We’ve known this was coming for a while now . . . but I suppose not everyone reads tech news.
one might say that this piece of news is the… canary… in the coal mine?
I mean… Even if everyone knows it’s coming, you still need to have notice when it actually happens right?
And what? If someone can live with ads, they can stay. Otherwise anyone can install Firefox. I was all-in Google since the beginning of Gmail. And switching to Firefox was completely painless. Everything works the same, times of website incompatibility are long gone.
Issue is, a lot of people think the only browser in existence is “google”. I even had people looking me at funny for having an e-mail address ending in outlook.com rather than the usual gmail.com, and not because of some anti-MS sentiment, but because they thought e-mail was invented by Google, hance the name “gmail”.
but because they thought e-mail was invented by Google, hance the name “gmail”.
Life is scary.
What if websites decide that chrome users earn much more ad revenue and start forcing users to switch with those “This website only supports Chrome” error messages? What if this practice gets popular? I’m sure there are ways to get around it, but the average users who bothered switching to Firefox at all, will just conclude that anything except chrome has a bad browsing experience.
Can’t you have your Firefox browser just report itself as chrome?
You certainly can. They don’t know what you’re doing.
It’s all fun and games till they check for web USB support. They don’t need to actually use web USB but it’s a telltale sign that you’re not on Chrome.
A plugin could very easily have Firefox claim to support WebUSB, but return no devices or junk devices. Some of the anti-fingerprinting add-ons already do, iirc.
You get my point though, all they need to do is start supporting a feature that’s not easy to spoof.
The real defense against this is for people to refuse to use Chrome. It’s not the tail that wags the dog, Make The Firefox user base so big the developers can’t ignore it. Basically IE all over again
I agree with your conclusion, but as long as they’re offering data up for download to your machine, they really can’t control how you access it or what application you use for it. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, but even if it requires reverse-engineering some website DRM, somebody’s going to do it. And if Chromium remains FOSS, it won’t even be terribly difficult.
Remember, they tried to defeat ad blockers on YouTube, and they gave up because it wasn’t worth it. uBO was updating to block their attempts within hours. They’ve tested inserting the ads in the video stream, but that’s probably also not going to last for long.
They’re trying to assert an ownership over the Web; and yes, the best way to defeat it is to build a strong and united resistance against it. But even if we don’t, there are ways to quietly refuse to comply.
Then apple would whip out their giant throbbing cock and smack them with it because they want people using safari.
i never understood how those messages work? like how would using firefox ruin your website? or how they even detect firefox in the first place lmfao
They can in theory make tricks showing that you are using an ad blocker or a specific browser. Even if you set Chrome’s user agent in Firefox.
I personally wouldn’t make such effort to use such websites then.
Visit about:compat. Sites already do that. Firefox can deal.
times of website incompatibility are long gone
I wish I could agree with that. Hell, I have to use Chrome to download my phone bill from Virgin, and a couple of others don’t work.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming FF. It’s these lazy web developers that only target Chrome. I’m sure Safari users get the same shit experience.
Yep so happy with Firefox having switched back a couple years ago.
I really wish Firefox implemented easily switchable browser profiles. I am use Firefox mainly but for work I’ll still use edge so I can use this feature.
I don’t know exactly what part of a separate profile you are after, so this may not be a 100% substitute, but I found container tabs in Firefox to work quite well (with some extensions to improve UX). It’s still the same profile though, so passwords and history are shared.
firefox.exe -P -no-remote
times of website incompatibility are long gone.
cries in dev
I’ve cried also in dev a lot in the past, but mostly don’t cry so much anymore
some people dont want firefox bcs its kinda slower then chromium based tbh but it aint bad am not saying firefox is bad
They’re not that different any longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883
Oh
Because Google is trying to turn the internet into a walled garden where only people with Chrome can visit the majority of websites.
I’ve been been a full time Firefox user for three years now. Haven’t experience a single problem like that. Haven’t really experienced any problem at all to be honest
Unfortunately that has not been the case for me. Some sites for buying concert tickets don’t seem to like Firefox.
I’ve had problems with several Microsoft sites we use internally for work ever since Edge went to Chrome.
It’s not Firefox’s fault. Mozilla is abiding by web standards.
If you find any websites that don’t work with firefox, you should report them to Mozilla. Firefox has a list of known bad websites, and has fixes for them, usually just a user agent override.
Do you use YouTube?
NewPipe exclusively. YouTube has been unusable long before I fully moved back to FireFox.
try changing your user-agent to mock chrome in Firefox while you visit YouTube.
you should see a drastic difference in UX.
I tried YouTube in Chrome on desktop (for about 2 minutes) and I didn’t notice any difference. I’ll just keep using NewPipe on my phone though.
it takes a whole 10 extra seconds for the interface to be usable for me in Firefox. but not when I spoof the user-agent as chrome.
at least that’s how it was about 4 months ago.
Your past experiences with Firefox are irrelevant because we’re talking about the future.
I know. My experience with Chrome used to be good too. And we all know what’s up now.
If Firefox fucks up, I’m fine with abandoning ship and moving on to the next thing. I’m not sure what that would be, but I’m sure I’ll figure that out once we get there.
That’s the problem. Google is working so that there’s not going to be a next thing.
That is concerning, but Internet Explorer used to be the only option too. Of course things are different now, but I have faith (for lack of anything else).
Thats the thing.
There is basically no alternative. Firefox exists on the mercy of google which is its biggest donor.
There are very few attempts at a truly open source browser and neither can tackle the biggest problem, which is google pushing websites to adopt their standards, weaponizing ad income to guarantee compliance.
Currently more then 80% of internet users have a chromium browser while websites creation for many entities is often outsourced out of lack of own IT knowledge. When firefox dies there will be no economic insensitive to build sites accessible by anything but chromium.
Low key i wish this fires back into anarchy. I hate the corporate web and the only sites i like to see are those free of economic insensitive and all in on an ethical free digital world.
Incentive
Maybe part of the monopoly ruling will have chrome taken away from them.
Hopefully wikipedia recognizes this as the official Canary in the Chrome mine. I was first impressed with chrome book because of seeing them used for education, getting my own laptop during school would’ve been mindblowing to kid me. I was unimpressed with the strangulation process of the OS but again shocked when they added a linux boot mode. There needs to be better alternatives by now, I would be ok with an OS developed by the department of education in conjunction with higher educational institutions. Could have a decent non-profit approach to a browser and ad blockers could legitimately be built in as a “protect the children” aim of approach.
I take it you’ve never been involved in such an endeavor? What you propose would take a decade a minimum due to the sheer number of nested advisory committees that would be required for those groups to interface. Better a non-profit group begins the work and then solicits these group’s input at the design stage.
What could go wrong when you let an ad company dictate the browser standards/rules.
I know we have Firefox and some forks like librewolf, but percentage wise it feels like a lost battle ( even if I am on Firefox ).
If only people switched en masse to Firefox for the ad blocker. Wouldn’t that be something… One big collective FU to Google.
Oh well. One can dream I guess.
There comes a point where one realizes that those around you cannot be relied upon to leverage solutions. Psychopaths get ahead because they’re willing to play dirty. So much of the world can be summed up as large swaths of population being induced to behave or think certain ways by psychopathic manipulators.
Data serves a great role in this. It’s a currency of control.
Political, social, etc.
Which is why privacy is so goddamn important.
The average Joe or Jane have no idea about ad blocking possibilities. They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.
I have even shown people the difference between their browsing experience and mine, and still they can’t be arsed to install an ad-blocker.
But then again, they use tiktok and Instagram and all the other brain-numbing shit out there.
They think ads are just
the normal price you pay for surfingpart of the webI personally wouldn’t mind ads, if they weren’t too obtuse and/or malware ridden.
I often turn off the adblocker for independent news sites, as theirs are less obtuse and are vetted better than just running an AI to detect nudity and/or slurs.
By all means bring back the banner and side ads that are just one banner and a couple of side ads. Breaking every paragraph up by two more ads is just a miserable experience. Have you tried to look up a recipe lately? Trying to find a recipe without an ad blocker pisses me off and off that I just give up on the recipe. Even though I know it’s on the page, between the 5,000 word essay trying to convey their nostalgia for the recipe and the 27 different ads that break that 5,000 word essay into 25 pages, I’d rather DDOS them then get the recipe from them.
The average Joe or Jane have no idea about ad blocking possibilities. They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.
Actually about a third of all users have an adblocker installed. Adblocking has been mainstream for a while, no doubt why Google finally stopped pretending they were OK with it.
My wife didn’t even notice when I turned on the pi-hole. She also told me she thinks there’s a virus on her phone.
I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in the intelligence of a woman who would marry a Lemmy user.
They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.
Which is great, offsets us who do use adblocks. It would be awful if majority of users would use adblocks.
Normal price is usually offered before charging it.
Great day to be a firefox user!
I thought they already killed it? They keep killing it multiple times.
Yeah I heard it was permanently removed like a month ago. Still working for me.
I suspect this will soon be followed by a renewed effort by google to kill firefox compatability.
Have you looked at the market share of Firefox lately? Why even waste time on that?
Because this is likely to drive a lot of people to try switching. And they’re the type of people who try to convince other people to switch, too. Techies, etc.
When forced with trying to keep family safe from abusive and/or manipulative ads, this is a pretty hot topic. Plenty of people tell their family what browser to use and even set it up for them with ad blockers, etc.
I’ve recently had some experiences that tell me my parents are at a vulnerable age and can’t fully protect themselves, so it’s pretty important to have control of this.
A slight misunderstanding, perhaps. I meant why should Google try, as right now Firefox is no threat to them.
So you will need to have a backup browser to use only Google services and everything but Google search blocked in ff
Its not google services i worry about ive pretty much degoogled everything i can. Its the google bits so deeply embedded into almost every website across the internet. If they implemented some tpm bs into chrome that somehow Verity’s itself with tpm and google servers before it loads anything then that instantly makes a majority of websites juat not work on ff with no fixes backdoors or bypasses. They will try, we have little hope in stopping it, and most people wont even notice let alone give a fuck.
I’m being downvoted heavily on Reddit for suggesting thorium instead of Chrome.
My guess is bots as thorium is way faster and the dev hates the thought of a chromium browser without Adblock.
Moronically I think the Reddit hive mind is following that opinion and I may have to delete the comment or face site wide blacklisting which is what usually happens.
Thorium doesn’t support secure streaming, so while it was amazeballs fast, it wasn’t useful. Ended up picking Vivaldi for watching streaming.
tbh i dont like thoriums update cycle you stay on 1 version for 4 months the firefox fork is even worse thats why i use ungoogled chromium instead
Kinda agree it should have an update built in, I’m using Chris Titus’s update script to update it Which to be honest doesn’t seem to update it much.
I’m mostly basing my use on it being quite fast and the dev cursing out Google and swearing to keep Ublock.
Didn’t thorium had some drama the other day though?
i am pretty sure it was resolved and explained , crisis Titus also had a video but ever since its members only and i cannot find a reupload.
I’ll take your word for it but between all the nonsense Google and Mozilla have pulled I’m not sure where to place my belief.
I’m sticking to thorium for now because it’s fast and does what I want in a browser
Maybe we’re thinking about this wrong. Maybe we should all start running plugins that just load whatever ads that show up in the background hundreds of times without showing them to us. Every viewer is thousands upon thousands of impressions and click through rates become absolutely miserable. We can make the ads worthless or maybe even make them cost a significant amount of money to host.
AdNauseam does this to a lesser degree. I’m not sure how effective it is.
It’s mildly effective in the sense that it will decimate click-through rates, but if enough people did it, they would start filtering by IP, and you’d need to change how many ads it clicks on so it looks more human.
It also still gives advertisers your data, since it still has to load the ads on your system to click them, so it’s not as privacy-preserving as a full-on adblocker that outright blocks every advertisement and tracker related network request in the first place.
Yeah, I don’t want to use it because I don’t want them to get some weird over fitted model of my behavior.
shrugs in Firefox
Why not LibreWolf? It’s Firefox without Mozilla’s BS.
You say that like they didn’t just remove several other adblock extensions themselves
No they didn’t.
They’re still there. Ublock origin is the god-tier adblock, and it’s still there. It’s even a Recommended by Mozilla extension.
I think people don’t hate Mozilla, they want them to do better as there are not many options left if you care about privacy. It’d just be nice to not have to pick the lesser evil for once.
And they are doing better. Making ads private is a very good thing. They’re currently a privacy nightmare.
They are not making ads private, they are adding another tracking vector. This will not get rid of the other ones already there.
No they weren’t. Clearly you don’t know how this system works.
It is impossible to track anybody using this.
You are getting angry at Mozilla for making something that enables privacy, then getting angry at them again because they aren’t dictators of the web who can control everybody’s and networks.
PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.
So, let’s say I trust in everything they are saying, which is the absolute best case scenario, then they have done nothing for privacy, because the whole premise that ad networks only care about ex-post measuring the effectiveness of their ads is false. They could have done that long before.
They want to know who you are and what you do so they can sort you in categories and show you specific ads based on those. That’s the service ad networks sell to advertisers. So, tracking as usual will continue.
I don’t think Lemmy users hate Firefox. I feel like alot of it is either people who legitimately have whatever needs they have, fulfilled by chrome more than firefox, or…it’s fucking astroturfers/fanboys.
Edit Addendum: Also, if anything, Lemmy users fucking love Firefox.
I don’t mean all Lemmy users. I mean a surprisingly large amount that non-stop hate on Mozilla and Firefox.
I’ve even seen two users that hate Mozilla/Firefox so much that they wrote about it in their account bio, which I find crazy.
Mozilla have made a series of unpopular choices, especially their enabling of telemetry for advertisers that does nothing to benefit users.
It is no surprise some people are vocally unhappy.
Private ads that make user tracking impossible absolutely benefits users, and the ad industry would be a lot less of a cancerous cesspit if it were the norm.
It’s certainly been unpopular, but that’s more because most people on Lemmy don’t read past ragebait headlines and assume the worst.
There is no reason to trust Mozilla more with your data than anybody else.
It’s just another source of telemetry for advertisers and won’t stop any of the existing methods of tracking.
The one they removed isn’t relevant until Firefox also removes manifest V2 which they have no plans for.
Firefox has a different manifest v3 that still retains webrequest functionality, so even when they do switch over it’ll be fine.
Except they didn’t… If you read more than headlines
shrugs in books
They have no idea how stubborn I am.
From what I’ve heard, they only “removed” uBlock Origin Lite. Normal uBO is still up.
Actually, they flagged UBO Lite and the dev removed it himself in a fit of pique.
and they only flagged it because it violated privacy rules
No. It didn’t. That’s why he was upset. Mozilla even admit this. Did you read the article or what?
“Mozilla later admitted in an email that they had made a mistake regarding the extension, but Hill has ultimately decided to cease development of the uBlock Origin Lite add-on for Firefox.”
Careful, there are some edgy people out there who don’t want to use more than one browser because Firefox doesn’t work with their cameras /s
Meanwhile, I’ll still be using Firefox too
Who needs to give their browser access to their camera?
I do this with Discord and Zoom as an alternative to installing their actual apps. 99% of the functionality is there anyway, and the 1% is stuff I don’t want anyway
I use MS teams for meetings every day at work, in Firefox, in Linux. It’s nice that even the camera works when I need it to.
People who have to use their browser for telehealth and virtual teller banking access.
Sadly these are also things that require better security.
Yup. Firefox doesn’t work for me unfortunately, so I have to maintain Chrome on at least one device for these things
Hey, member when you always had to have IE for one of “those” sites and it was basically just an awful browser everyone was forced to have like as a legal requirement or something?
Heh. IE. Then when you’d use it to download firefox it’d say “Nooooo! Wait! I’m teh Best Browser!!” Hahahahah
IE. Ded.
I use Firefox for some teleconferencing, but my therapist’s software only works on chrome
Does it have to be Chrome, or just e.g. Chromium is fine?
People who use Webex, zoom, etc for one use in try browser and don’t normally use those links. Happens at work when an outside vendor doesn’t use what we do.
It’s so frustratingly annoying. I primarily use Firefox, but switch to Chrome for specific Google services on my mobile. Once in a while, the search suggests I take a photo? Why?
Y’all got any more of that data?
/Google
May be bad phrasing, but Firefox doesn’t support h.265 so there’s limitations with streaming video on some camera platforms and other sites.
TIL Firefox doesn’t support HEVC. Hadn’t really noticed that before, I guess it’s why some Jellyfin streams started transcoding for me.
I guess it’s why some Jellyfin streams started transcoding for me.
You’re better off using the Jellyfin Media Player standalone application anyway.
Neither does it support HDR content
It is supported in the nightly build and full support is in the works currently.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/hevc-support/idc-p/63424/highlight/true#M36557
I’m currently using safari on a MacBook. Way more power efficient than chrome.
Wtf is Chrome Canary?
Chrome Canary, the pre-beta release version with the most far-out feature set
I see. So the beta version got the the “feature” later than the production version? Google really is in great hands.
Thanks!
Hoping that Vivaldi is going to hold off somehow - perhaps with their built-in ad blocker. And before you say “switch to Firefox”, I’ll say I’m not gonna, at least not until I see native mouse gestures implemented and working everywhere.
I made the switch from Vivaldi back to Firefox recently. I loved Vivaldi, but I’m happy with Firefox too.
Fair enough. All I’m saying is that mouse gestures are so much ingrained in my muscle memory that their absence in native capacity (and reliance on extensions for that) is a show-stopper for me.
I get it. Date your distro, marry your browser.
I miss the level of customization you could do in Vivaldi, down to minute details. But I don’t miss it enough to put up with ads and tracking nonsense.
I started on Firefox back when it was a beta called Phoenix. I eventually moved to chromium based browsers like the rest of the world, but now I’m back. I’ve come full circle!
Been using Firefox for quite a time now! What are the other alternatives?
Ladybird is working really hard to become good enough for daily drive. Will they succeed? Idk. How long will it take? Idk.
Is that Firefox alternative?
Not right now.
It’s a new browser being built from scratch.
Brave, Librewolf (didn’t test yet)
How many times has this been announced already?
Think of it as an iceberg & Chrome users as a boat.
Assuming no changes, this is landing in Chrome Canary now, so we’re watching the Chrome Canary boat hit the iceberg. The Chrome Beta boat is going to hit in a few weeks. Finally the Chrome Stable boat is scheduled to hit in mid November.
Now Google may choose to hold back actually enabling this flag immediately. It wouldn’t be the first delay. But likely in mid November is when all the posts will start to appear of people asking where their ad blocker went.
(Although I’m guessing it actually is delayed until after the holidays and in the new year, but that’s just wild speculation.)
Yes
