Why Bother With uBlock Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox

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Why Bother With uBlock Origin Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox
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Why Bother With uBlock Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox::Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs.

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I love Firefox. Love it.

But I keep coming across sites that don't function properly with it. Is this Firefox's fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don't, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.

Chrome seems to have such a foothold that it is getting away with embrace/extend/extinguish and I think it's a very sad thing.

That was Internet Explorer 20 years ago and look where we are now.

I personally can't remember the last time I had issues with a site on Firefox in the last few years since I switched.

The teams web app was borked for me on Firefox at one point. Idk if it's still like that. Also Google Chat or whatever tf it's called now disables a bunch of features on Firefox.

Still worth it to switch. 99% of websites work just fine. They basically have to intentionally design sites to not work with FF.

Ah yes wtf is Teams doing!? Some arbitrary features are blocked on Firefox, like you can't direct call someone but you can be part of a group call ๐Ÿคช

But I don't think Microsoft's online suite is a reference, most of it feels buggy or bloated at best.

Makes sense since the browser microsoft pushes on it's users is chrome based.

Just spoof the user agent and it works fine.

Those are literally restrictions placed by the site in question, not a limitation of Firefox. Get a user agent changer, and set the user agent to the โ€œrequiredโ€ browser, and ~magically~ it will work!

When I was using Firefox I felt like spoofing user agent was essential to make websites work the way they were supposed to. I could loose some rounded corners here and there but it was still better that some features completely missing

Chrome turning into Internet Explorer was something that I didn't foresee some years ago.

Heck they have literally done that with Edge lol.

Been using it for years, and the only few times I had issues was due to worthless websites creating artificial obstacles with an "unsupported browser/OS" page or banner rather than something actually breaking for being incompatible.

Discord and spotify web versions donโ€™t work on Firefox for me. On discord in canโ€™t connect to a call and Spotify doesnโ€™t play songs or it takes a long time after pressing play for the song to start playing.

Both work flawlessly for me. In fact, discord on Firefox works much better than the standalone app specifically for calls.

Sounds to me like something is broken or misconfigured on your system.

Good to know. Iโ€™ll try reinstalling Firefox. Both of these work flawlessly on edge for me.

Interesting. I will have to try discord. I've used Spotify with no issues.

This is an especially common problem on Android. I have found many sites whose mobile version simply does not work in Firefox. It's very frustrating.

I also feel their number grew in the last year. I've recently tried using Mull again (mobile firefox privacy-focused fork) after using Bromite for a year, and it was so unbearable I had to switch back. I'd say I had less websites that worked than ones that did not

Unfortunately tracker blocking can lead to even more issues as many sites have started relying on it for basic functionality.

Have you got an example I can test? I switched to Firefox mobile over a year ago and I can't think of any time I've come across a site that didn't work.

The most recent issue I had was Birds and Beans "manage subscription" page so I don't think you can test that without a coffee subscription. But here is a screenshot:

I'm not sure why it says "nightly" as I'm on the stable version.

This isn't Firefoxs fault though, is it? Just a bad Website putting arbitrary restrictions in place

Not Firefox's fault at all. Just a website not following web standards.

I keep seeing this sentiment on these posts, often with a suspicious number of up votes that don't seem to correlate how many up votes everything else in the topic get.

Literally the only place I have EVER seen this issue was a state toll road website, which was using a timezones that didn't actually exist but chrome added (and documented on the Internet to trick people into using it). A simple email to the website with an explanation and the correct timezones name and the problem was fixed.

Pretty sure a lot of this sentiment is either astroturfing, or people passing on astroturfing trying to be helpful.

Yeah, Iโ€™ve been exclusively using Firefox dev edition for the last 2-3 ys. I canโ€™t remember one site not functioning properly apart from the odd visual bug from time to time.

I tried to bring this up as an issue back on Reddit, and I got downvoted into oblivion.

I think sometimes switching your use agent to Chrome can bypass some issues.

So many tech minded people, but at same time, so many of us fail to consider others POV and priorities.

JUST DON'T VISIT THAT WEBSITE! - sure bro, that means i won't be able to pay the bills this month because the only traditional way of doing this is visiting a physical kiosk at working hour. Did i mention that i gotta work?

Similar with messaging apps.

YOU NEED BETTER FRIENDS LOL - trust me I've tried. i also need to send my resume using this app to whoever interviewing me. no, no email. yes, i tried teling that. no, i won't be that guy preaching about software freedom when all i want is a fucking job.

The first sites I really noticed it on were banking sites. Pretty much essential. Then I noticed more and more sites. Switching to chrome based solved it. But it really, really bothers me that I had to resort to that.

Would love to just ignore such sites, but that becomes a pretty big ask... Sigh

Where do you live where banking sites donโ€™t follow industry standards, even for web development?

Iโ€™ve never had a problem with a website outright not working on Firefox, although in some cases features are restricted which usually just require a user agent change (like huddles on slack).

Do you have concrete examples of websites that outright donโ€™t work on Firefox?

Make sure to only do that temporarily and only if it's absolutely necessary. Otherwise just avoid using said website and look for alternatives.

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Thatโ€™s such bullshit. People keep saying SO MANY SITES DONT WORK ON FOREFUX

with zero examples.

I see no examples. Youโ€™re making a ridiculous claim with no proof and Iโ€™m astounded at how many people believe you here.

Give me examples. I've been using Firefox exclusively for over ten years and I can recall one website I've had to use chrome on. That was draw.io to get shared drawing through a Google drive to work.

For me there are certain sites where the site icon doesn't show up in my bookmarks. While not world shattering, it can be annoying.

But I keep coming across sites that donโ€™t function properly with it. Is this Firefoxโ€™s fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites donโ€™t, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.

Reminder for others that they can report to Web Compat

This is a good comment! I've reported to them in the past. A good reminder.

on desktop I don't think I ever notice an issue, but on mobile it's really noticable

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It blows my mind how many people do you not understand how essentially useless Chrome is now and how much it has changed.

What I don't get is that my browser experience is legitimately better overall, I don't know what was keeping me from switching all these years. Familiarity perhaps.

I had the same reaction. Used to love Firefox with all it's awesome plugins but it took me soo long to go back to it. I just became so used to Chrome that the switch seemed daunting, although, I'll admit it took a little while to get comfortable with it again.

What about chrome is useless? What makes chrome so useless that a normie would want it to change? In the end both let you browse the internet just fine. from work i use Firefox and at home i had chrome for years. I did not recognise any diffrenses except ram usage and it beeing a Google product. I changed to firefox at home a few months back so it is the same at work and at home. Can't say it feels any snapier or whatever. For a normie Privacy is no reason to change. They don't care. Ram, they probably don't even know what that is. You have to search for new extensions in the mozilla store if the same one you used does not exist there. That is the reason firefox will not dominate Chrome in my opinion. For a normie there is absolutely no reason to change and normies are the majority of people. Some anecdotal story. At work i installed for some colleges Adblockers because the said some of the ads where anoying and after i did in the following months one after another wanted me to deactivate it again because they could not figure out to visit some websites. As i offered them to show them how they could get around it they just denied. "that is to complicated for me." So yeah. Normies do not care and even worse adblock blockers work.

Not to mention that Youtube and Chrome are run by the same company.

In my book, nothing changed because I refuse to run anything closed source on MY computer.

Very Stallman of you, unfortunately for many people's use cases they will want at least proprietary video codecs or drivers. You could even argue using most websites with minified JS is closed source.

Whatever you're willing to be exterminated for.

Edit: All you fucking morons come here and downvote me but fact of the matter is you will all die and there will be zero reproduction of humanity in far less than a decade from now.

Only Free and Open Source AI Software will save you. Only. But go on, like your vote makes any fucking difference.

Well, that escalated quickly.

You're missing shit. Like, the fact that you and everyone else will die for ignorance of the only survival possible on this planet being FOSS.

Neither I nor you escalated shit. The patriarchy in its attempt to murder everyone already did that. You're just ignorant of that and misread that happening here and now.

The... patriarchy.

That was an unexpected addition to your disassociated rants.

Dissociated? Just exactly what do you draw that from? I ain't chugged in months...lol.

chugged? what? lol.

If you're ignorant, then I ain't helping.

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Why're you so angry over this?

You read emotions in words written down. You a fishing. You are ignorant.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. I'm genuinely curious as to why you're getting so angry over this, that's all.

There's no angry. You're reading shit. Not observing a person.

OK, but can you see how calling people 'fucking morons' and saying they will all die might be misconstrued as sounding angry? This is obviously a topic you care about, else you wouldn't have commented at all. Do you think that adjusting your perceived tone might improve how you interact with people on a topic you care about?

Maybe. I'm working on that but prolly won't go far. I don't really give a fuck. Especially when you're a moron that thinks they can read people's emotions...digitally.

they can read peopleโ€™s emotionsโ€ฆdigitally.

People have been expressing emotion in the written form since writing has been a thing.

An Internet search on "expressing emotion in writing" will give you an education on the subject.

This is just an amazing example of being neuro-atypical.

Sociopath? Autism? Some spicy mix of hormones and Mountain Dew? I dunno. But when someone is swearing, ranting and blaming the end of the world on the patriarchy and closed source AI, we can safely say they have lost touch with reality.

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That's good that you're working on it. I'm sure that must be hard work, so good for you. In terms of reading people's emotions digitally, I'm sure you can see how someone's emotions could be inferred via the words they type online? And the words you're typing seem very hostile for no obvious reason.

inferred via the words they type online?

You're not psychic. You're playing stupid games implying shit you don't know.

the words you're typing seem

Seem? Keep trying.

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I don't have to physically view you to know you are torn up over this or generally an asshole. You're arguing for the sake of arguing and bitching about internet points.

Definitely an asshole, but isn't self-aware at all either. They're all Elon-Musking this thread; thinking they're all super smart and aware, and in complete denial of reality. "You can't convey emotions with words! That's unpossible!" ๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿคฆ

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Iโ€™d mark this comment to return to in 10 years, but I have a sneaking suspicion you wonโ€™t be around to answer me when I point out that we are all neither dead, or sterile.

So Iโ€™m just gonna say, 10 years early: Lol

We need a remind me bot. I'll make one in 10 years when I have the time.

If it ain't global soaring, it's viral (synthetic or genetic, don't matter), or war & tyrrany, pollution & poison, I'm only saying probably within a decade but I guarenfuckingtee it won't make two.

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there are many reasons to prefer chromium based browsers, security being one of them

am not saying that firefox is inherently bad, but that there are valid reasons to use something else. I know that this is considered a hot take on lemmy but it needs to be said

On balance, though, since most people go almost exclusively to well-known, uncompromised websites that are legitimate and also trying to harvest data, privacy protections are more important. Defend against the attacks you know are happening and all.

Besides, most attacks are social engineering these days, and even the most secure browser on earth won't defend against that. The recent flurry of high profile YouTube account hijacks was accomplished via malware that stole session tokens from both Chrome and Firefox.

both privacy and security are important and neither one is going to save you from a social engineering attack.

and besides, trusting on your users to only go to well known websites isn't something you should rely on.

but yeah, I totally get your point

They said Chrome specifically, not Chromium as a whole.

by Chrome they usually mean chromium and all of its derivatives since those will also get mv3 unless they specifically opt out

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Tbf every time is the best time to switch to Firefox

I would gladly if their Android app wasn't filled with bugs and performance issues on my phone

i've been on Firefox in the last 8 years. i don't even know what's going on in Chrome and other browsers lol.

Same... I don't understand the appeal of Chrome. I think they used a new java engine like 10 years ago and beat Firefox in a handful of benchmarks, and then Firefox conclusively and irreconcilably trounced Chrome a few months later, never letting up a bit.

I remember when they released Firefox Quantum. Too many tabs was never a problem again.

I mean I tried to download the official minecraft client for debian and was not able to on Firefox.

Microsoft disabled the site on non Chrome browser

This sounded weird to me, so I just tried it. Running Firefox on Kubuntu, I just downloaded it with one click from here.

Are you sure? I just tested and after logging in, the option to download the launcher was there (popos/firefox).

Just tried it myself and it doesn't have any issues at all. It seems like it might be an issue with something else on your end.

Though honestly I'd strongly recommend against using the Official launcher as it has been known to introduce bugs and in general has poorer support for mods. I prefer the MultiMC forks like Prism, which don't have the bugs the official one does.

I wanted sth that is updated by my system and the flatpak I found logged me in as a unsecure user or I had to login at each launch

Remember when Firefox started dealing damage to IE's insane monopoly, and then Chrome came along and shanked them both?

I hope Chrome finally eats dirt after basically becoming knockoff IE 2.

Literally every new HTTP standard is coming out of Google's dev team. That is not a good thing.

As long as Chrome was convenient people preferred it. Now that they are showing their true face and squeezing it in favor of being more ad-friendly I hope people realize there are better choices.

Iโ€™d largely like to agree. My main issue is as others have said, some websites donโ€™t work on Firefox due to Chrome basically being the standard. Itโ€™s annoying. And I do think people should still switch and try their best to stop using Chrome. Because IF we could get to a point where Firefox has a larger audience than it already has, the problem may end up stopping due to developers having more of a need to make sure their stuff is cross compatible with other browsers.

I've been using Firefox as my main browser for a long time. Sites that don't work in FF are very rare. If it's something I really need to access, I just use chrome/edge for that particular site. But as I said, it happens rarely, and there's an easy way to work around it.

I actually encountered the opposite. A site I've been using for roughly 7 years actually has massive issues on chrome that makes it unusable.

On Firefox? No problem at all.

Which site? Just curious. I've never encountered any issues whatsoever with either browser.

Chatzy. However the site is intensely archaic to begin with.

There's a lot of unique chrome exclusive bugs. Like the fact that opening the command menu or replying to hidden messages, deletes your chat windows contents.

Or the fact that the chat would just suddenly freeze up entirely. GUI elements deciding to randomly not display anymore. Bold messages sometimes breaking formatting. hangups that require a forced reload. Etc.

Decades old Firefox user here.

In the last week or two both Discord as well as Google Maps started not to work, they basically freeze up during/after they load, almost freezing up the whole browser as well (struggle to close the tabs they are on).

The weird thing is they both always used to work great up to just very recently, and nothing else has changed on my desktop, except for the normal OS updates semi daily.

(Speaking of the desktop version, on Fedora Linux.)

Used discord on Firefox within the last week, no issues detected.

Disable all your plugins and check if this still happens, a few months ago I ran into an issue where every tab would load for a good few seconds before actually opening, even super lightweight stuff. Turned out to be caused by an addon that was umantained because the maintainer passed away.

Donโ€™t remember which addon it was, but I can try and remember / search if you are interested.

Google already confirmed they were causing deliberate delays on YouTube videos for people detected using adblock. Extending the enshitification is all they have now, sold their soul to steal a buck.

Thatโ€™s fair. Firefox hasnโ€™t sprung up too many issues for me either. But it does occur and occasionally adds some annoyance if itโ€™s a site you need. For me especially Firefox on IPhone is annoying to work with at times. Which is why I have other browsers on my phone as well. But for desktop, generally works fine.

I honestly don't think I found a website that doesn't work in Firefox for years. But I agree that it can be really annoying, I hope more people adopt Firefox (or it's engine at least).

As for your iPhone issue: Well Apple doesn't really allow any other browsers on iOS, AFAIK it's all just Safari under the hood with a skin on top.

I hope people do too. I am a Waterfox lover myself and it works great for the most part.

And huh, interesting. Good to know. Might just be a safari issue then. Idk. I for some reason thought that had changed, but could be wrong.

That's interesting to know. Maybe that's why add-ons don't work in Firefox iOS or iPad OS.

iPhone's Firefox is still safari under the hood, but without the support of being a native app on top of it.

At the moment, it's ok, I also have problems, but it'd be great if iOS opened up more and allowed a real Firefox browser to exist.

I see. Alright.

But yeah, would be great to see that. Maybe if they get through with side loading being natively supported things will open up a bit. Tbh I am just waiting to get my android fixed or a new android device or Pinephone.

Yeah that'd be great. Then we could get extensions on mobile.

I just use whatever phone is cheaper, and a family member had just upgraded their iPhone. Gotta say, it's been reliable at least.

It's funny that you say that, because all browsers on the iPhone are just rebranded Safari, due to Apple's policies. So the web engine is just the same as Safari, or iOS Chrome or Opera or whatever. Literally the only platform where Firefox can't have compatibility issues because it's just a re-skinned Safari.

some websites donโ€™t work on Firefox

Are you sure? Is there a list of these websites? I've been primarily using FF for a decade and haven't encountered any.

Same. Usually it's a case of "the site is broken on both", or a hard refresh is needed, so switching browsers feels like it works

I've had a couple straight up tell me I had to use Edge/Chrome recently.

I've had some map sites that just refuse to work on ff

Have you tried spoofing your User Agent to Chrome with a user agent switcher extension? The site might actually work in Firefox.

I never had that issue, untill starting last week. Now Google Maps won't work, for some reason.

It worked for years before that, it's a recent thing, in my case at least. Makes me wonder what's going on.

I've ran into a few in the last year or two. I also can't flash things like ESP32s (ESPHome) using Firefox for some security reasons, but this is fine as I'd rather be safe than sorry with my main browser.

I donโ€™t have any specific list. But I have ran into a few issues with Firefox. (mostly on my IPhone) In my experience Firefox on Mobile is just up to par with Desktop.

Last I checked all browsers on IOS are required by Apple to be basically a reskinned Safari.

Almost every web developer I've met tests if their site works in Firefox and other browsers. The problem is when websites (aka Google sites) deliberately design their sites to not work in Firefox to get people to switch to Chrome

Ive had website that require chrome work perfectly fine in firefox when I switch my user agent

Ive had website that require chrome work perfectly fine in firefox when I switch my user agent

I've been using Firefox since the beginning. I do not understand any of the complaints people have about it. And I cant remember the last time I visited a website that wasn't compatible with it. It was definitely before the pandemic and probably longer before that.

I agree, run Firefox as your main and then a privacy focused fork of Chromium as your second if you need it for specific website.

Personally I barely ever encounter issues with websites running FF.

This is probably the way to go imo. And make sure that it canโ€™t run in the background either. Since at least if your computer is anything like mine. Gotta shut that chromium based stuff down to have enough ram to actually do much lol.

Can you list the websites? I feel like this issue is sufficiently rare to be inexistent for the vast majority of users.

People always say โ€œMUH WEBSITE BORKED ON FIREFOXโ€ and never give examples.

This is not as nearly as bad as the old days of IE6's tyranny. If anything, we should stick to FF now that the situation is still bearable - before it becomes completely unbearable.

I use Firefox. If a site doesn't work depending on my OS I use Edge, Safari or Chromium.

You can file web compatibility bugs on bugzilla.mozilla.org or webcompat.com

There are different ways how bugs are fixed. But someone might reach out to the page itself, find and fix a bug in Firefox or change the web specification if the incompatibility arises from ambiguity around the feature definition.

Firefox can also ship an intervention, basically injecting code into certain websites to fix broken ones.

Some incompatibilities can arise from missing features in Firefox, the web constantly evolves and the Devs sometimes don't catch up. But bugs might still help, as high compatibility-risk features might be implemented more quickly.

As someone who used to do web design when there were around 5 different rendering engines, I found having multiple browsers to design for was often a good thing. You could easily build something that worked 90% of the time on the primary testing browser, and hit a wall trying to fix the remaining bugs, but then testing in a different browser would reveal something obviously broken with your solution, and once you fixed that, would fix some of the minor quirks you were having a hard time solving in the primary testing browser. 5 was probably too many engines, and I'm thrilled to see Trident (IE) in the grave where it always belonged. But if you aren't testing in multiple browsers, you're making your life harder, not easier.

Am I the only one concerned Google may try to pull a fast one and block Mozilla from using the Widevine DRM?

Time to boycott widevine and insist websites switch to an open standard ... (though honestly good luck with that, Google might very well win that battle)

Not that easy since the W3C mandates everyone use Widevine or something similar. There was such a shitshow over this that the EFF pulled out of the org.

Google has the internet by the danglies via this little whatsit and the W3C can do nothing about it, because Google accounts for a sizable amount of their funding, and dropping Widevine/EME would break everything.

Also, Google could just more simply stop funding Firefox: Mozilla gets a lot of money from Google just to be the default search engine. Then again, maybe Firefox can switch to Bing or Duckduckgo, though I don't know if those would pay as well as Google.

Google is not funding Firefox only for the search engine being default. Google needs to keep Firefox alive because it is their sole competitor. If Firefox (Mozilla) goes down, Google can be accused for monopoly practices which is something they want to avoid.

I mean, they could also argue that all the Chromium based browsers are not Chrome, and so there is competition (we know how it really is, of course, but they have good lawyers...).

But I'm sure that's at least part of the reason why they keep funding it.

Chromium comes straight out of Google though. It is not another browser. It is the same engine. They give their engine for free and different companies use it to make their own flavors of the engine of the "Google browser".

They're actually increasing the market share of their browser engine by having chromium open source.This is not competition.

Mozilla has good lawyers too.

Nah they don't. If they had, the whole IE2 debacle would have been over in a court of law.

Yes of course, but I guess they could argue that legally they don't count as the same browser, because each company using chromium as a base for their browser is adding or changing it as they like.

Someone could, in fact, fork Chromium and bring back support for Manifest V2 extensions, or disable whatever things Google does to block ad blockers (and in fact, I bet someone will).

I've never seen any websites use it... btw mozilla kinda abuses widevine by running it in an isolated container (because no one wants proprietary drm software running directly on their machines!)

If you are concerned about things like PWAs like I was, try it out anyway. PWAs require a bit more setup, but are a lot more flexible in Firefox. For example, PWAs with http connections have a huge banner in Chrome, and just an icon in Firefox. Everything I've noticed is that firefox is just as snappy as Chrome

I thought PWAโ€™s didnโ€™t work on Firefox. Thatโ€™s good to know, because Iโ€™ve been using chromium specifically for PWAโ€™s.

Same here, I tried the PWAsForFirefox extension a few years back and found the setup to be too much of a pain in the ass compared to the Chromium forks. I tried again around 9-12 months ago when Manifest V3 drama was making the rounds and found the extension had been overhauled and that's no longer a problem. As a bonus each PWA is a self-contained browser instance, so performance is improved when only the PWA is open, and extensions are per-PWA. So I can run only Purple Adblock on my Twitch PWA, or only uBlock for Youtube, etc.

I'm using them heavily as well. Mostly good. Painful though when moving between computers as you have to set them up on each one. If they can get it to sync eventually that'd be handy.

What PWA do you use? I think they're a neat idea but I haven't come up with an actual use case yet.

I just use it for any tab which I always have open, so they're organised on my taskbar. That way I don't end up with 40 tabs of like 5 different websites that I just pathologically open up a new tab for each time I revisit, having to scan through them all each time I want to switch to find one from before. That's an ADHD thing though. Effectively for some websites I want the tab to always be pinned and easily accessible with a large icon for a visual cue, and this way that all happens automatically

Gmail x2. Pulse SMS. Keep. Calendar. Whatsapp, Facebook, Messenger. All as task bar icons.

I used to use Chrome for this but every now and then it'd break and they would either open in the wrong profile, or they'd add a tab to the main browser rather than opening as a window.

Any idea how to get links clicked in a PWA like Google Messages to open in a normal browser tab? I've tried nothing.

Go to the PWA settings and enable "Open out-of-scope URLs in a default browser" and restart your PWAs.

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It's weird how lots of devs treat chrome as a standard, even though when developing I have a lot more issues with Chrome browsers than Firefox browsers

Well the market share is the whole story when it comes figuring out whats the standard

I haven't had any issues with browser compatibility since IE. Occasionally Safari might have some CSS issue, but it's been probably 10 years since I had any major issues with browser compatibility. Html 5 and CSS 3 tend to work across all browsers without issue.

There are some niche features Mozilla refuses to accept like WebSerial and WebMIDI, but they're starting to come around on them.

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Because Chrome rendering and dev tools are effetely superior to Firefox. That's why.

I'd disagree on Dev tools. Both are really great and useful. What I'd say is that Firefox may have less support for external debugging, but that's more others choosing not to do Firefox debugging

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It would be nice to spend one day on Lemmy without seeing a half dozen posts telling me to switch to Firefox nor 100 comments on every post that's even vaguely browser-adjacent about how ever since they switched to Firefox their life has been nothing but joy and rainbows

May I interest about about switching to Arch Linux instead?

I'm using arch and Firefox. But I keep chrome as a backup because I also have a ton of nest devices... Is your mind blown?

If it makes you feel any better (it probably doesnโ€™t), the same article was on reddit too. And hackernews also had it hit the frontpage.

People who are on an open source reddit alternative like open source software and an open internet, holy shit!

I'm using Firefox basically since it came into existence and my life is depressing and sucks. But at least I can browse the web without being tracked so hard by Google and others while trusting on an open source project whose first priorities are its users and not profit.

agree, no matter what communities you browse, you just get repeatedly hit over the head with the same 5 topics.

I didn't switch to anything, I simply never stopped using Firefox as there was no pressing need to do so.

Firefox is my daily driver, but oooh how I miss native tab groups like they have on most chromium browsers right in the tab bar. Extensions like simple tab groups just hit differently and are inferior...

Are there any settings you can tweak in the about:config page? That's how you have to enable the compact tab size, which is annoying.

I feel you. STG is the best addon I could find, I tried Floorp but it just was not the same thing.

I totally agree. Especially now that you can save the tab groups like bookmarks (experimental flag in chromium)

The people who know what UBO or a firefox even is is the vast minority. Google could single handedly completely fuck over the free internet and a majority still wouldn't give a fuck as long as they get that sweet sweet one click convinence. The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options. They just want their shit to work, privacy and daddy google violating their basic human rights be damned.

Oh and also some websites make it a huge pain in the ass if you aren't using chromium. I think its a bit of a conspiracy but could be wrong.

Also stop shilling firefox and start shilling Librewolf

is librewolf on mobile?

Nope only desktop. FF on mobile does have UBO available to install and I hear they are making plans to have all desktop addons be available on mobile at some point. I use kiwi browser for mobile. It is unfortunately chromium based but lets you install all the desktop adds from the chrome store including UBO

Mull is a decent option on Android that's fairly similar to Librewolf. You have to manually install the apk though.

The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options.

Doesnโ€™t this apply to most things? Phones, laptops, desktopsโ€ฆand cars, refrigerators, garage door openers, light bulbs, etc etc

Any numbers from Mozilla about increase in usage or anything?

This "article" is an ad lol

The irony is real

It's a shame that Firefox is still heavily reliant on Google. It's not chrome but we really do need some competition in this space that doesn't feed the monster and is also not safari lol.

How does it rely on Google?

funding, mainly.

That's right. If chrome didn't suck that much, no one would be funding firefox. Thanks Google!

Oh yeah, good point. Well at least that's just a deal to set the default search engine. Is there more?

More, as far as I know. Google has to at least keep it afloat, or else be accused of being a monopoly. It's a small price to pay for them.

Much like Microsoft bailing out Apple back in the day.

Finance an underdog so when someone complains about anti-competitiveness, you can point your finger at them and claim there's healthy competition.

Something like 90% of Mozilla's funding comes from Google paying them to make Google the default search engine in Firefox.

While I largely agree with the options that Tuta provides, I think the article could've been more succinct and to the point if they condensed all the Firefox forks like PaleMoon and WaterFox under one category. Also, I'm not sure if Brave should be on this list, not just because of their Chromium foundation but also because of their use of cryptocurrency, something I consider very suspicious and unsustainable. Finally, I question whether DuckDuckGo should be on the list. True, they are more private when compared to Google and all, but aren't they limited to what they can block through their contract with Microsoft? I remember hearing/reading something about that.

why the Freenet logo and not I2P? Freenet is not designed with privacy in mind, unlike I2P which literally stands for the Invisible Internet Project.

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Last I checked, Firefox had also been switching to Manifest v3 because they're also combating the tide of add-ons that pretend to do something useful, but actually steal your information. They asked uBlock at least a few times how they could build Manifest v3 in a way that'd be compatible. Instead of the browser asking about each URL, thereby giving the add-on access to personal information, uBlock could tell the browser what to block. uBlock's answer was always, "No. That's not good enough. Give the add-on access to URLs." It seemed to me like every time uBlock was approached, they turned to news sites to complain and IIR, the feature that would have given uBlock some functionality was removed from v3 because if nobody's going to use it, why build it?

I wonder, now that uBlock has conflated the discussion of, "How much should extensions be able to see and modify URLs you're visiting?", with, "v3 is a war on ad blockers!", how quickly Firefox will move forward with v3, if at all.

I think a lot of people don't realize what a gaping security hole extensions can be. Back in the 2000s, I'd install almost anything that seemed useful without realizing the amount of data that goes through them.

pushed up glasses

It motivated me to finally set up pi hole in my old raspberry pi I wasnt using, so there's that

doesn't help with youtube ads unfortunately

A mix of things helps. For most, pi hole/adguard home covers you. For YouTube ads there are a large number of addons and extensions that still cover that. (I actually pay for family premium out of Turkey for various reasons.)

On TV youโ€™ve got iSponsorBlock which can both mute and auto skip (when the skip button becomes available) the ads when they come up, with the added benefit of being able to skip in video sponsoring/ads. And it doesnโ€™t even need to be running on your local network.

There are solutions, just gotta dig around a little bit.

Generally no, but I've noticed a couple of times where it said "1 of 2 ads", 1 ad played, there was a pause, and it went back to the content.

I try to use Libretube on mobile

I use Firefox but there are web apps that just plain do not test on it. Office 365 is one of those and Word is basically non functional...more than normal.

I can't even log in to Lemmy properly on FireFox for mobile. And many drop down type selection boxes across tons of websites also do not work on either mobile or desktop versions of FireFox; this one irritates me most, because this was an issue years ago when I first was using it before Chrome existed and one of the reasons I originally switched to Chrome over FF at that time. It's been over 10 years and still hasn't been fixed.

Considering, the mobile browser also has addons and will gain hundreds more in a few months. It's a no-brainer.

This. Youtube is getting progressively more annoying (my train to switch on PC), but what pushed me was Dark Reader on mobile.

I haven't been using chrome ever since they remove AdNauseam from the web store with no justifiable reason.

They just took it off and kept it that way because there wasn't sufficient backlash.

In my former job, I had no choice but use Chrome due to work rules. If I couldn't have installed uBlock at the time, it would have killed me. So I hope for people like me, there's at least an adblocker that has a small chance of working in Chrome.

I'm curious if "must use browser X" is a deal breaker for many people.

Would you quit a job for forcing a specific browser?

For me it was the OS. We agreed, when I started my job, that I would use Windows but that I would eventually switch to Linux, which I did a few months in. If they wouldn't allow it, although agreed upon, I would have left - which I did anyways, but for totally different reasons

Vivaldi has an adblocker built-in but has no cosmetic filtering unfortunately. I did ask and they said it's been prioritised given the MV3 problems.

If they were in my situation, installing another browser was not an option, but installing Chrome extensions was still possible.

for anyone wondering, there's already a manifest v3 version of ublock origin available from the same developer.

Yes but ubol (ublock origin lite) , is limited in what it can block. It may or may not affect users, depending on how they had ubo configured.

See the author's FAQ:

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)

I only install UBO and never configure it, so perhaps UBOL will be fine

as long as you set it to 'Optimal' or 'Complete' it's going to be able to block YouTube ads for example. that's the main thing I missed while trying out dns adblockers and as such it's definitely not too limited for me

I'm trying to make the switch to Firefox, but I'm running into some issues. The main one being, I travel internationally a lot for work and rely heavily on chrome automatically translating every web page I visit. Is there a way to have this on both my desktop and mobile (android)? When I look at the available extensions there are like 15 available... Thankfully one of them is uBlock Origin

Firefox does now have built-in page translation that runs offline. While it's not the best one out there it only needs to connect to the internet once to download the translation data.

I know they recently put the feature in the desktop, did they dobit on mobile too tho?

FF doesn't do that I think. There are addons that u can use for it though.

I like how they mention Internet Explorer.

Internet explorer was the shit in 1992. That's only 30 years ago, not everybody is quick to switch. ๐Ÿ˜œ
There's also an icon for Navigator, and none for edge. LOL
Maybe they needed an image that was out of copyright?

Its biggest selling point was that it was bundled for free with Windows 98 while Netscape Navigator was still a pay-for product.

Yes apparently I remembered 3 years wrong according to Wikipedia, I am pretty sure we got Internet Explorer for Windows 3.11, as a separate free product, but Wikipedia states it was released with Windows 95 plus pack in 1995. So 28 years old not 30. But the plus pack although moderately successful cannot compete with being included with Windows 98. The last good Windows version, where you could boot to dos, and fix everything in Windows if they were broken. NT all the way up until Windows 11 sucks IMO. Bad design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer

Is that moon a browser?

I think it's that :

https://www.palemoon.org/

I briefly used a version of that on a legacy application that needed flash, because it still supports it.

thank you comment section, lemmy is so obnoxious when it comes to firefox ill be going with something chromium based soon now out of spite

Enjoy your ads because adblock on chromium fails

my man, not only have several forks got inbuild adblockers that wont be affected by manifestv3, ublock origin already got a working version for a long time

I like Librewolf better

I.e. Firefox

Whatever forks you choose, they'd better be based off Gecko-based browsers, and the only one now is Firefox (and all that forked from it)

Librewolf is firefox without the bloat.

Yes, essentially. But that's still Firefox, and it makes sense to refer to it as such when talking about global things like Manifest V2 support, adblocking, and other basic functional blocks from eagle view.

And then we can go into details and talk about differences between Firefox forks, Librewolf being just one of the most popular. This is important to talk about, just not in this particular context.

It's like uniting and arguing in favor of Linux regardless of the distros - distro wars are still valid, but not something we should immediately load onto a Windows user. Heck, even if person goes for a goddamn Ubuntu, it will be an improvement. Same logic.

You're telling me people actually still use chrome?

They are. In fact, they make up 60 plus percent of world-wide browser users.

Don't forget that Chrome is Android's default browser.

I like Firefox as default browser, but if i need something more secure i choose FireDragon

I've started making the switch. The only thing that's holding me back fully is the google search function. I just don't get as accurate results on Firefox as I do on Chrome

I would love to use Firefox, would switch in an instant but the browser feels so barebones. I'm using Vivaldi and that's how I think Firefox should have been, tons of options and features. Don't want to install extensions that might be sold to the highest bidder.

As a user of Seamonkey - which you'd know as Mozilla, the app that Mozilla the company ditched for being 'too hard' - I have to say no. While I trust they're not as evil as Google, I don't trust them to do the hard part of actual software maintenance.

Nope. Brave with its builtin adblocker is more than enough. I'd dare to say that any browser with builtin adblocker is going to be more than enough.

p.s.:

"Yeah, but the guy donate 1000 $ to some anti-LGBT org years ago", "yeah, but the referral stuff", more crap bullshit, etc... Don't care. It's fucking browser, not a religion.

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What is with the almost constant ads for Firefox on this platform? It seems every other day I'm blasted with some "Chrome bad get Firefox" article.

I get it, Firefox is great, we know. Beating a dead horse a bit at this point though.

The /c/technology community is the place for things like this. If you wanted to see less you could block the community.

it's because it's literally the only non chromium browser that's a viable alternative. At this point there are literally just 2 options for browsers: chromium based, Firefox based. That's pretty much it.

Yeah, lets switch to questionable ethics company number 2 and shady finances.

I used to use Firefox as my primary browser and sometimes even recommended it, but after all those articles I started digging a bit and doing research on what the browser calls and does and I was bit horrified. What I really don't like about this Mozilla situation is that tech people tend to see them as the "all savior Mozilla" while, in fact, theyโ€™re full of shit.

If you do care about freedom and your privacy use LibreWolf or Ungoogled Chromium.

What are these sources, but yes, LibreWolf is the way to go

If you do care about freedom and your privacy use LibreWolf or Ungoogled Chromium.

Neither of which are mentioned in the article, for some reason.

Neither of which are mentioned in the article, for some reason.

What's your point? The articles are about why you should avoid Firefox... not about suggesting alternatives.

That is exactly the point of the article

Today we will go ahead and take a look at a number of privacy-oriented web browsers outside those provided by Big Tech, which treat you like a human being and not a bullseye for targeted advertisement revenue.

There's so many post about Firefox. Mozilla should throw some money at Lemmy devs for free marketing.

Is it surprising that a userbase for an open-source online forum with no ads are advocates for an open-source browser that can remove ads?