The other thing people on Lemmy / Hackernews/ Reddit don’t seem to get is that people are not using laptop or desktop computers anymore. More and more people only have a phone and maybe a tablet. People with phones and tablets do not know what a browser is. It’s baked into the system. Everyone on Android is using Chrome and they very likely don’t even know it.
I use Ecosia on my phone because it has a built-in ad blocker that actually works.
I use Revanced instead of YouTube/Music so I don’t get ads and can listen to what I want (I had to change my phone’s DNS, because on data it wouldn’t let me watch or listen to anything that was marked “explicit”).
I haven’t updated my Discord app in the last couple years because I heard that one of those updates supposedly introduced ads and I said “hell no.”
Their absolute and stubborn refusal to implement PWA made me give up on Firefox recently.
I tried using Chrome for PWA only and using Firefox for my main browser for a while (to help their market share), but it made it very difficult because external links would open in Chrome.
I’ve found like 80% of sites I use are self hosted so I found it easier to just stop using websites with ads than dealing with Firefox 😞
Because installing a native app requires an enormous amount of trust. Every native app running as your user has read access to all data created by every other app including browsers and their secrets like saved credentials to sensitive websites.
The Linux ecosystem mostly got away with this by being too small to be worth targeting. But several recent events (like the attacks on the AUR) have increasingly shown that we’ve passed the threshold where that’s no longer true.
So, what am I to use when I don’t have the time to go through the source code of every new version of every single app with a fine-toothed comb? Well, browsers (while not perfect) have some level of sandboxing, doing an overall decent job of keeping websites’ (apps) data isolated from each other.
Switching to use web apps whenever possible meant (at least, in Firefox) giving up a lot of the functionality of native apps (like default file associations, dedicated entry in the taskbar, and so many others). They’re basically refusing to acknowledge the open web as a platform that solves a real need: providing security and escape from walled-garden app stores (which is the bigger problem on mobile). Instead they’re spending their funding on AI, and VPNs, and random other features nobody really asked for.
While I think it’s very important that there is more than one browser implementation in the world, I have 2 choices:
Use Chromium fork to get security and convenience and privacy.
Use Firefox (or its forks) to maybe get privacy at the expense of the other two.
That’s an interesting take. But you think its safer to use web versions? Sending your data out somewhere else? To keep tabs isolated in firefox I do use containers, so they dont interact, but I have never been a fan of making WPA’s, when I could just click on the tab its in or open it in the browser anyways.
Progressive Web Apps, a crack-pipe idea that allows you to install websites as if they were computer applications. Desktop entries, shortcuts, opens as a single window with no URL bar, everything to make it look like a computer application, but it isn’t. It didn’t take off because it’s not a very good idea, with no very good implementations. In my opinion.
Because installing a native app requires an enormous amount of trust. Every native app running as your user has read access to all data created by every other app including browsers and their secrets like saved credentials.
The Linux ecosystem mostly got away with this by being too small to be worth targeting. But several recent events (like the attacks on the AUR) have increasingly shown that we’ve passed the threshold where that’s no longer true.
So, what am I to use when I don’t have the time to go through the source code of every new version of every single app with a fine-toothed comb? Well, browsers (while not perfect) have some level of sandboxing, doing an overall decent job of keeping websites’ (apps) data isolated from each other.
Switching to use web apps whenever possible meant (at least, in Firefox) giving up a lot of the functionality of native apps (like default file associations, dedicated entry in the taskbar, and so many others). They’re basically refusing to acknowledge the open web as a platform that solves a real need: providing security and escape from walled-garden app stores (which is the bigger problem on mobile). Instead they’re spending their funding on AI, and VPNs, and random other features nobody really asked for.
While I think it’s very important that there is more than one browser implementation in the world, I have 2 choices:
Use Chromium fork to get security and convenience and privacy.
Use Firefox (or its forks) to maybe get privacy at the expense of the other two.
This will hopefully move more people to use Firefox again.
Maybe 0,00001% of the user base will. People don’t care, us nerds need to come to term with this
The other thing people on Lemmy / Hackernews/ Reddit don’t seem to get is that people are not using laptop or desktop computers anymore. More and more people only have a phone and maybe a tablet. People with phones and tablets do not know what a browser is. It’s baked into the system. Everyone on Android is using Chrome and they very likely don’t even know it.
You mean those people that were born in the digital age so that it’s second nature to them?
I use Ecosia on my phone because it has a built-in ad blocker that actually works.
I use Revanced instead of YouTube/Music so I don’t get ads and can listen to what I want (I had to change my phone’s DNS, because on data it wouldn’t let me watch or listen to anything that was marked “explicit”).
I haven’t updated my Discord app in the last couple years because I heard that one of those updates supposedly introduced ads and I said “hell no.”
I suggest to install Aliucord for Discord and Metrolist for YT music
This is also why Nintendo/Ubisoft/Other Shitty Company Here is still doing well despite all the gamers saying they’d boycott them.
Their absolute and stubborn refusal to implement PWA made me give up on Firefox recently.
I tried using Chrome for PWA only and using Firefox for my main browser for a while (to help their market share), but it made it very difficult because external links would open in Chrome.
I’ve found like 80% of sites I use are self hosted so I found it easier to just stop using websites with ads than dealing with Firefox 😞
All this over running web sites as apps? Why would I ever want a website as an app?
If I understand what you are saying correctly.
Because installing a native app requires an enormous amount of trust. Every native app running as your user has read access to all data created by every other app including browsers and their secrets like saved credentials to sensitive websites.
The Linux ecosystem mostly got away with this by being too small to be worth targeting. But several recent events (like the attacks on the AUR) have increasingly shown that we’ve passed the threshold where that’s no longer true.
So, what am I to use when I don’t have the time to go through the source code of every new version of every single app with a fine-toothed comb? Well, browsers (while not perfect) have some level of sandboxing, doing an overall decent job of keeping websites’ (apps) data isolated from each other.
Switching to use web apps whenever possible meant (at least, in Firefox) giving up a lot of the functionality of native apps (like default file associations, dedicated entry in the taskbar, and so many others). They’re basically refusing to acknowledge the open web as a platform that solves a real need: providing security and escape from walled-garden app stores (which is the bigger problem on mobile). Instead they’re spending their funding on AI, and VPNs, and random other features nobody really asked for.
While I think it’s very important that there is more than one browser implementation in the world, I have 2 choices:
That’s an interesting take. But you think its safer to use web versions? Sending your data out somewhere else? To keep tabs isolated in firefox I do use containers, so they dont interact, but I have never been a fan of making WPA’s, when I could just click on the tab its in or open it in the browser anyways.
Because it’s handy to have some apps as separate windows outside of the browser so u can quickly alt tab to them.
PWA? Poopy Wet Ass? I know nothing about computing what is PWA
Progressive Web Apps, a crack-pipe idea that allows you to install websites as if they were computer applications. Desktop entries, shortcuts, opens as a single window with no URL bar, everything to make it look like a computer application, but it isn’t. It didn’t take off because it’s not a very good idea, with no very good implementations. In my opinion.
Because installing a native app requires an enormous amount of trust. Every native app running as your user has read access to all data created by every other app including browsers and their secrets like saved credentials.
The Linux ecosystem mostly got away with this by being too small to be worth targeting. But several recent events (like the attacks on the AUR) have increasingly shown that we’ve passed the threshold where that’s no longer true.
So, what am I to use when I don’t have the time to go through the source code of every new version of every single app with a fine-toothed comb? Well, browsers (while not perfect) have some level of sandboxing, doing an overall decent job of keeping websites’ (apps) data isolated from each other.
Switching to use web apps whenever possible meant (at least, in Firefox) giving up a lot of the functionality of native apps (like default file associations, dedicated entry in the taskbar, and so many others). They’re basically refusing to acknowledge the open web as a platform that solves a real need: providing security and escape from walled-garden app stores (which is the bigger problem on mobile). Instead they’re spending their funding on AI, and VPNs, and random other features nobody really asked for.
While I think it’s very important that there is more than one browser implementation in the world, I have 2 choices: