Google Chrome’s plan to limit ad blocking extensions kicks off next week
arstechnica.com
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.
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.
After bingeing that show, I have a constant fear that he's been standing behind me the whole time, just waiting for me to catch a glimpse of him.
Been here since Kevin helped the project out?
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?
Finger sweatbands for epic googling activities
The 80s are back! Sweatbands for everyone!
Agreed, but also
How can you not kinda love it
i’m with you it’s really camp
Laughs in Firefox
How long until the majority of the Internet is inaccessible to non-Chromium browsers because the pages "don't support them"?
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^
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 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.
Then I guess people will use the web less and less.
I remember the "works best on IE" warnings of old, looks like we might be heading back there.
This is getting more common. Whatever dev accepted that when sizing the story should hang their head in shame. “No, you don’t size for a poor solution, you size for a good solution and let the PMs chip at the things they understand, keeping some things sacrosanct”.
For this reason, we must still take a stand against this stuff.
They do some now, but user agent switcher gets me to all of those with no problem.
It is not that simple. These are cat and mouse games. Whack a mole. Whatever you'd like to say.
If I can't access a site with firefox, i won't deal with online. I'll call them and waste an employee's time, or send payment in the mail. I'm not using chrome or an app and i don't care.
Laughs in Waterfox
Laughs in earthfox
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.
While I dont use Firefox itself any more I am using librewolf on my PC, which sadly doesnt exist for phones yet. Also, GOS comes with its own privacy oriented chromium fork called vanadium, so I'm using that in the mean time.
I also use librewolf and have settled for iceraven on my phone. the list of installable extensions is much longer (even if not everything is working yet, depending on how far mozilla has come along) and it has about:config support, which gives me a pretty close approximation of my desktop browser.
I've found the Mull browser (which can be found through the DivestOS repository on F-Droid) works great as a privacy-focused firefox fork, similar to LibreWolf. I hear Fennic F-Droid is also a pretty good but less extreme alternative, but I'd imagine you don't care much about that if you use LibreWolf.
Firefox is a good option.
But I will raise people one more. Waterfox. Been using it for over a year now and enjoy it.
Firefox's marketshare is small enough relative to Chrome's that some websites might just block it at this point, if Chrome users mean ad revenue and Firefox users don't.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Firefox has 2.88% marketshare.
Chrome has 65.34% marketshare.
It's gonna be interesting to see what happens...
User agent switcher
Based and
incognitoprivate mode pilledIt doesn't necessary cost a meaningful amount to a site to allow Firefox users to view it; it does however cost to make it compatible with non-chromium browsers. For most viewing that's a non issue (I mean, most crms are going to work) but specific sites might stop working (YouTube already got caught throttling firefox, and tbf, streaming would cost more than reading an article or something).
Firefox blocks statcounter tracking by default. It's an inherently flawed metric, though Firefox is definitely in the minority still vs Chrome
The numbers may be indicative of the general trend, but every single privacy oriented browser and so forth is spoofing the user agent, pretending to be the most widespread and popular os and browser.
Which is why privacy checks on my Linux+librewolf PC return win10 with chrome.
My worry is what the EU changes might mean for the mobile web and beyond. With iOS's market share and only the same rendering engine Apple used in Safari being available, sites/apps had to support more than just Chrome. If forcing iOS users to Chrome is an option (either through pointing them to the browser or an app built with that rendering engine), then there's even less of an incentive to test with anything else. It's great that users get more choice but if providers use it as an opportunity to reduce support for other browsers then it might not be a great benefit after all.
Firefox and WebKit for all!
I did have some issues on firefox om some sites.
Never heard of it, I prefer LibreWolf
https://librewolf.net/#what-is-librewolf
but I'm gonna list some other popular forks
TOR Browser (anti-censorship enhanced fork, bundled with TOR network)
https://www.torproject.org/
GNUzilla IceCat (GNU version)
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
Pale Moon (able to use old XUL based extensions)
https://www.palemoon.org/
Mullvad Browser (a security hardened fork, IIRC based on TOR, made by Mullvad VPN company)
https://mullvad.net/en/browser
ANDROID (Fennec/Fenix)
Fennec F-Droid (Fennec version available on F-Droid, clean of propietary blobs)
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/
https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild
Mull (hardened fork of Fenix)
https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix
IceRaven (yet another hardened fork of Fenix, able to install an extended list of extensions)
https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
Well I will sound like an old bore but throughout the nearly 20 years Firefox is out I never looked at anything else. Seen the rise and fall of Internet Explorer seeing the rise and fall of chrome.
Even Firefox in its dreadfully slow era (2010-2016) it did not made me change. And let me be clear Firefox is far from perfect. But for my use cases (privacy and security balance over certain conveniences) I would not change for any commercially backed Browser.
Moral of the story. It's better to donate to Mozilla and enjoy the freedom of your browser than giving yourself in on the erratic behavior of the big tech companies.
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)
I've been a loyal Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox has existed. So I'm probably a bit biased. However, when I used other browsers, and if it wes just to try them out, I didn't notice any benefits in terms of loading websites and executing their scripts. This includes Chrome. In benchmarks there are obviously differences visible, but to me as a user they didn't matter. I wasn't so short on time that I needed those microseconds. So I really don't get how performance could be an argument in this.
agreed. chrome was bare ones and super fast when it was released. over the last two years it's a fucking monster memory hog
I was a Firefox user at the time, using adblockers, and the swap was a huge improvement to my browsing experience. I can’t even remember all the ways, since this was a decade ago. But at the time, Firefox was in a lul.
Things likely swapped pretty fast, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time because I was already using Chrome.
No ads swayed me, no Google specific sites, it wasn’t side loaded with anything.
The Chrome eating ram memes came much later, after the enshitification process reached the third step. You seem to be compressing the entirety of both browsers into a single moment, and that’s not really how time works.
I understand that you made such an experience, but I can't share it though. I've been a Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox exists, which is almost two decades. (I think I joined somewhere between 2005-2007). I've tried other browsers, sometimes I had to. However, I didn't notice any benefits compared to Firefox. Especially not in performance. Even though benchmarks have always shown clear differences, they weren't significant enough for me to consider switching, as the difference really didn't impact my browsing experience.
Regarding the memes: That was just a random annectode which I found suitable here. I don't claim it has been that way since the beginning. (Can't relate to that anyway.) But given that it has been around for a while, I don't see how performance can be an argument in favour of Chrome in this.
I just remember Firefox around that time and for like over a decade just felt bloated and super slow in comparison. No idea if it’s better these days or what.
I'd say give it a try and see for yourself.
I can just recommend using Firefox for a multitude of reasons. However, I am biased as I have been using firefox for almost two decades and did not have many reasons to complain.
Its much better, and indistinguishable from a usage standpoint against chrome (I use Google garbage at work and they deliberately hamstring it in Firefox, so I use both browsers side by side)
Biggest Firefox win is containers and privacy. Chrome probably has better absolute security (based purely on the concept that non-private security is Google's whole schtick, not based on data) and in the last year it's gotten better memory management (via sleeping tabs) that Firefox just hasn't caught up with...but there's an addon for that ;)
I think you're ignoring the functional aspect of the integration of Chrome into the Android platform. A lot of people's entire online life is stored within the walls of the Chrome ecosystem. And moving all of that to a completely different browser that is not fully integrated with Android is daunting to say the least.
What's the new chrome integration?
Didn't say new, I'm assuming they refer to the WebView that many apps use which is chromium based. However if you have a calyx- or graphene- compatible phone the WebView will be non-g chromium.
The situation is even more dire on iPhone.
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.
Good thing I exclusively use Firefox.
Fortunately I at least have Firefox on Linux. But then when I need to use Windows for something… well look at that, also Firefox!
won't stop pihole
It's still DNS level only, right? That wouldn't stop YouTube ads, or remove annoyances.
Love my PiHole but you’re hella correct
You can block ads from being served to you.
But the flip side is that the website developer can make a website that won't function if it can't load the ads being served.
And most users are gonna want a functional website.
Somebody's going to need to write a web site with a very, very compelling function to make me give enough of a shit to not just click away if it is deliberately coded to not work with Firefox/adblockers. Like, gives me a million dollars per page load functionality.
Man for real.
And they never will.
Switched to Firefox at work today. Looks like I still need Chrome to do the VPN handshake, but the more of us there are, the more pressure we have on IT!
If you still need Chrome, consider Ungoogled Chromium!
Is that project going to maintain Manifest V2 support?
I don't have official information, but I doubt it. They tend to stick as closely to the Chromium experience as possible, with the exception of the ungoogled part, of course. Maintaining Manifest V2 support would also just be a massive amount of work, for which they likely don't have the manpower.
I have no idea. I'd guess not, as it's not a strong fork like other Chromium-based browsers. Its main selling point is that it's nearly identical to Chrome, but with a lot of the Google garbage stripped out. I don't use it as a daily driver, but only when I need something Chromium-based like the use case mentioned by @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml. It's very likely to work wherever Chrome does.
I'm still confounded by workplaces that run the old nineties way of VPN handshake by browser. Clunky, clumsy just straight up bad digital workplace setup.
There is no reason to not do it the modern way where all the handshaking and connecting is done under the hood, hidden from the user. At the most you as a user should only see the tiny little systray icon switch how it looks.
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
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...
Might have to do with the fact that Firefox was the dominant browser for quite awhile until Chrome arrived on the scene.
Iirc it peaked at around 30% market share. I think IE was around 60% at the time. So never dominant, but definitely very very widespread.
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.
Yeah I've been using it for at least a decade now. It's great.
I guess average user cares mostly about how fast and smooth the browsing is. Chrome definitely has the edge on that over firefox.
I’m forced to use Chrome quite a bit (workplace silliness) and exclusively use Firefox at home. I seriously cannot see this edge that you claim Chrome has. Do you mean in loading speed? Scrolling speed?
I second you, I don't see any advantage on using Chrome over Firefox.
same for me. no noticeable difference
This is also why there's such a a prevalence of flashing warning banners, fake pseudobluescreens, and other scary shit disguised in chrome notifications.
The notifications in chrome are as close to on by default as you can get and with the right code snippets you can make it look like the FBI locked down your workstation and you need to call them.
Firefox should start hardening against this behavior now because popularity gets targeted even more specifically.
Make it an end user safety feature.
Force every notification to have
"This is a notification from a website that you elected to receive by allowing notifications. You can disable these notifications here"
with a link to the setting on the frame of of every one, no fullscreen allowed, no flashing, double-check and prohibit the words FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, IRS, Social Security, Microsoft, etc.
I say this a lot but get Firefox.
Now we gotta have websites developing for all web browsers instead of Google Chrome like it's Internet Explorer 2.0.
There are effectively only two web browsers: Chrome and Firefox. Literally everything else, aside from some really niche things that can't render modern webpages, is a fork of one of those two that uses the same rendering engine.
Not to toot the kagi Horn, but they are talking about releasing thier webkit based Orion Browser on Linux. Ive been following that one closely since it has firefox extension support.
I mean, if folks really want something like that, I'd say they shouldn't have let KDE's KHTML (which is what WebKit was forked from) die. But as I've said elsewhere in this thread, KHTML→WebKit→Blink are related and thus fail to combat Google's web hegemony the way that Gecko (Firefox) does.
I've become very skeptical of anything Kagi, wishing they'd just focused on making one thing good instead of getting distracted by mediocre AI and a browser they can't realistically support while their search is still subpar. Illusions of grandeur.
Iirc the browser is older than their search engine. If anything that is their og product
Subpar Search?
Yeah, wtf is he/she talking about there :)
What about Apple's WebKit? Does it count?
You mean KHMTL, born in KDE's Konqueror. That spawned WebKit (Safari), that spawned Blink (Chrome, Edge, Opera, etc). The whole thing then finally came full-circle when Konqueror dropped KHTML due to lack of development, now you have the choice between WebKit and Blink (via Qt WebEngine).
Then there's Gecko (Firefox) and Servo which had a near-death experience after Mozilla integrated half of it into Gecko but by now development is alive and kicking again. Oh and then there's lynx, using libwww, tracing its lineage back straight to Tim Berners Lee.
No, they don't mean KHTML. KHTML is an ancestor of WebKit and Blink, but WebKit forked from it over 2 decades ago. They meant WebKit.
Nope, it doesn't count. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn’t considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.
I'm sure they've diverged enough for it to be pretty significant compared to the Chromium browsers
So it wasn’t, like, forked hard enough that now after the years it counts as a different browser? Expect it to render pages ‘n’ stuff pretty much like Chrome?
I admit, I haven't really looked into it. It's possible Apple implemented new HTML/CSS/JS standards independently, but it's also possible that Apple continued to backport Google's changes. Unless they had a business goal of being independent (or NIH syndrome) I would guess that they'd do mostly the latter, but you'd have to go read the code to know for sure.
They are definitely still more related to each other than either is to Gecko (which is to say, not related at all), though.
They've been separate for over a decade, and even before that they were heavily customizing it. They're cousins, but absolutely not close enough at this point to be considered the same.
haha Safari would like a word.
What word? I spoke the truth: there are only two rendering engines. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn't considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.
I deleted my original comment before you replied because I am not really in the mood to defend this but the OP was talking about the pain of developing for different browsers and I don't care what is a fork of what, this is a fact: Chrome, Firefox and Safari all render differently and have to be catered to individually.
Also, Safari, between desktop and mobile, has 30% of the market to Firefox's 8%.
I don't LIKE it, but there are "effectively" three, not two, rendering engines.
It's about browser architecture and not silly names ("Safari", "Firefox", "Chrome"). The point is that there are only two actual variants.
Not when you have to make a web app render identically in them, which is what the OP was about.
No, you still have three rendering engines. WebKit and Blink are different. Since the second is an (old) fork of the other one, they are similar but far from being the same. They are pages that work in one but not the other, even if you change the user agent.
That's...not true at all.
And safari, although it's a cousin/uncle to Chrome at this point.
Not that I use it, but still.
I've been way more than a decade (closer to two decades) uninterruptedly using Firefox. I've never used chrome as a my main browser, ever.
But still, I'll be naive if I didn't recognize that this kind of shit will affect me even if it's just indirectly.
Next year they'll surely will be forcing many webs only working in "manifest V3 compliant browsers". I'm sure of that.
The problem is that Firefox has like a crumb of the market and it's held by a lifeline given by Google itself
There is no guarantee Firefox would survive the long term ... Heck it would die short after Google decides to cut them off
Back in the Dim Times (1990s), before ad-blockers appeared, there was a program called WebWasher. It's basically a proxy server you run on your own computer and it contained all the ad filters. You just configured your browsers network setting to point to WebWasher and it would handle all the ad filtering.
So even if companies completely remove extension support from their browsers, we'll still have an alternative. :)
That man-in-the-middle principle doesn't work with TLS.
But ads are still often delivered by content delivery which is blockable by domain, hence the reason piholes work. Not that in-stream ads aren't the future, perhaps, but life finds a way.
What you're describing is not a man-in-the-middle proxy, but a simple DNS block. That's a very crude approach to blocking ads and notoriously doesn't work for YouTube and Google ads because they're served from the same domain.
I run a pihole myself but there's still a huge difference between browsing with pihole only and pihole+ublock. It's certainly not the answer to the Manifest V3 shenanigans.
however its relatively rare that an ad company provides a bunch of services I want to use. The only exception i can think of is google.
obvs its hard to avoid gmaps because the alternatives are beyond godawful (no, openstreetmaps, i didn't want to go to the coffee shop of the same name in connecticut, I wanted to go to the one 3 km away), but for youtube I use a python tool called youtube-local which is very very effective, strong rec. Im sure google will defeat them eventually, but so far all of the incremental "block a little of this, block a little of that" stuff the g-man has been doing has been bypassed within a few days. Viewtube is also pretty easy to self-host, but they never quite figured out how to make the UI work.
Still not unheard of today if you're using a VPN. For example, if you're using Mozilla VPN (Mulvad), in the DNS settings it gives you choices between regular DNS, DNS + ad blocking, or DNS + ad blocking + tracker blocking.
I did not know about WebWasher, that's very interesting.
Hey that's awesome! Thanks for sharing
Firefox is looking to implement Manifest V3 to keep extension feature parity with Chromium, but their version will not ban the one API that adblockers use. So Firefox will eventually be V3 compliant
Maybe it's my tinfoil hat but if any part of this is related to
theirgoogle's pursuit of ad revenue, I don't imagine a v3 compliant Firefox will work with adblock for long.At the very least they would probably make using it a huge headache
edit to make it clear who I was referring to
Firefox has ad revenue?
I'm realizing that was unclear.
I meant google's maifest v3, not firefox's implementation of it.
Ah, appreciate the clarification. I'd also just woken up and hopped on Lemmy, so maybe partially my fault 😋
I switched to chrome because they were the first to have each tab be it's own process so one bad site/connection did crash the whole program. Also the cloud based password saving across devices was super convenient.
Firefox does both now too, has better ad blocking, and is a little less invasive and bloaty. A lot less invasive if you know how to set it up, which I don't.
But yeah, Firefox is my guy again
Same here. Made the switch back to Firefox a year ago when I saw the writing on the wall about where Google wanted to take Chrome with Manifest V3.
firefox extensions are the best patches i have for enshittification
Can't wait for nothing to change 'cause 90% of chrome users don't use add-ons.
How horrifying
I can't remember a time when I didn't use Firefox. Actually back in highschool I used IE around 2002ish but only because I didn't know any better back then.
At some point 15-20 years ago Firefox was becoming a resource hog and I switched to chrome. I switched back a number of years ago and regret not switching back earlier.
Are you me? Firefox was always an option, but it definitely became slow maybe around 2010? I switched to chrome but came back to Firefox a few years ago also when chroms was first getting enshitified
Back when Chrome was the shiny new thing, Firefox was taking a downturn, I think it was around version 50 or something, as they wanted to update something that would break compatibility with a considerable number of existing themes and plugins, including my then favorite, NoScript.
For some reason, the UI of Chrome was never my cup of tea, all those round edges and auto-hiding buttons (maybe these were later additions?) annoyed me to no end.
Yeah, all my bad experiences with Firefox from back in the day were completely gone when I switched back to it a couple of years ago.
I went from IE to Firefox back in that same timeframe, then by the time Chrome came out, my Firefox just had too much clutter and Chrome was way faster.
Within the past year, Chrome managed to enshittify itself enough that I've gone back to Firefox on PC (still using chrome on mobile) and it's the same sort of "lighter, faster" feel that I got years ago when I left it for Chrome.
There's also the whole ad blocker bullshit too, of course. YouTube ads were the last straw for me.
if you use Firefox on mobile, you can add plugins like ublock origin.
I can't use the Internet on Mobile without an adblocker. The user experience is totally unbearable
fully agree
When Chrome launched Firefox was in pretty rough shape, and Google wasn't what they are today.
Lots of us switched to Chrome then because it simply ran better.
Honestly, IE was the best browser around the time IE6 was released (2000/2001). Way better than Netscape. Opera was the other good browser back then. The initial release of Firefox wasn't quite there yet.
Better for MS non-standard things? Or better how? Performance-wise - yes.
IMHO a web browser has to support HTML 4.* , JS, Netscape plugins (Java, Flash, whatever else) and that's it.
That's what I came to when I started using the Web, but I'm confident it's not just bias - that was the best combination. I'm not sure on CSS - I hated it, but people have good arguments in favor of it. But hypertext with limited appearance tuning and scripts for the web itself, plus plugins for various content, including applications, - that's definitely a better idea than the modern approach.
I admit I didn't always use Firefox. I used netscape navigator.
google chrome will go the way of netscape navigator and internet explorer. might take a while and a antitrust case or two, but we will get there... again.
At least the EU is trying to cut its tentacles a bit.
Firefox Forever!!
Meanwhile, Firefox.
Is that only for Chrome or all Chromium-based browsers?
First one, then the others eventually.
Just use Firefox :)
It's not that simple.
I need very niche Chromium-based extensions for my work. They don't yet exist on Firefox. Nor any replacements to my knowledge.
They aren't ad-related, but I don't know what's going to happen to them.
I, too, am forced to use Chrome for parts of my work.
I just run Chrome for that set of tasks. Then quit, or tab to Firefox for regular browsing.
This is SOP when dealing with uglies like google, microsoft, amazon, adobe, or meta: do the toxic thing or software they require, as sandboxed as reasonable, then get back to daily life and more knowable risks.
Currently, I use Brave. Not Chrome.
I have all the benefits of Chromium-based without the Google's spyware.
I don't see myself going back and forth between 2 web browsers. I prefer choosing one that fills everything that I need, sticking with it and moving on with my life.
But since Chromium is mostly backed by Google, I don't know the long-term implications of using Chromium based.
Yeah, but that's just it, there is no one thing that fulfils all your needs if you are forced to use a particular tool, but it lacks privacy or freedom or other features.
I use chrome because I have to and also am curious and I need to know about how Google runs its shit. I run Firefox because of various features it has that are good for web development. I run Safari because it is fast and relatively private outside of the Apple ecosystem And has some great developer tools.
The effort of one keyboard twitch to move from one browser to the other is not really any amount of friction for me. It's easier than switching from one tab to another inside the same browser, so I don't get your fixation on a single tool.
And as a PS, I won't touch Brave with a 10 foot pole anymore because of their Fuckery with crypto.
Brave isn't perfect but seems to be my best option so far.
Most of the time, you can disable the 'unpleasant' stuff.
But no web browser is perfect.
Maybe Ungoogled Chromium could be good as well. But requires more tweaking and setting out of the box.
Same. I got a cheap Chromebook and a no-contract flip phone and only use google on that.
Happy to be corrected, but as I have understood it in the past, all of them.
Both.
Last fuck up I installed Firefox. I left chrome in place. It's finally time to remove chrome.
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].
netscape was the standard back then when expolorer was crap.....fast forward today,firefox(netscape's successor) is still the standard when other browsers are still crap.
edit: spelling firefox and netscape....god damn butter fingers...
Firefox
NetScape!
it's all inevitable. client signatures, the end of privacy, jerking off on my way home from the office. there is no God
We killed god and replaced it with Google.
I used firefox back in the day because it was better than IE, switched to chrome because of the convenience and features. I recently switched to brave because chrome became such a pain. If brave shits the bed because of this, I'm going back to firefox.
Friendly FYI: Brave is based on Chromium, so under the hood it uses the same browser engine as Chrome. I can't recommend switching to Firefox enough, not only because it's a good and fully featured browser, but also because its existence is vital to keeping Google's power in check.
Don’t forget that brave is also just a crypto scam hiding as a browser.
To my shame, I'm still deeply ingrained in the Google ecosystem. I settled on it like 8-10 years ago and I'm not sure how to dig myself out of this pit. More than Chrome, I heavily use Docs, Sheets, Drive, Wallet, YouTube, Gmail, I even have a Pixel (I hate how bloated Samsung is).
I've used Firefox a little for work because of the nice containers feature. Is Google Drive bad too? It's so easy to share things, I torrent a lot of books and I've shared with a bunch of friends, idk if there's an alternative that others could easily use.
Here's what I did:
I'm still stuck with Google Drive though. As you said, it's just so convenient. I'm trying out OnlyOffice with a self-hosted NextCloud instance, but there's a lot of sacrifices. I have some complex spreadsheets, and switching to literally anything else loses features (I like the
GOOGLEFINANCE()feature).But yeah, I wish Google didn't suck, they have some really convenient products, I just don't trust them anymore.
Don't fret, I think a lot of us are on a long-term journey to de-Google. I've actually found that changing browsers is one of the easiest things to do, especially with the ability to import your bookmarks and such. With Firefox Sync, you pretty much have the same functionality as you would with your Google account signed into Chrome.
Gmail is probably the hardest one to kick. I'm fine with paying for an email service if it's functional and doesn't siphon my personal data, but finding a quality trustworthy provider and then migrating 20 years of data to it seems so overwhelming.
Why do you need to migrate 20 years of data? Do you actually look at anything more than a month or two old?
That said, Protonmail has "Easy Switch" to copy emails and whatnot.
The harder part for me is Drive, since there just isn't a competitor that's anywhere near as good in terms of overall experience. I'm going to try out OnlyOffice, but I know there are a few features I just won't have anymore.
I do occasionally need something from 10 or even 15 years ago, needing the exact date I sold a property or started a new project or even just jogging my memory of an old contact I am reaching again. While none of this is strictly necessary, I could make do without it if I had to, it does create inertia.
I really need to check out Proton, Google is just getting worse and worse and the sooner I can get away from their ecosystem the better.
Give it a shot! Worst case scenario, you just go back.
Why do you need to access 20 years of data in Gmail? For archiving mails there is a cost-free tool called MailStore Home. It's portable and fits on a USB thumb drive. Save two or more copies for data safety.
https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/
So you can archive your mails without a hassle. Then you can choose any provider you want.
Oh my gosh thank you!! I need this exact thing but hadn’t gotten around to figuring out a solution. Much appreciated!!
I think migrating is the hardest part. My email history has a lot of important records and notes that I don't want to lose.
By the way, I recommend checking out this video, which makes a great point that email is inherently insecure, regardless of the provider you choose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH626CXyNtE
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=iH626CXyNtE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Several practical solutions here but the simplest is probably to start with thunderbird on your home computer. That way storage limit shouldn't be a worry and you can see if you find it searchable/usable enough. If so, you can do a Google takeout as a long term canonical archive, do a thunderbird backup to easily switch computers when the time comes, and then sign up for a privacy friendly service.
I bought into proton for a bit but am very very against how they bundled their services and switched my mail to posteo, which i have had no issues with in the last 1.5 years or so. Tutanota was fine but firmly a third place opt for me. I also prefer posteo because I'm anti-magic: posteo has tons of options which can get you to same or better security than proton, but it doesn't "just work" like protons security does. Both are great.
Restore Privacy – Alternatives to Google Products – The Big List (2024)
I did it by selling soul to apple completely, I mean I am not going to peddle another company but at least it isn't google. However I can afford to throw some cash on their overpriced stuff. They suck but at least they aren't google. I don't use any google services right now. Not even maps. Without any cons because obviously I just use apple stuff for everything wallet etc
I could use framework laptop linux + graphene os but I need to live and thrive among ppl and also get that sweet social credit for not being a total nerd that yells about evil corps and how I have superior privacy in the basement left and right. However I would if it was socially acceptable.
Oh no! Wait, I don't use that shit because of shit like this.
How does this affect browsers like Brave?
Brave's ad blocker is not an extension so it's unaffected.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Other groups don't agree with Google's description, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which called Manifest V3 "deceitful and threatening" back when it was first announced in 2019, saying the new system "will restrict the capabilities of web extensions—especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit."
Google, which makes about 77 percent of its revenue from advertising, has not published a serious explanation as to why Manifest V3 limits content filtering, and it's not clear how that aligns with the goals of "improving the security, privacy, performance and trustworthiness."
Like Kewisch said, the primary goal of malicious extensions is to spy on users and slurp up data, which has nothing to do with content filtering.
Google now says it's possible for extensions to skip the reviews process for "safe" rule set changes, but even this is limited to "static" rulesets, not more powerful "dynamic" ones.
In a comment to The Verge last year, the senior staff technologist at the EFF, Alexei Miagkov, summed up Google's public negotiations with the extension community well, saying, "These are helpful changes, but they are tweaks to a limited-by-design system.
For a short period, users will be able to turn them back on if they visit the extension page, but Google says that "over time, this toggle will go away as well."
The original article contains 692 words, the summary contains 230 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I use Firefox and Brave at work. I need a Chromium-based browser, and Brave's ad-blocker works, otherwise I would be Firefox only.
Are they going to do this on Edge? Please don't judge me. I love the "Continue on Mobile" feature.
Firefox has this feature too, just saying
Firefox not only let's you view tabs from your PC on your phone, it let's you install extensions (like ublock origin) on the mobile browser
not the ios app unfortunately, due to webkit
I don't think of apple browsers as anything other than flavored safari, so I forget to count that as firefox
I overall love Edge. But when the ads come running, I'll have to switch :/
Looks like they will follow Chromium so as with Chrome you have till 2025 June if you use ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy
Thank fuck I switched to mozilla
since people here are more tech savvy than i could ever be if like to ask what you guys think of Vivaldi, because i like it a lot. super customizable, has quick command search, side panel lets me use some websites like extensions, and workspaces help me organize especially with work... has anyone used it and can anyone tell me if waterfox or other forks are better and how?
I tried it for a week, but eventually left back for Firefox.
Vivaldi is cool af and I used it for a few years but ditched it for firefox the minute i read about manifest v3(2 years ago? don't remember). Not the devs' fault but I'll be damned if i allow ads on my devices.
is that guaranteed to force all chromium browsers regardless? like, does that ban the ublock origin extension (or something to the effect of rendering it useless)?
It does! However, uBlock Origin has a "Lite" version that works with Manifest v3.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home
wow. ok. time to experiment with Firefox forks.
Yeah, all chromium-based browsers will be affected, sadly.
Vivaldi is the new Opera, right?
If by Opera you mean as it was back in version 12 before it got sold to some chinese company and completely changed, then yes. Nothing to do with what opera is now.
If Vivaldi were free and open source, it would make an interesting alternative to Ungoogled Chromium. But it's not, so I'll stick with extensions on Firefox (and Ungoogled Chromium as a backup).
It is source-available though, so that's a plus.
According to Vivaldi's blog post "Why isn't Vivaldi's browser open-source?", all of Vivaldi's UI is closed source and not source-available:
The UI is the main thing that differentiates Vivaldi from Chromium, and Vivaldi chose to keep it closed source and obfuscated for business reasons. That's a negative compared to Firefox and Ungoogled Chromium.
Huh, hadn't seen that bit before, thanks for that. Ok, well that is disappointing. I did notice this bit in there too though:
It not much consolation, but it's better than nothing. As it stands though, FF still has too many problems for me. I'll have to see how this ad blocking thing shakes out though, might have to revisit my decision then.
I think LibreWolf is going to end up being the go-to browser at this rate.
Oh no, anyway
I really like KDEs Falkon browser, based on QT web.
But it having no extension support kind of kills it for me...
What engine does it use?
It's Chromium under the hood.
Funnily, KDE's early KHTML engine got forked into WebKit, which got forked into Blink, which is at the heart of Chromium. So, we've gone full circle...
kHTML, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time
I feel old
what chrome? haven't used that in ages
I've long ago stopped using Chrome on my computer because it was getting too bloated.
I am using firefox over six month i guess. Added firefoxcss and some important extensions. Its just invincible. In my experience, its better than edge and vivaldi. I stopped using chrome many years ago. I switched to edge, then vivaldi, then again edge. Now, firefox forever. But, I have a question. I understand that, it will stop extension. But those chromium based browsers, which have built in adblocker, will they also get affected? Edge, brave, vivaldi etc, all of them are chromium based. It would be sad to see them suffer. They all fight against the mighty emperor like chrome. Hope they are going to find alternative way. However, firefox should make it customization more easier for normal user. They can offer extension like sidebery, ublock origin, gesturefy, dark mode, auto discard tabs at the beginning of their installation. Also, some different looks as theme from Firefoxcss. Normal users don't dig much. Many people still don't know that ads can be block by extension. A easier setup would boost users.