If you value privacy, ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox now

Frost Wolf@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 3177 points –
fastcompany.com

With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.

988

You are viewing a single comment

Most people aren’t concerned about privacy outside of places like here and Reddit.

With Chrome killing ad blocking, they'll quickly care

Except most people don't use adblock. I don't even know how they live

I'm conviced those people aren't real and everyone is in fact secretly using an ad blocker.

I mean, how do you not get annoyed with so much ads? People are probabaly lying in surveys to trick youtube to not blocking adblockers.

You are mostly right. Think about how many people use chrome on corporate office computers that they do not have permission to install anything on or modify. It's part of the reason Windows is so dominant. Businesses run windows and chrome a shit ton. I work for a Fortune 100 company. It's Windows and Chrome across the whole company.

I work for a large company and its the same. They even force-install Chrome despite Edge already being there! Yes, some people will make the privacy argument that Microsoft takes your data, but so will Google, and it's not as if the business cared either way, because if they did they'd install an adblocker or Firefox, which they don't.

Permissions, you say? Lemme introduce you to Portable Apps.

Yeah the second anything gets stuck into a USB port, IT is on WebEx like "Get what's that asshole in pod H-12 doing???"

Hate to say it, but I think you're giving the average person way too much credit. Most people are just not that smart.

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin

Average and below internet users are not the kind of people you meet on Lemmy. They are people like the aging Gen-Xer who doesn't know the difference between "the internet" and a web browser, or the kid whose parents shoved a tablet in their face to get them to be quiet for an hour.

Most people want computers to be an appliance like a washing machine - the thought that they can shape their own experience on their phone or computer never even occurs to them.

1 more...

I forget that these people exist sometimes. I can’t ever go back to the internet with no ad blockers.

You realize the Internet costs money. Those sites don't charge due to advertising. If everyone used ad blocker. There wouldn't be internet.

But blind there

2 more...
2 more...

I suspect they spend most of their time in apps and not surfing the internet. Just a guess really since I saw the mobile traffic exceeded desktop. A lot of people don't spend hours on the "internet" surfing. Tic Tok sure. Hell I'm getting more and more like that. Even when I use chrome I still only go the the same sites for the most part. lol

It could be a good thing. Maybe they won't bother about people blocking ads because they become even less than before.

So maybe you need to pause the ad block a lot less.

Ah, you met my parents.

I had to install ublock origin on my mother's Chrome because she never would otherwise. Doesn't even know how.

3 more...

Google’s doing a pretty shitty job on that front since uBlock is already prepared with a new version that will work largely the same after the changeover.

Do you have a post clarifying how uBlock got prepared? I can't seem to find anything

I don’t think it’s just one post, but before last month Gorhill would regularly post to Reddit about it. The MV3 extension is already live in the extension store as well.

Honestly, it seems like people have basically created internal adblockers where they seem to not notice ads.

1 more...

They won't. The vast majority aren't using any kind of ad-blockers in the first place or Google would go out of business.

I’m going to use Chrome as long as I can. If they update and break my Adblock extensions (and there isn’t a fix in a day or two from devs), I switch browsers or find some other workaround.

I’m glad people with more ability to avoid the problem are trying to do so proactively (via ad-on updates, alternative browsers, etc)… so I don’t need to worry about an ‘escape route’… because I know there will be one.

The plan to deprecate Chrome V2 extensions has been constantly postponed again and again for years now. There is NO SCHEDULED DATE for this to happen currently, and when it is announced it will be more than 6 months out.

Source: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/zQ77HkGmK9E/m/HjaaCIG-BQAJ?pli=1

If Google really wanted to kill ad blockers, they would have done this years ago.

They don't. They want to force ad blockers and other similar extensions to use more efficient APIs that don't slow down the web. Extension developers overall (not just ad blockers) aren't happy with the changes, so they're still working on the APIs.

IIRC the original cutoff date was supposed to be this summer (or possibly winter).

Not surprised you’re being downvoted but definitely disappointed seeing it.

4 more...

Hmmm, on the bright side, with lemmy going mainstream maybe some of this culture (including privacy and FOSS) becomes more and more openly discussed.

As much as I love Lemmy I don't see it going mainstream :/
It's too weird for the general user

Yeah I agree. Arguably reddit isn't even mainstream, and it is exponentially larger than Lemmy now and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

I'm really loving Lemmy, but it is not even remotely a factor if we are having a conversation about things that are mainstream enough to reflect popular opinion.

Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream ...

... with just 0.91% of US social media visits this year in March this year, if this isn't wrong:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265773/market-share-of-the-most-popular-social-media-websites-in-the-us/

FB 53.09%, Twit 16.25%, IG 13.85%, ..., Reddit 0.91% ...

[Edited to fix my error.]

[I have no affiliation with the linked site.]

That's US based. I don't have stats handy, but I remember seeing that huge amounts of Reddit traffic are outside the US, and from anecdotal experience, limiting the study further to younger demographics would drastically change these results.

1 more...

Reddit was too weird for most people until they ended up being in their Google search results for most topics. It will take a while but the Fediverse will eventually reach a level of popularity and mainstream utility.

We could have it both, where big instances like LemmyWorld or BeeHaw becomes the well known public interface, while they maintain federation with smaller instances.

Then why are you here "Generic User 1234"?

I'm sorry, I don't know if "general user" means what I think it means. English is not my first language.

What I meant was that most people who use the internet and social media on a regular basis aren't exactly nerdy/tech-savvy. So as soon as you start talking to them about federated instances and whatnot, they lose interest.

4 more...

I mean I love Lemmy but I don't see it going mainstream :/
It's too weird for the general user

The irony of this comment duplicating 😅 but yeah you're right, there needs to be a lot of streamlining first

jsjajsj yeah, Jerboa froze on me so I had to retype the comment. I didn't realise it had already gone through.

I had that issue with Jerboa a lot so I switched to Liftoff, it's much smoother!

I dunno. Lemmy isn't all that weird outside the first little bit of choosing an instance and signing up for communities. Everything since that has felt extremely normal to me. Some more thought about that and a good instance onboarding workflow can be implemented, that seems like a solvable problem.

I completely agree, I don't find it difficult at all. But I have already tried to recommend it to a couple of friends and just having to go through those first steps was enough for them not to want to use Lemmy.

Not sure why it’s weird, it’s just reddit but open source?

Whole idea is weird and as of now its lacking features. Like no ability to look on the other instance local feed without registrating there (at least not in apps i use). Also needing to type whole adress with instance name if you want some community from other instance is unhandy.

Also, as far as i understand, there can be the same communities on different instances, so you could subscribe to, idk, cat community on lemmy.ml, but not see anything from cat community on lemmy.world. If its true its kinda stupid, i think there should be a way to associate comunities across fedarated instances.

Hell, even registration is kinda messed up. As lemmy.world shown, you easilly can sign up on overpopulated instances which would drop several times a day. Not sure, it probably fixed for now, but that was a problem when i started.

So far i like the idea and want it to succeed and become popular. But with how elitist people here are usually towards users from other platforms and with overall roughness it kinda seems unlikelly. Maybe it will change when current apps get better, or reddit app developers make versions for lemmy, idk.

If you click the All, you can see that I am able to see posts from lemmy.ml even though I’m on lemmy.world

Yes, but you would be seeing ALL posts from everywhere your instance knows about.

I kind of like the idea of being on lemmy.world, filtering to say aussie.zone and getting it to show me local.
Or being able to simply get a list of every community on another instance.

These are cool ideas.

But it does show feeds from other instances. Tick all rather than local

No, i mean not all, but local from other instances. I dont remember why i needed it, probably discussion of more specialised instances out there. Most down to earth example i can imagine now would probably be trying to find instance on your local language (other than english, ofc).

There are instances dedicated to other languages, but because they are new, and has not a lot of people, they won’t push at the top of your feed. The best thing for now is to help those instances grow by contributing to the instance and communities. As more activity sprouts, more and more specialized communities and instances will get pushed to the top.

As a start, you can select Hot or New rather than active and see if there are specialized regional instances. Or try directly searching for it.

If not start your own community in the language you desire. Bear in mind that lemmy only has 200k users. And most are probably from the US. So you’ll likely see more mainstream communities and in English.

If that’s still not enough, the best I can advise is to wait until it matures. The more mainstream it gets the more lesser known communities and regional instances can develop or start.

Yeah, probably. Still hope it will be an option in the future. I think the biggest jump in popularity gonna heppen when there is gonna be more developed apps for browsing it, considering that some QoL problems could be fixed by those developers.

I’m optimistic. So many apps are developing at an astonishing rate. Recall that third party apps offer better experience than official reddit. Given time, third party apps will do the same too.

Agreeing that it's not a seamless transition in user experience from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin. But one thing that at least the instance that I'm on (kbin.social) makes easy is subscribing to various communities (or magazines, which is what they are called on kbin):

I go to the Magazines screen in kbin.social, type.in the general topic I'm interested in (in your example, cats). The search results in kbin.social bring me all of the magazines and communities that have cat in the name, and I subscribe to them all. (Meaning, I don't have to type out the full community address.)

Yes, a lot of it will be redundant and if I don't subscribe to specific communities I may miss some stuff. But I can say that now I have a ton pf.contwct that I'm interested in my "Subscribed" feed (similar to the home feed on Reddit).

Lemmy isn't weird at all. Now P2P platforms like secure scuttlebutt and aether, that's some weird stuff. I couldn't get them working at all (or maybe nobody is using these anymore). P2P is very confusing for me. I assume that a federated network is as confusing for many people as p2p social networks are confusing for me. I guess there will be someone out there who reads my comment and be like: "What? P2P networks are so simple, what don't you understand?" I guess people just have different amount of tolorance to being confused by complexity of something before they just give up. I couldn't figure out those P2P systems so I just give up.

I wish that was the case. Privacy is barely a thing in the general public's eye. FOSS is a spec in the wind in comparison.

WHAAT? I CANT HEAR YOU OVER THE MEEEEEMEES!!. SPEAK LOUDEERRR!

4 more...

I think lots of boomers and gen-x do care. (At least the ones I know). They just aren't tech literate enough to do anything about it.

I think we need more privacy oriented devices and software with simple ux, and advertising that isn't targetted at the tech community.

Run some TV ads for a privacy enabled smartphone, and play up how it works just the same as your current phone but doesn't spy on you. Shit like that.

8 more...