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.
It’s weird that I’ve been on firefox for the vast majority of my life and I always had this perception that “everyone” was using it. Here in lemmy you hear about it all the time, my friends use it, I see it on my newsfeeds etc
But when you check the market share it around 2.8% while chrome is 65.1% https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
I was at my parents house last week because i had to help them with their laptop. I told my mom about firefox and she was very confused because she doesn’t seem to understand that google chrome is a browser and that every browser can access google search or their banking site.
It took a bit of effort to explain that firefox works the exact same but is safer and faster.
She is now using firefox on her phone because i showed her ublock origin works with it to block ads.
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that google chrome isn’t the internet and what exactly a browser is.
I feel like “most people” only learn “one technology per category”. They know of, one operative system, one browser, one app to mindless scroll, one program to edit text. As a developer it shocks me a little because I’m always eager to try new programming languages, technologies and ways to interact with things. I guess most people only know about edge/safari because they come pre-installed
How is that shocking?
I use Linux, Firefox, Lemmy, nano. Why would I change?
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that google chrome isn’t the internet and what exactly a browser is.
It’s been that way for a lot longer than chrome has been the big one, it used to be the same with internet explorer…
I would even go as far as saying that the left meniscus of the gaussian thinks google chrome is “google” and the “thing that finds webs”
Might have to do with the fact that Firefox was the dominant browser for quite awhile until Chrome arrived on the scene.
Iirc it peaked at around 30% market share. I think IE was around 60% at the time. So never dominant, but definitely very very widespread.
I remember a point around 2015ish where a lot of web apps went from recommending Firefox and Chrome for the best experience to just Chrome. Now I often see “don’t use Firefox” as a support tactic.
Yeah I’ve been using it for at least a decade now. It’s great.
This is also why there’s such a a prevalence of flashing warning banners, fake pseudobluescreens, and other scary shit disguised in chrome notifications.
The notifications in chrome are as close to on by default as you can get and with the right code snippets you can make it look like the FBI locked down your workstation and you need to call them.
Firefox should start hardening against this behavior now because popularity gets targeted even more specifically.
Make it an end user safety feature.
Force every notification to have
“This is a notification from a website that you elected to receive by allowing notifications. You can disable these notifications here”
with a link to the setting on the frame of of every one, no fullscreen allowed, no flashing, double-check and prohibit the words FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, IRS, Social Security, Microsoft, etc.
I guess average user cares mostly about how fast and smooth the browsing is. Chrome definitely has the edge on that over firefox.
I’m forced to use Chrome quite a bit (workplace silliness) and exclusively use Firefox at home. I seriously cannot see this edge that you claim Chrome has. Do you mean in loading speed? Scrolling speed?
I second you, I don’t see any advantage on using Chrome over Firefox.
same for me. no noticeable difference
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.
Been here since Kevin helped the project out?
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^
Oh yeah nothing bad could ever happen from effectively removing an entire section of the population from certain parts of the Internet completely.
I can’t imagine that ever going badly.
That’s already the case. Facebook etc have been walled gardens (or prisons if you prefer) for decade and a half now.
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”.
If it don’t work on Firefox I won’t use it. There are better FOSS options anyways
Sure as long as it’s not my bank or my employer or the gov official website for accessing my taxes…
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“WebUSB is a JavaScript application programming interface specification for securely providing access to USB devices from web applications”
Holy Hannah, NO!!!
Might as well allow a website to direct write to your hard drive unprompted again.
Does noone see how BAD this stuff is?
Stop creating attack vectors with glowing neon signs on them.
Except it’s a very good thing for 2FA USB keys which prevent people from gaining access unless they have physical access to the key. Also useful for USB gamepads etc
Web engines are nearly OSs at this point. It’s aready possible to flash a phone ROM in two clicks with a webpage. Most apps are also already rendered in browser engines anyway, that includes things like steam. The APIs might sound evil until your favorite FOSS project uses them to make your life better.
Unfortunately, if Mozilla refuses to implement stuff like PWAs or advanced APIs it’s locked out of that side of innovation both good and bad.
It’s aready possible to flash a phone ROM in two clicks
That’s precisely the kind of access that a web browser should NEVER, EVER have.
If you think 2 stage download keylogger apps getting into app stores is bad, wait until it can be done with a banner ad. Or by viewing a comment on a post.
I would close my bank account and such to a different bank. It takes literally 5 minutes to open one online.
And yes, I would not work for a company that doesn’t support Firefox
I would also keep pestering support of the government website, that one I will have to give to you
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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If we get to the point where the corporatocracy can force us into a limited set of compliant browsers then the web as we know it has ended. I don’t think they’ll go that far unless they decide to go whole hog. That level of control will likely look to wipe out any useful plugins like ad-blockers or other privacy features. I didn’t want to go down the slippery slope argument, but that’s pretty much what will happen if they go that direction.
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But most of those only give you a few bits of data. Like if there’s only one technique that succeeded, you might have the same fingerprint as everyone with your exact phone with the rest randomized
I remember the “works best on IE” warnings of old, looks like we might be heading back there.
For this reason, we must still take a stand against this stuff.
They do some now, but user agent switcher gets me to all of those with no problem.
It is not that simple. These are cat and mouse games. Whack a mole. Whatever you’d like to say.
If I can’t access a site with firefox, i won’t deal with online. I’ll call them and waste an employee’s time, or send payment in the mail. I’m not using chrome or an app and i don’t care.
Laughs in Waterfox
Laughs in earthfox
Laughs in airfox
Laughs in long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony fox
Laughs in Captain Planetfox
Wait, wrong 5 elements
With your powers combined, I am Internet Explorer 7!
Laughs in avatarfox
Laughs in electrofox
laughs in icefox
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
it’s all inevitable. client signatures, the end of privacy, jerking off on my way home from the office. there is no God
We killed god and replaced it with Google.
netscape was the standard back then when expolorer was crap…fast forward today,firefox(netscape’s successor) is still the standard when other browsers are still crap.
edit: spelling firefox and netscape…god damn butter fingers…
Firefox
NetScape!
I’ve been way more than a decade (closer to two decades) uninterruptedly using Firefox. I’ve never used chrome as a my main browser, ever.
But still, I’ll be naive if I didn’t recognize that this kind of shit will affect me even if it’s just indirectly.
Next year they’ll surely will be forcing many webs only working in “manifest V3 compliant browsers”. I’m sure of that.
Firefox is looking to implement Manifest V3 to keep extension feature parity with Chromium, but their version will not ban the one API that adblockers use. So Firefox will eventually be V3 compliant
The problem is that Firefox has like a crumb of the market and it’s held by a lifeline given by Google itself
There is no guarantee Firefox would survive the long term … Heck it would die short after Google decides to cut them off
Back in the Dim Times (1990s), before ad-blockers appeared, there was a program called WebWasher. It’s basically a proxy server you run on your own computer and it contained all the ad filters. You just configured your browsers network setting to point to WebWasher and it would handle all the ad filtering.
So even if companies completely remove extension support from their browsers, we’ll still have an alternative. :)
Still not unheard of today if you’re using a VPN. For example, if you’re using Mozilla VPN (Mulvad), in the DNS settings it gives you choices between regular DNS, DNS + ad blocking, or DNS + ad blocking + tracker blocking.
I did not know about WebWasher, that’s very interesting.
That man-in-the-middle principle doesn’t work with TLS.
But ads are still often delivered by content delivery which is blockable by domain, hence the reason piholes work. Not that in-stream ads aren’t the future, perhaps, but life finds a way.
What you’re describing is not a man-in-the-middle proxy, but a simple DNS block. That’s a very crude approach to blocking ads and notoriously doesn’t work for YouTube and Google ads because they’re served from the same domain.
I run a pihole myself but there’s still a huge difference between browsing with pihole only and pihole+ublock. It’s certainly not the answer to the Manifest V3 shenanigans.
I switched to chrome because they were the first to have each tab be it’s own process so one bad site/connection did crash the whole program. Also the cloud based password saving across devices was super convenient.
Firefox does both now too, has better ad blocking, and is a little less invasive and bloaty. A lot less invasive if you know how to set it up, which I don’t.
But yeah, Firefox is my guy again
Same here. Made the switch back to Firefox a year ago when I saw the writing on the wall about where Google wanted to take Chrome with Manifest V3.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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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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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.
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Always has been.
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
- 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 :}
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 extensions are the best patches i have for enshittification
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t use Firefox. Actually back in highschool I used IE around 2002ish but only because I didn’t know any better back then.
At some point 15-20 years ago Firefox was becoming a resource hog and I switched to chrome. I switched back a number of years ago and regret not switching back earlier.
Are you me? Firefox was always an option, but it definitely became slow maybe around 2010? I switched to chrome but came back to Firefox a few years ago also when chroms was first getting enshitified
Back when Chrome was the shiny new thing, Firefox was taking a downturn, I think it was around version 50 or something, as they wanted to update something that would break compatibility with a considerable number of existing themes and plugins, including my then favorite, NoScript.
For some reason, the UI of Chrome was never my cup of tea, all those round edges and auto-hiding buttons (maybe these were later additions?) annoyed me to no end.
Yeah, all my bad experiences with Firefox from back in the day were completely gone when I switched back to it a couple of years ago.
When Chrome launched Firefox was in pretty rough shape, and Google wasn’t what they are today.
Lots of us switched to Chrome then because it simply ran better.
I went from IE to Firefox back in that same timeframe, then by the time Chrome came out, my Firefox just had too much clutter and Chrome was way faster.
Within the past year, Chrome managed to enshittify itself enough that I’ve gone back to Firefox on PC (still using chrome on mobile) and it’s the same sort of “lighter, faster” feel that I got years ago when I left it for Chrome.
There’s also the whole ad blocker bullshit too, of course. YouTube ads were the last straw for me.
if you use Firefox on mobile, you can add plugins like ublock origin.
I admit I didn’t always use Firefox. I used netscape navigator.
I am still using Mosaic because it supports Gopher.
Honestly, IE was the best browser around the time IE6 was released (2000/2001). Way better than Netscape. Opera was the other good browser back then. The initial release of Firefox wasn’t quite there yet.
Better for MS non-standard things? Or better how? Performance-wise - yes.
IMHO a web browser has to support HTML 4.* , JS, Netscape plugins (Java, Flash, whatever else) and that’s it.
That’s what I came to when I started using the Web, but I’m confident it’s not just bias - that was the best combination. I’m not sure on CSS - I hated it, but people have good arguments in favor of it. But hypertext with limited appearance tuning and scripts for the web itself, plus plugins for various content, including applications, - that’s definitely a better idea than the modern approach.
Better for MS non-standard things? Or better how?
All browsers had non-standard things back then, to the point where many sites had two versions: An IE version and a Netscape version.
Believe it or not, back then Internet Explorer was the most standards-compliant browser. It was the first browser to implement the DOM and CSS based on relevant W3C specs (Netscape was backing JSSS instead).
Many features we take for granted these days came from IE. Drag and drop, the JS events system, iframes, rich text editing, clipboard access, AJAX (dynamically loading content on the page without a full page reload), visual effects like transparency and gradients, all originally came from Internet Explorer.
The CSS box-model in IE6 (including margin, padding and border in the width of elements) was wrong because the CSS spec hadn’t been finalized by the time of its release so Microsoft used a draft, and it changed from publication of the draft to publication of the final version. Many years later, people realised that IE6’s model was actually the better model, which is why every browser supports it now via
box-sizing: border-box.Sigh. OK, since I didn’t use Netscape (started around 2002), didn’t know about some of these.
there was a point between 3x and quantum (47 or 48 I think) that the performance was pretty poor and I briefly switched to chrome. when quantum got released, I switched back instantly
When Firefox was just starting to get good I still used Opera with their presto engine
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.
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.
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
Man for real.
