- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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Laughs in Waterfox
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Always has been.
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.
If we want to be honest, Firefox on Android has way worse performance than Chrome.
(But I still use it instead of Chrome)
I use both on a Pixel 7 Pro.
Can’t confirm that.I use it on a Pixel 5 and even there it is fluid while browsing. Only on Youtube there is the slightest stutter for HD Videos. Heavy sites like Discourse fora or Cryptpad or such work flawlessly.
TIL Cryptpad.fr is just one instance apparently
Yeah wow nice that’s fantastic
I use both on a Galaxy Fold 5 and can confirm Chromium based browsers are smoother. Although I still use Waterfox on my phone. I just keep a Chromium based browsers in case a website doesn’t work when I visited it using Waterfox.
It depends I think. I found Chrome to be a tiny bit faster but then ads bogged the page down so most of the time, Firefox is faster for me.
In some very rare cases when I need to disable ads blocking, Chrome is indeed faster but I’d rather abandon websites rather than disable ads blocking.
So if you love ads, Chrome is better. If you hate ads like I do, Firefox is miles ahead.
There are other ways to block ads. Adguard does a great job on Android. It establishes a local VPN, so it can do HTTP[S] content filtering in addition to DNS blocking.
Can’t use my VPN and adguard at the same time iirc, unless android has two active VPN “slots” now. Can’t bring a pihole with me 24/7 either as much as I would like to.
There’s always nextdns.io that can be configured to use ad blocking filters on the dns level. You can set it up on your phone as well
Can I use it in conjunction with my normal VPN? AFAIK android has only one active VPN slot available at a time.
Yes because there is no need to setup another VPN. You only configure the DNS settings (Private DNS). I know that Mullvad on PC has an option to use custom DNS server
Ive been using Firefox on Android for years but it really needs some TLC. It doesn’t support scaling to a tablet/desktop UI at all so it doesn’t work well in DeX or anything larger than a phone. I also recently had to swap to Brave because I noticed Firefox was draining a lot of battery all of a sudden. There’s some kind of leak or running process that isn’t sleeping properly. In a few months I’ll re-install and try again.
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 pilled
It 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.
But I will raise people one more. Waterfox
Never heard of it, I prefer LibreWolf
https://librewolf.net/#what-is-librewolfbut 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/browserFennec 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/fennecbuildMull (hardened fork of Fenix)
https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenixIceRaven (yet another hardened fork of Fenix, able to install an extended list of extensions)
https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
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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.
dont donate to moz lmfao if you look at the source code they collect absolutely everything, just use librewolf + betterfox.js/arkenfox.js
They collect everything? I’m on mint. I want extensions, and not have to run my browser like I need to tweak an OS. I just want it to work. What do I use?
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox
if user.js editing is too much of a pain then get plain librewolf, go to settings and enable history-saving:
search bar ‘history’ > scroll to ‘history’ > disable ‘clear history when librewolf closes’.
supports extensions just fine too! :)
https://librewolf.net/installation/linux/ installation for mint
edit: why the downvotes? i cited a good source for my claims.
edit 2: hackernews post about plain firefox being spyware, mental outlaw’s video on the topic and eric murphy’s video on this.
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- Firefox doesn’t “collect absolutely everything”.
- DO donate to Mozilla as without them the Firefox, Tor, Mullvad, Floorp, Mull, Waterfox AND Librewolf browsers wouldn’t exist.
- Librewolf disables SafeBrowsing, which is a security must-have for anyone installing a browser for friends/family - and in many cases even for yourself.
- Even the Librewolf developers say “Safe Browsing is still a good security tool and Mozilla’s implementation is privacy respecting.”
- Yes, if you know what you’re doing use Librewolf. For everyone else, Firefox is a great move.
oh, thanks for the information! it appears i was mistaken :}
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 ;)
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I remember it as, Firefox was fast enough, but Chrome was shipping a weirdly quick JS engine and trying to convince people to put more stuff into JS because on Chrome that would be feasible. Nowdays if you go out without your turbo-JIT hand-optimized JS engine everyone laughs at you and it’s Chrome’s fault.
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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.
Have you thought about installing a Firefox fork? On my Work PC I use Firefox for work and Floorp for personal browsing.
What’s this, you say? Floorp? Sounds like you’re setting me up for a Futurama joke, or something.
I’ll see what’s up, as long as it doesn’t require admin rights.
Unfortunately, I think that while ad blockers won’t work as well, they will still work good enough that most won’t bother making the switch.
https://blog.getadblock.com/how-adblock-is-getting-ready-for-manifest-v3-6cf21a7884f6
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/
https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-mv3.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1067als/comment/j3h00xj/
The main issue I see is the slow update of filters (which require an extension update). This might make YouTube win the cat and mouse game. Where YouTube updates(ed?) their blocking detection multiple time a day.
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.
You sweet summer child.
How long do you think Chrome will let DoH be opt-in?
You sweet summer child
How are they going to get past my firewall rules?
Nerd fight! Nerd fight! Nerd fight! Show 'em your bionicles collection!
By using the same hostnames that you need for wanted content.
By refusing to load
Personally, I’d like to see them force in-browser DoH down my throat with my computer powered off. They’ll never see it coming.
It’s not up to Chrome.
The day they do their own DoH in-browser it is definitely up to them. It’s already opt-in if you want to see how well your pi-hole won’t work with it enabled.
Next step is to do DoH by default, and finally making it compulsory.
Chrome already does have DoH enabled by default from what I can tell.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/10468685
By default, Secure DNS in Chrome is turned on in automatic mode. If Chrome has issues looking up a site in this mode, it’ll look up the site in the unencrypted mode.
They can do it all they want but it won’t work…
If I “opt in” it falls back to non doh immediately because using doh on my network is not up to Chrome.
use-application-dns.net + nxdomain for any known doh provider
I don’t use pihole but doh blocking works great on my network. It should work on a pihole tho it’s pretty basic stuff.
If you can’t resolve the domain you can’t validate the TLS certificate.
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
