What could go wrong when you let an ad company dictate the browser standards/rules.
I know we have Firefox and some forks like librewolf, but percentage wise it feels like a lost battle ( even if I am on Firefox ).
If only people switched en masse to Firefox for the ad blocker. Wouldn’t that be something… One big collective FU to Google.
Oh well. One can dream I guess.
And what? If someone can live with ads, they can stay. Otherwise anyone can install Firefox. I was all-in Google since the beginning of Gmail. And switching to Firefox was completely painless. Everything works the same, times of website incompatibility are long gone.
What if websites decide that chrome users earn much more ad revenue and start forcing users to switch with those “This website only supports Chrome” error messages? What if this practice gets popular? I’m sure there are ways to get around it, but the average users who bothered switching to Firefox at all, will just conclude that anything except chrome has a bad browsing experience.
Then apple would whip out their giant throbbing cock and smack them with it because they want people using safari.
Can’t you have your Firefox browser just report itself as chrome?
Because Google is trying to turn the internet into a walled garden where only people with Chrome can visit the majority of websites.
Maybe part of the monopoly ruling will have chrome taken away from them.
I’ve been been a full time Firefox user for three years now. Haven’t experience a single problem like that. Haven’t really experienced any problem at all to be honest
Unfortunately that has not been the case for me. Some sites for buying concert tickets don’t seem to like Firefox.
I’ve had problems with several Microsoft sites we use internally for work ever since Edge went to Chrome.
It’s not Firefox’s fault. Mozilla is abiding by web standards.
If you find any websites that don’t work with firefox, you should report them to Mozilla. Firefox has a list of known bad websites, and has fixes for them, usually just a user agent override.
Your past experiences with Firefox are irrelevant because we’re talking about the future.
I know. My experience with Chrome used to be good too. And we all know what’s up now.
If Firefox fucks up, I’m fine with abandoning ship and moving on to the next thing. I’m not sure what that would be, but I’m sure I’ll figure that out once we get there.
That’s the problem. Google is working so that there’s not going to be a next thing.
That is concerning, but Internet Explorer used to be the only option too. Of course things are different now, but I have faith (for lack of anything else).
That was for a different reason, though. That was Microsoft forcing you to use their software on something you owned. A website can say, “you have to use chrome to access our site,” and that’s not antitrust behavior on the part of Google.
Thats the thing.
There is basically no alternative. Firefox exists on the mercy of google which is its biggest donor.
There are very few attempts at a truly open source browser and neither can tackle the biggest problem, which is google pushing websites to adopt their standards, weaponizing ad income to guarantee compliance.
Currently more then 80% of internet users have a chromium browser while websites creation for many entities is often outsourced out of lack of own IT knowledge. When firefox dies there will be no economic insensitive to build sites accessible by anything but chromium.
Low key i wish this fires back into anarchy. I hate the corporate web and the only sites i like to see are those free of economic insensitive and all in on an ethical free digital world.
Incentive
try changing your user-agent to mock chrome in Firefox while you visit YouTube.
you should see a drastic difference in UX.
I tried YouTube in Chrome on desktop (for about 2 minutes) and I didn’t notice any difference. I’ll just keep using NewPipe on my phone though.
it takes a whole 10 extra seconds for the interface to be usable for me in Firefox. but not when I spoof the user-agent as chrome.
at least that’s how it was about 4 months ago.
Do you use YouTube?
NewPipe exclusively. YouTube has been unusable long before I fully moved back to FireFox.
times of website incompatibility are long gone
I wish I could agree with that. Hell, I have to use Chrome to download my phone bill from Virgin, and a couple of others don’t work.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming FF. It’s these lazy web developers that only target Chrome. I’m sure Safari users get the same shit experience.
times of website incompatibility are long gone.
cries in dev
I’ve cried also in dev a lot in the past, but mostly don’t cry so much anymore
some people dont want firefox bcs its kinda slower then chromium based tbh but it aint bad am not saying firefox is bad
They’re not that different any longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883
Oh
I really wish Firefox implemented easily switchable browser profiles. I am use Firefox mainly but for work I’ll still use edge so I can use this feature.
firefox.exe -P -no-remote
I don’t know exactly what part of a separate profile you are after, so this may not be a 100% substitute, but I found container tabs in Firefox to work quite well (with some extensions to improve UX). It’s still the same profile though, so passwords and history are shared.
Yep so happy with Firefox having switched back a couple years ago.
Hopefully wikipedia recognizes this as the official Canary in the Chrome mine. I was first impressed with chrome book because of seeing them used for education, getting my own laptop during school would’ve been mindblowing to kid me. I was unimpressed with the strangulation process of the OS but again shocked when they added a linux boot mode. There needs to be better alternatives by now, I would be ok with an OS developed by the department of education in conjunction with higher educational institutions. Could have a decent non-profit approach to a browser and ad blockers could legitimately be built in as a “protect the children” aim of approach.
I take it you’ve never been involved in such an endeavor? What you propose would take a decade a minimum due to the sheer number of nested advisory committees that would be required for those groups to interface. Better a non-profit group begins the work and then solicits these group’s input at the design stage.
Can we get a fork orba dedicated browser that stays on manifest v2? Even Firefoxs lack of plans is disconcerting. I want expmicit plans to not play along
How many times has this been announced already?
Yes
We’ve known this was coming for a while now . . . but I suppose not everyone reads tech news.
one might say that this piece of news is the… canary… in the coal mine?
shrugs in Firefox
Careful, there are some edgy people out there who don’t want to use more than one browser because Firefox doesn’t work with their cameras /s
Meanwhile, I’ll still be using Firefox too
Who needs to give their browser access to their camera?
I do this with Discord and Zoom as an alternative to installing their actual apps. 99% of the functionality is there anyway, and the 1% is stuff I don’t want anyway
People who have to use their browser for telehealth and virtual teller banking access.
Sadly these are also things that require better security.
Yup. Firefox doesn’t work for me unfortunately, so I have to maintain Chrome on at least one device for these things
I use Firefox for some teleconferencing, but my therapist’s software only works on chrome
Hey, member when you always had to have IE for one of “those” sites and it was basically just an awful browser everyone was forced to have like as a legal requirement or something?
Heh. IE. Then when you’d use it to download firefox it’d say “Nooooo! Wait! I’m teh Best Browser!!” Hahahahah
IE. Ded.
May be bad phrasing, but Firefox doesn’t support h.265 so there’s limitations with streaming video on some camera platforms and other sites.
TIL Firefox doesn’t support HEVC. Hadn’t really noticed that before, I guess it’s why some Jellyfin streams started transcoding for me.
It is supported in the nightly build and full support is in the works currently.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/hevc-support/idc-p/63424/highlight/true#M36557
Neither does it support HDR content
I use MS teams for meetings every day at work, in Firefox, in Linux. It’s nice that even the camera works when I need it to.
People who use Webex, zoom, etc for one use in try browser and don’t normally use those links. Happens at work when an outside vendor doesn’t use what we do.
It’s so frustratingly annoying. I primarily use Firefox, but switch to Chrome for specific Google services on my mobile. Once in a while, the search suggests I take a photo? Why?
Y’all got any more of that data?
/Google
You say that like they didn’t just remove several other adblock extensions themselves
No they didn’t.
They’re still there. Ublock origin is the god-tier adblock, and it’s still there. It’s even a Recommended by Mozilla extension.
I know people on Lemmy often, for some reason, hate Mozilla more than Google or Microsoft, but Mozilla very much still caters to people who want to block ads, despite the disinformation on Lemmy.
Except they didn’t… If you read more than headlines
From what I’ve heard, they only “removed” uBlock Origin Lite. Normal uBO is still up.
Actually, they flagged UBO Lite and the dev removed it himself in a fit of pique.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2474353/popular-ad-blocker-removed-from-firefox-extension-store.html
and they only flagged it because it violated privacy rules
The one they removed isn’t relevant until Firefox also removes manifest V2 which they have no plans for.
Firefox has a different manifest v3 that still retains webrequest functionality, so even when they do switch over it’ll be fine.
shrugs in books
They have no idea how stubborn I am.
I used to recommend uBlock as a no-brainer, now folks really need to change towards a better browser.
Or get network wide blocking. Doesn’t prevent everything but it does prevent most ads. Makes the internet tolerable at least.
nah, lets get them switched away from chromium based spy machines.
Not everyone can. Work machines for instance.
Can’t install extensions on a work machine but you can add a network wide blocker?
Possibly, if you work from home
Wouldn’t a company VPN bypass all that even though you are using your own internet connection to connect to the outside world?
Maybe, I guess I don’t know enough to answer that. I do know that being on a company VPN isn’t always a requirement, though.
Either way, I’m not trying to argue for one approach to ad blocking over another as a one-size-fits-all solution, I just wanted to point out that it’s possible to have more control over the network than the computer in some cases.
sadly, agreed. mindshare leads to adoption, tho - so putting Firefox in front of more faces is always a positive. after all, its how google dominates.
Depends on how lax the IT department is when it comes to random executables. I was able to move the firefox installer to the appdata root, and run a non-admin install to my user profile.
I recommended pihole to my senior webdeveloper. She didn’t know about it and was blown away by the concept. She installed it immediately and is now living happily ad free.
Something like NextDNS as a no-brainer? It works but hits the limit of the free tier if people use it beyond their phone.
PiHole and a TailScale exit node so you can use it for DNS whether or not you’re on your home network.
Or a variation of this is TailScale configured to use NextDNS and a TS exit node. That’s for anyone who doesn’t want to maintain a PiHole. I’ve done both. Personal choice.
ControlD then.
Didn’t see this coming. Thanks for reporting it 😁
It did its job then. Gave warning.
🐥⛏️
“I’ve got the black lung papa.” cough
-Chrome Canary
Ad Lung
coughs up product placements
also coughs up scams and malware
Are Opera and it’s derivatives affected by this?
Yes. There’s only 3 major browsers. Chromium (Chrome), Firefox, WebKit (Safari). Nearly every other webbrowser is a fork of one of these, most are forks of Chromium, including Opera. As such, most webbrowsers will be affected by the change.
Chrome browser = chromium plus Google
Samsung browser = chromium plus garbage
Brave browser = chromium plus crypto and homophobia
Brave browser = chromium plus crypto and homophobia
the crypto stuff can be opt out tho
And yet, the homophobia can’t be
i didnt mention the homophobia bcs it was unrelated to what i was saying
Should probably add this info about Mozilla funding almost exclusively from Google but at least they haven’t disabled mv2 extensions yet. Even though they put in a fucking opt-out ad telemetry setting in recent releases.
I don’t think it should’ve been opt-out, but Mozilla’s ad metrics development is very much the direction ads on the web should go in. It is impossible to determine who you are from the data. It’s a way to still have ad revenue funding the content we all consume, while also still maintaining privacy. It’s a good thing. It’s just the opt-out aspect for existing installs that’s bad.
That said, I’m personally a proponent of just using adblock lol
I also use adblocking at multiple levels so it wasn’t a huge thing for me (been blocking Pocket and other bullshit for years at the dns and network levels) but I still feel like Mozilla witnessed Google going for broke with killing mv2 and inline ads on YouTube and decided wellll our existing users probably wouldn’t notice or care if we slipped in an opt-out fuckery… But we did. Immediately.
For any browser trying to sell itself as “the only privacy browser on the market” this was a dumb fucking move by any metric. Like why not just openly admit we’re going with the Brave browser model?
Is Chrome’s ad telemetry opt-in?
No it’s not. But if we’re hoping Firefox will be better in some way we’d expect more from them. Wouldn’t we?
Good, hopefully I can convince my friends to switch over
What’s duck duck go’s browser?
DuckDuckGo’s webbrowser is somewhat unique, in the sense that it isn’t its own browser at all. It’s a “WebView”, using the OS built-in webbrowser with a coat of paint.
This means it’s Blink/Chromium on Android and Windows, and WebKit on iOS and macOS.
depends on the OS!
DuckDuckGo uses the default rendering engine of whatever OS you use it on, so webkit (also used by safari) on macOS and iOS and blink (also used by edge and chrome) on windows and android
even if it uses the same rendering engine on some platforms, it’s not based on chromium, so it’s not a chromium browser
Chromium.
imagine opera and opera gx 💀
Why would you use a Chinese browser?
what does the browser being Chinese have to do with anything?
You really don’t see a problem installing software from an authoritarian regime that spies on basically everyone and everything and has 0 privacy protection?
Are you talking about America lol
the chinese government isn’t making every software that’s made in china lol
like yea, opera is spyware, but so are chrome, safari and edge, and none of these are made in china
I don’t?
My friends do though sadly
Not this with built-in adblockers, despite someone’s wishes.
Their adblockers suck though, especially on youtube
I’m being downvoted heavily on Reddit for suggesting thorium instead of Chrome.
My guess is bots as thorium is way faster and the dev hates the thought of a chromium browser without Adblock.
Moronically I think the Reddit hive mind is following that opinion and I may have to delete the comment or face site wide blacklisting which is what usually happens.
Thorium doesn’t support secure streaming, so while it was amazeballs fast, it wasn’t useful. Ended up picking Vivaldi for watching streaming.
tbh i dont like thoriums update cycle you stay on 1 version for 4 months the firefox fork is even worse thats why i use ungoogled chromium instead
Kinda agree it should have an update built in, I’m using Chris Titas/Titus update script to update it.
Which to be honest doesn’t seem to update it much.
I’m mostly basing my use on it being quite fast and the dev cursing out Google and swearing to keep Ublock.
I mean like chrome version updates and stuff
Didn’t thorium had some drama the other day though?
First I’ve heard of it honestly, I’m in the weird position I don’t really trust Google or Mozilla so all I’m using is forks.
If those go ad crazy I’m kinda screwed.
i am pretty sure it was resolved and explained , crisis Titus also had a video but ever since its members only and i cannot find a reupload.
I’ll take your word for it but between all the nonsense Google and Mozilla have pulled I’m not sure where to place my belief.
I’m sticking to thorium for now because it’s fast and does what I want in a browser
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