is and which should never have made it this far and remind all of the web devs married to it that they’re doing bad things and are the reason why we can’t have nice things?
Hmmm … a web browser owned by a monopolistic advertising company … how could that possibly go wrong!!!
Do you remember the Internet Explorer days? This, unfortunately, is still much better.
Pretty good reason to switch the Firefox, now. Nearly everything will work, unlike the Internet Explorer days.
- Firefox User
I think some people overestimate how many will migrate to Firefox in the near future over this.
- High switching cost compared to finding another extension (e.g. uBO Lite), even if the resulting experience is worse.
- Just as many Firefox users like Firefox, lots of Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don’t want to lose that.
- The kind of tech-aware person who’d switch over this is much more likely to have seen the news months ago and taken action already.
As fun as it is to imagine an Adpocalypse shocking the masses and pushing them to try out alternatives to big tech, it’s also way too optimistic, I feel.
The uBlock Origin chrome extension
hashad 34 million users. Chrome has 3.45 billion users.Even if every uBlock user switched, it’s less than 1% of chrome users.
Yeah, I thought about mentioning that. But the comparison goes both ways. Less than 1% of Chrome users switching to Firefox could still mean an increase in Firefox users of over 10%, if I remember my numbers correctly. That’d be a sweet boost for most products.
Ya, it’d still be huge for Firefox, but what I’m really getting at is that even with this change, Chrome is going nowhere. They’re the big fish, they can afford to make these kinds of changes, because the people who care are a very small minority.
To be fair, nerds will tell their tech-illiterate friends about this change and probably influence them enough to consider it. Especially when it’s something as easy as downloading an application.
It’s much easier to switch a browser then it is to stop using Google, Facebook, etc.
Depends on their methodology. Sure, a huge proportion of those are users who haven’t heard of uBO, but we’re forgetting a lot of caveats:
- Electron exists and lots of apps are built on top of it and identify as “Chrome”. Judging by the numbers most have been weeded out, but some edge cases do visit more sites so they end up in the count.
- A lot of workplaces mandate the browser, which is often Chrome. This also gets counted.
- A not insignificant amount of Firefox users change their useragent to Chrome.
All of these skew the numbers towards Chrome. Some Chrome users use a different adblocker which lowers the uBO statistic.
I’ve been on Firefox since manifest v3 was announced. Firefox has its own shortcomings but no dealbreakers.
And then there are Safari users who are watching from the sidelines.
1 year ago I had basically free Spotify Premium because Safari was unable to play ads. That’s a kind of ad blocking.
And you ran zero ad blockers in Safari and on your network?
No ad blocker. This bug started to break song playback on Safari (according to Spotify’s forums, I faced no such problem) and then it was fixed so I got ads.
My friends will stick to chrome, I switched to Firefox months ago. You’re right
I think probably the single most important thing that nobody is saying is that Google have ALL the numbers on this decision and they are not stupid, so it would be silly to assume this will work against their interests. Not only do they know how many people use chrome, their ad network gives them insight into ALL browsers.
I agree folks are overestimating how many will switch. but also maybe you’re underestimating too - a lot of browser installations are managed by the “family tech guy”. the father, mother, brother, sister, aunt or uncle who sets up everyone’s new laptops on Christmas and has the suggestions when you look for a new phone. we all know the type. a lot of us are the type.
setting up granny’s laptop? I’ll install whatever browser lets me automatically block the most “1000th visitor!” banner ads and change the desktop icon to the old AOL icon because that’s all she knows the internet as. she doesn’t know of care about the browser options so it’s up to me. Chrome used to be fast and simple so it was the right choice. Firefox has caught up a fair bit on UX simplicity and speed and now offers better blocking and general security, so it just stole the crown for these installations imo. I trust it more to not let her mess the computer up, so even if I’m not using it as my main personal browser, it gets use here.
For what it’s worth, I hope you’re right.
- Just as some Firefox users like Firefox, many Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don’t want to lose that.
Do you have some source for that? IIUC, you mean that more Chrome users like Chrome than Firefox users like Firefox, right?
No. I simply meant that there exist Chrome users who appreciate what it provides them (features, UI, etc), so for these users to leave they’d have to give up those things. That’s always a hard ask.
Meh. They had plenty of time to move to Firefox but they ignored all the warnings.
It’s not like they contracted some sort of terminal illness. Anyone can migrate whenever. It’s not hard.
My organization has blocked all browsers other than Edge and Chrome - and has also blocked all plugins except for UBlock. For security reasons, of course.
And I mean, there’s still time now. Switching browsers isn’t that bad. Export+import some bookmarks and adjust some settings, good to go.
I think FF has been a good option for a while. But the second best time is now. I can totally get it if people didn’t want to switch until they had more of a concrete problem.
In case anyone here needs this
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-chrome-firefox
I’m in the process of switching to firefox on all my devices.
I’ve had enough of Google pushing features like this.
Having ublock on mobile is such a breath of fresh air. I wish I had made the transition sooner. I knew this was coming and completed my transition a few weeks back so I could abandon Chrome on my own time table and not on Google’s. Other than a little headache trying to find extension replacements for pc, I’m LOVING it.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox in 2019 because that’s when Google adopted Manifest V3 and I never looked back. There were already articles then describing how it’d break ad blockers, and Firefox had at the time just recently released their “Quantum” overhaul which drastically improved responsiveness.
I’m a bit surprised it took five years for Google to drop support for Manifest V2, but the threat has long been there.
I remember the Quantum release. They remade how the browser handled tabs, and with the new release you could handle (almost) unlimited number of tabs. I tried this buy opening as many tabs as I could, it worked flawlessly. I can’t even remember how it was before that, except that it was RAM intensive.
I use Firefox as my main on my home pc. I keep running into things that don’t work on Firefox. Not by saying they don’t, just by throwing errors that make it sound like I put the wrong data in a field. Is there some magic extension to fix that?
Firefox.
This is the way.
This is the way.
This is the way.
There’s only 34 million uBlock Origin users on Chrome? So, billions are using Chrome without any ad-blockers? That’s crazy and unsafe
Lemmy has a really biased idea of what the average computer user can do. Imagine Janet in accounting, who calls help desk to reset her password every morning, and takes 30 minutes to remember how to check her email. Or the late GenZ just entering the workforce, who was surprised that their desktop wasn’t a touchscreen, and doesn’t know how a file structure works, because literally every device they’ve used growing up has been either a tablet or a Chromebook. That’s the average user.
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My boss once asked me to take a look at her computer that was super slow and barely functional, and the thing that surprised me the most was that she had been running Chrome without any adblock since ever, and when I asked her about adblock, she answered: “adwhat?”. Mind you that she’s still a millennial, and only a few years older than me.
I had to use my parents desktop a when I flew home for a bit.
Surfing the internet is fucking stressful if you don’t have adblocks. So overstimulating!!
I’m also on windows and for some reason I had to use Edge.
The Edge home screen is the VERY REASON google killed it back in the 90s. Clean clear search screen. Allows you to think what you are doing with out getting bombarded with ads and posts and ads and markets. Reminded me how terrible the search experience was back in Alta Vista and Yahoo days
There are also loads of people using Edge.
There are billions of people on earth who don’t have access to a computer.
At this point I am seriously wondering why people would like to use Chrome over Firefox for instance.
“What’s a browser?” —the general populace
I just install uBlock Origin on every device I come across. Graffiti software.
Because I use chrome for standard use and Firefox for sailing the high seas. And I much prefer just having 2 separate browsers for containerization. I’m just going to have to use librewolf or something when I do get the the mv3 update.
Why not just use something like Fences on Firefox? It allows you to containerize individual tabs. I use it all the time to separate work and personal accounts.
Does this allow you enable/disable add-ons on a per container basis? What about bookmarks?
This is also how I have it set up, with “firefox multi-account containers” and “simple tab groups” working together, you can have multiple containerized accounts within one firefox instance. Works great!
Personal preference I guess. I’ve tried Firefox many times over the years and always ended up going back to other browsers. I find Firefox doesn’t render some pages quite right, the user agent stylesheet is odd, and the UI is less streamlined. Performance also used to be a problem although I hear it’s caught up now.
I used to be a Chrome user but now I prefer chromium based alternatives like brave and edge (which incidentally, uBO will keep working on). Chrome is still required for work, but uBO change won’t be an issue I think, there are plenty of other ad blockers that will work with MV3
I am using Firefox as of last week I made the switch to the browser a different password manager and so far it is fine but there have been a couple of hiccups but it’s not necessarily a Firefox issue but an implementation with Android issue.
For example auto forwarding to an app from a webpage in Firefox has worked half the time for me and the other half not so much.
This is a small example, having Google Chrome and like wise the Google app be native to Android so they move back and forth between one another and are interchangeable while using my phone is much more smooth on my Android device.
Other than that, I am not positive as to why. On Desktop, zero issues. Works like a charm.
Its cool well just message the maintainers of Android to improve it, I’m sure it’s a mistake. Lemme go check who who’s behind it… /s
I use multiple profiles in chrome for my different logged in usages, for some reason Firefox makes it hard to switch profiles.
Stallman was right.
I can’t listen or look at this man anymore after seeing him scrape shit off his feet and eat it in front of a bunch of people. 🤢
He has went on record multiple times saying having sex with children (even within the family) or family pets is fine. Eating his foot gunk is the least of my issues with him.
That said, when it comes to warning about software, he was pretty bang-on.
Post the link to him saying that having sex with children is okay
It’s pretty well-known at this point, I thought? Regardless:
“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”
RMS on June 28th, 2003
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. "
RMS on June 5th, 2006
"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
RMS on Jan 4th, 2013
You can find these on Stallman’s blog, which I believe is Stallman.org iirc. Just go to the dates I provided.
Yeah, necrophilia is fine as long as both parties are consenting.
When one of the parties objects, that is when the fun starts :D
I cannot find any of this on his blog, why didn’t you just link to his blog?
I did link to his blog… It’s stallman.org
I said from there you can go to the dates I provided.
I don’t wish to be rude, but do you really need this hand-holding? It took me less than 10 seconds to find a specific link to the first quote, for example:
https://stallman.org/archives/2003-mar-jun.html
Did you really look?
Stallman being pro-paedophila is not new information.
You pasted the domain not an actual blog post link. And you’re the one making these claims about him on a forum, does it really surprise you when someone asks for the source? Sorry you had to google something.
who
It’s a very searchable name
Too bad he spent all his energy getting Linux users to say GNU/Linux instead of talking about the real issues
Just because that’s all you ever listened to doesn’t mean that’s all he ever said.
We should all probably start donating to Firefox. Isn’t Google their main source of income?
There might come a time when they prefer to gut Firefox, forcing Mozilla to either reject uBlock Origin or die (or they could simply pull the plug on funding knowing they’ll earn more when people go back to Chrome-based browsers)
If they can pay 5-8 milion the CEO while laying off employees, they do not need donations.
Mozilla still does pretty good without any donations, and your donations will most definitely not be spent on Firefox.
Mozilla still does pretty good without any donations
because Google pays them so that they keep offering Google as the default search engine. now that Google has been declared a monopoly, they might not be allowed to do that anymore, which means Mozilla loses its funding.
Mozilla’s funding did mostly consist of the Google partnership (86%), but as you can see, it’s not their only source of income. And you really don’t need half a fucking billion just to develop a web browser, which is open source, which also gets community contributions. This is made pretty obvious by their current revenue (>$1,000,000,000) and their CEO’s whopping $5.6 million salary.
Don’t donate to a shitty for-profit that masks itself with their non-profit company. Instead donate to something like Ladybird, whom are currently in early development but have no plans on adding features that actively spy on you (FakeSpot, Pocket), and they don’t need $500 fucking million to develop a web browser.
And if you’re going to talk about Mozilla’s social work, just don’t. I’ve already seen it.
You have zero idea how much engineering it takes to create a standards compliant engine and then maintain it. “And you don’t need half a fucking billion just to develop a web browser”. Technically this is true if you are willing to use someone else’s web engine. Firefox aren’t doing that, and it requires huge investment to maintain their own engine. There is a reason only large companies these days (Apple, Google, Mozilla) have their own engines. The actual browser part is tiny compared to the engine. We are talking about something the size of the Linux kernel or bigger, that gets far less contributions from outside sources. It actually makes perfect sense they are looking at starting other projects when you think that all other companies that do this kind of work need those other projects to remain profitable. Web engine development from my understanding does not pay. You get almost the same amount of money using somebody else’s engine as you do developing your own, yet one costs way more.
The fact Mozilla manages to maintain a better web engine than Apple’s WebKit only from Google’s advertising money is actually incredible. Did I mention Apple didn’t even start that engine themselves? It’s based on KHTML. Chrome is in turn a WebKit derivative. Firefox on the other hand actually comes from Netscape, and was first developed under the name Mozilla based on Netscape’s code. So Mozilla has put in more work than Google in modernising their engine.
Thank you. Yes, they are also developing their own web engine, which is a very complicated piece of software because of the current sad state of the web. But it doesn’t excuse any of the things I mentioned, and web engine development still doesn’t suckle up that much money as we can see from their current revenue and other efforts to make an independent web engine such as Ladybird.
I do not mind Mozilla starting other projects, but if you’re talking about FakeSpot or Pocket which are getting integrated into the “more private alternative to browsers like Internet Explorer, and now Chrome” by the “non-profit” whom “prioritize people and their privacy over profits”, I think you need to take a look at those privacy policies I linked in my previous comment.
I agree with you on your last paragraph, but there are some things I’m bothered with. Mozilla is (or was) a company that focused on one thing, their web browser. Apple and Google are (and were) different, in that they have a vast range of products to maintain. And Gecko is most definitely inferior to Blink in terms of speed, although I’m not familiar with any of their “modernity”.
I’ve read the one for fakespot. Given what it’s designed to do then having your purchase history makes perfect sense. How else are they meant to make recommendations? If you really have a problem just don’t use that service. The only real criticism here is the name doesn’t imply they also make product recommendations. Nevertheless they explain that on the website.
I have skimmed the pocket one, and as far as I can tell they aren’t doing anything dodgy. Keeping information only to provide the service, and some anonymised analytics to see how it’s actually being used. The later is needed to direct development effort.
In summary: Not everyone is out to get you. Some information is needed to provide services.
Edit: sorry for there different comments, wanted to come back and do more research before I finished making a statement.
Yeah, no problem at all. This is a lot better than people downvoting and not actually talking about what they disagree on. Felt like r/apple.
Reading it again, Pocket’s privacy policy is actually not that bad. Thankfully it was not one of those 100 page ones that are made to confuse the shit out of consumers, but I have a slight problem with it.
“Personalized Advertising: Some Pocket web pages have ads. With your consent, Pocket’s ad partners will place advertising cookies on your device to personalize the ads you see here and on other websites.”
How does this consent exactly work? Is it just a simple check you have to tick in your account settings, or is it one of those cookie banners that require you to untick 800 advertising partners to “not give consent”? I’m not exactly a Pocket user so I’m a bit ignorant about it.
Though there doesn’t seem to be another privacy concern with Pocket. It seems I had misconceptions about their practices.
The one other problem I have with Pocket though is, it’s not a feature that should be in a browser, it should be an extension. They have already made a lot of extensions for features that not all of the userbase might need, even FakeSpot is currently an extension (approximately 40,000 users). I guess this is a whole another argument though.
I will write my thoughts about FakeSpot in another reply.
Okay, what does a sweepstake or a contest have to do with a browser extension, made to spot fake reviews. Trade shows? What?
I did take a look at this privacy policy before to check if the extension was worth installing, but holy fuck I didn’t see that.
And they collect a lot of things, supposedly “automatically”. I have never developed a browser extension, but does the browser force this information on the extension? Do they just look at their data collection and find the geolocation of their users, how they accessed the extension download page, browser specifics etc.?
They also sell your “automatically collected” geolocation data, “internet or other electronic network activity”, “inferences drawn from other personal information to create a profile about a consumer”, and “commercial information”. I’ve quoted the three data selling points I really don’t understand, since their “descriptions” aren’t very descriptive. But if we are to fully trust the lawful descriptions they provided, I hope the extension stays at 40,000 users really.
other efforts to make an independent web engine such as Ladybird.
Notice the word efforts here. No one has actually succeeded yet despite multiple attempts, some even by Mozilla themselves like Servo. Ladybird is not a fully functioning browser yet. Are they anywhere even close yet? Even if they are close it also has to be fast. Google and Mozilla have spent quite a bit of time, money, and effort making their JavaScript engines as fast as possible.
I will have a look at some of the links you have given, but honestly I think most criticism thrown at Mozilla isn’t anything close to what the alternatives are guilty of, and is mostly done by conspiracy nuts. The kind of people were Mastodon and Lemmy is their only social media, and refuse to own a modern smartphone that isn’t running custom firmware.
Ladybird is fairly new. Just like how Mozilla didn’t get Gecko to this point in 1 year, Ladybird will take years of development to become a reliable browser and browser engine.
I pretty much agree with you. The alternatives are far worse. Seeing Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge being literal spyware, other Chromium-based browsers cutting out support for content-blocking extensions Firefox is vastly superior to them in terms of privacy. Although that still doesn’t mean Firefox is good, at least if we’re past talking about web browser engines etc., using another Firefox-based browser which is less bloated (Firefox Sync off by default, no Pocket, no recommendations in Addons tab), more privacy-friendly (all telemetry off by default, uBlock Origin installed by default, some hardening options from about:config enabled by default) seems to be the best choice currently, since other options like GNOME’s Epiphany and KDE’s Falkon sucks, if we’re being honest.
And I do kind of fit your description, if we exclude being a conspiracy-theorist.
Oh also the devs behind Ladybrid are apparently against anyone who isn’t male using their technology. People tried to change masculine pronouns in the documentation to neutral pronouns just to be more grammatically accurate, and it started a whole chain of GitHub arguments arguing the change is “political”. Apparently it’s political not to imply that every computer user is a man.
There are many software from bigots and shitheads that still get used, being seperated from their creator (e.g. Hyprland, I guess you can put here some social media platforms like Xitter if we’re not only talking about open-source software). Although I prefer not using or supporting such software, I’ve not been able to find what you’re talking about. I’ve tried searching “ladybird pronoun controversy (forgive my search engine skills)” and other similar sentences but nothing really related pops up, so it would be great if you told me your source. Thank you!
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You’re absolutely right, ~80% of Mozilla’s revenue is from Google’s paying to be the default search engine in Firefox - and the US is going after Google for it’s anticompetitive behaviors as we speak. Ad blocking aside, Mozilla is going to need help pretty soon anyways if Google gets their monopoly broken up.
Possibly when the US government decides to break Google up next week.
Screw the mozilla foundation. My only hope at this point is that Ladybird or one of the other projects produces something viable one of these days.
Used Chrome forever, switched to Firefox back when this stuff first started going down. No ragerts.
No Rugrats!
Simple solution. Don’t use Chrome.
Ive been testing out ungoogled chrome with uBlock, and it still seems to be working. But I think I’m going to add Waterfox along side of my Firefox to look at that one also.
But I’m also not sure you can install uBlock anymore from the Chrome repository either.
Not sure about the repo route, never went that deep with Chrome. Firefox has always been my mainstay (and Netscape before it.)
Huh… I couldn’t tell with all the Firefox I use.
How long until YouTube blocks Firefox?
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With Google providing 80% of Mozilla’s finding, I think we can all see whats going to happen next.
I feel like this isn’t talked about enough. Sure
just use Firefox
But for how long is it gonna work that way until they too deprecate v2
Don’t worry. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Personally I feel like I’m too addicted to Youtube (and Reddit, which is what brought me back here), so if I can’t block ads, perhaps I’ll be able to quit. To be honest though, even just disabling watch history and reducing subscriptions makes a massive difference to how addictive it is.
The Google payments were never guaranteed for Mozilla. If they didn’t have a backup plan in place to reduce spending, that’s on them. Let Mozilla return to its garage opensource roots.
