I am from Germany and it is just sad how many people use these apps from shit companies without thinking, when suitable alternatives exist everywhere. Just use Firefox, it will work for 99,9% without any flaw. I would love to ditch WhatsApp, but could only convinge a few people to change to Signal. It is as easy as downloading a new app to prevent supporting Meta, but that’s too much effort for many :-(
it will work for 99,9% without any flaw
Unfortunately not anymore.
And it doesn’t help, that Mozilla is also slowly turning towards enshittification… (since they fired all servo devs…)
Actually as much as I’d love to use Firefox all the time, there are many times it won’t work properly at all. This isn’t entirely Mozilla’s fault, but it is the case.
People not using Firefox is Mozilla’s fault. Just look at how their mobile browser performs. It’s so much worse than any chromium browser.
I’ve been using Firefox mobile since they enabled extensions on it a little over a year ago on my Pixel 9 and haven’t had any performance issues with it. My only complaint is that it doesn’t handle form auto fills, or opening links associated with apps as well as chrome, but I think that’s because of chrome’s inherent ties into the OS. I prefer Opera on desktop for the UI and features.
I use Firefox mobile since they support extensions but I have to admit that mobile browsers that are based on Geckoview are worse than browsers that are based on Blink.
Mozilla said that they want to concentrate their power on the mobile version, but I could not find the statement anymore.
if ads were normal and unobtrusive. We wouldn’t need ad blockers. Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate. I had been running an ad blocker for so many years that when a friend (who doesn’t use an ad blocker) showed me a website, the unfiltered experience was horrifying.
I love this movie but honestly it’s getting to the point where I can’t even watch it without getting upset.
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Listen scro, Imm just tryin to keep the people from gettin deaded
I only made it through like one season of Handmaid’s Tale, it was too real.
some some youtubers that had setup like that, it was so cringey. its from idiocracy
uBO is not just an ad blocker, its almost a firewall against malware and a tracking filter
Im old enough to remember the internet before ads, and with ads became a thing and you had to make sure to keep your speakers low/off all the time less some screaming loud ad popped up somewhere to burst your eardrums at 2am.
There were so many obnoxious, visual cancer ads.
Then they became actual digital cancer by being injection points for viruses and malware, and thus adblockers became a necessity.
And they remain a necessity to this day, for the same reason as they were 20+ years ago.
and yet the ad servers want to blame the end user for adblocking.
not their absolute refusal to moderate or police any of the content they deliver.
and yet the ad servers want to blame the end user for adblocking. not their absolute refusal to moderate or police any of the content they deliver.
This is the American way. You try to shit blame elsewhere so noone puts the onus on you to improve so you can keep a larger portion of the profit. “Fuck you I got mine” should be printed on our money lol
Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate.
Its even worse than just hurting usability. Lots of ad networks are not policing their advertising customers and malicious payloads have been injected from ads. So allowing ads is a security risk because of the lack of security at the various ad networks.
I was about to comment something similar but you said it before I did. Sometimes I’ll mistakenly open YouTube with Chrome and then I realize I messed up because I have to sit through three, sometimes one-minute long ads just to watch a twenty second video. I’ll typically just nope out and switch to Firefox. The worst thing is they’re unskippable and I swear for some of them the ad actually pauses if you switch to another tab or browser. I’m getting ads even on super old videos so I’m pretty sure it isn’t all to do with the channels themselves monetizing their videos.
3 one minute long adds are better than those 2 hour long prageru racist propaganda videos trying to masquerade as “Educational” content
I’d be okay with sites showing me unintrusive non targeted ads, but since it’s all or nothing I choose nothing.
Chrome is no longer available in my Start menu.
Been a loooong time
But my time is finally near…
Yeah, I switched to Firefox when this whole Manifest V3 thing was announced, I only still have Chrome installed because it’s better for PDFs than Firefox and once in a great while i run into a site that doesn’t work right on Firefox.
better for PDFs
Sumatra!
I actually really like Firefox for reading pdf’s, how is it in chrome? I’ve never actually tried chrome for that because I was still using okular back when I still had chrome installed on anything.
The main issue I have with Firefox is that some pdfs have this side-by-side layout (especially rpg pdfs) that Firefox respects and I keep having to turn it off every time I load a new one. Chrome doesn’t respect it and shows it a page at a time like I want. My eyes don’t work too good so side by side the text is just too small.
Interesting, funny enough I have sorta the opposite problem using Firefox for PDFs: I like the side by side view of two pages and Firefox always loads books with single pages, zoomed way too far in for my taste. Have you tried it for PDFs recently? It’s a new way of reading them for me, and I wonder if they’ve changed it since you used it last.
Yeah, it’s still set as my default for handling PDFs, so I keep opening them in there and then copying the address over to chrome by hand because I’m too lazy to go find the default app settings.
Or in my app drawer
or in ~/.local/share/applications
laughs in Firefox
I just downloaded the Kagi Orion browser and I can install extensions from both Chrome and Firefox web stores!
Nice!
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This is probably the single thing that got me to switch to Firefox. Privacy whatever, I don’t care about my data or the morality of my tech company or whatever, but mess with my adblocker and goodbye.
I’m mostly in the same boat. If you really want to know my kink-search-history, I really DGAF. The morality is nice to think about but it’s all about your personal morals in a lot of cases.
Can I have your bank account username and password?
No
Can I have your psychosexual profile and live gps coordinates?
Fish sadist, 47°9′S 126°43′W
Like, a sadist for fish? Or a sadist that is a fish?
Yes
A fish who is a sadist in his sexual relations with other fish obviously.
Awww, but understandable. Can I see your bank statements for the last 12 months?
No
So you do care about privacy!
Yes, when it comes to sharing sensitive information publicly, I do care about privacy. Especially bank information - a regular bank statement could probably be exploited for identity theft - but it’s also nice to keep at least a little plausible deniability about who I am IRL (for employers and such).
When it comes to websites and browsers aggregating browsing history to use for advertising - which is what I was referring to in my original comment - no I don’t care.
Why not?
It could be used to take my money, which directly and drastically harms me and benefits you. Or worse, “steal my identity” and take out a loan in my name. Things like bank statements could also potentially be used for that, and I have no reason to give them to internet strangers.
firefox is going through thier own enshittifcation down the line, they changed ther policy about data recently
They changed the phrasing, since in some jurisdictions “sharing anonymized data with partners” can apparently be interpreted as a sale of data, if they get something in return, even if it’s not a fiscal payment.
But after the outrage that sparked, they’ve rephrased the policy again and wrote a lengthy article detailing the reasoning, which is at the very least plausible.
I’ll care when Firefox loses ManifestV2 support.
I read about this too, and it worries me. Google has donated over a billion dollars to Mozilla over the years. That alone doesn’t scare me so much as it’s a blatant propaganda tool to deflect the antitrust sentiment that plagues them and will probably some day do its work of breaking them apart.
Fortunately, there are numerous open source forks. I am currently using Librewolf, a fork of firefox focused on privacy and anti-tracking, and it has worked without a hitch. A couple of my extensions have required fiddling with to get right but it’s part of life if you care about these things.
Google is not an IT company. It’s an advertising company. Surprised Pikachu, it blocks ad blockers.
It’s been an ad company for a long time, though, and blocking ad blockers is new.
Because they are at the end of their growth phase and have entered their squeeze until dead phase.
Yes, but enshittification doesn’t happen all at once. And this is a textbook example of the actual meaning of enshittification.
Yeah it’s always been an ad company. And you are correct, blocking apps is new, welcome to the last stage in the ad-blocking arms race. Glad I degoogled my digital life a decade ago.
Hey, can you tell a little bit about your stack, what apps and services do you use? Also on phone? I guess in a decade you could work that out pretty well.
Your options for phones come down to linux phones (which I haven’t heard great things about) and pixels ironically.
Apple phones make a similar number of calls to google services as android phones simply because of how much google runs.
Use firefox
And if you don’t like Firefox, use one of the Firefox forks. Some of them are very Chrome-like.
Which ones do you mean?
FireDragon, Zen Browser, and LibreWolf. Zen feels like a streamlined Chrome.
Ah right. But none of them are true forks, really. They still rely on the Firefox project to port features in etc.
Chrome is no longer available on my computer.
Never has been 🔫 (at least for a couple of years)
I only use chrome for my work stuff, and that’s because I work with g-suite a lot.
Chrome fucking sucks
I wish I could say the same. Web dev. 🫡 But at least I’m using Chromium, if that’s even slightly better.
I switched to Firefox many years ago, after their announcement I switched to Waterfox and I’m very happy with it.
I’ve been on Firefox since 2004, trying Waterfox right now and it seems very nice. I was surprised to see that it supports Firefox Sync, took me less than ten minutes to make it comfy. Now I’m wondering about that; perhaps I should disable Firefox Sync?
How did you choose Waterfox? Are there any resources that compare these FF forks?
Not Waterfox, but others is listed here https://www.privacytools.io/private-browser
Worth to be mentioned are also
but the best IMO https://zen-browser.app/
I take this as a sign that it genuinely still works to block ads and hasn’t sold out and become malware like those others that used to be popular.
It was removed because Google did away with manifest v2 for browser extensions, and uBlock Origin worked almost entirely from a feature provided in manifest v2. So it was removed because it can no longer work on chromium devices, unless the browser manually adds back in support for it. Firefox has chosen to continue to support manifest v2, so the original uBlock origin is still available. uBlock lite is still available in the chrome store, and uses the new manifest v3. It is more limited in it’s capability, but should be able to get the most obtrusive stuff. The lite version is definitely not nearly as powerful as the original.
On a side note, it seems to me like the link still works for now. Idk how much longer that will last.
I swapped to Chrome years ago because YouTube stopped working right on Firefox.
I’ve started the process of swapping back to Firefox after 10 years with Chrome over this.
never had a problem with firefox and youtube
I know what he’s talking about- there was some javascript spec or something that google proposed, and nobody else bought in, so it never actually became part of javascript’s standard.
But google implemented it into chrome’s javascript engine anyway, and then used it for youtube. There was some fallback code if the new functions weren’t available, but, because of a ‘mistake’ they didn’t work and basically made playback ass for a while until the open source community basically debugged and fixed the issue FOR google, and then spent a few weeks cramming it down google’s throat that it needed fixed.
The only problem I’ve had is that you can’t view HDR content in YouTube on Firefox.
That’s not a big part of YouTube (yet), so it is largely unnoticeable.
It probably didn’t have anything to do with Firefox itself. It’s likely related to something I messed up in FF or it was something to do with the ancient laptop I had at the time being a junk heap, but I tried Chrome and noticed that the trouble didn’t exist there. So I started using Chrome.
I kept using it because of all the google integration, which was really handy when I was using the google business suite to run my own small business. I shut that down two years ago now, so there’s nothing really keeping me on Chrome any more.
I swapped back to FF a few days ago and YouTube works fine now. So I’m back on the FF train and giving Google the finger the whole way over banning the adblockers that I liked.
t probably didn’t have anything to do with Firefox itself
It probably did. Google has been caught red-handed with messing with Youtube to break Firefox.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/
Jesus Christ, what a bunch of rat-fuckers.
Yeah if you fiddle around with about:config without knowing exactly what yer doing, shit breaks. Fortunately you can type “about:profiles” in the url box, make a test profile, and mess around as much as you want before nuking your default browser.
If they break youtube in alternative browsers or force ads I’ll finally be able to ditch youtube for good.
There were a few extensions you could run in firefox that told youtube that it was totally for reals being accessed by a chrome browser.
Boy, that would have been good to know back in 2015, I feel like I let Google hoodwink me into using Chrome for all that time.
Ironically YouTube seems to work better for me in firefox, although the issue in chrome may be caused by browser extensions
That’s good to hear. I’m looking forward to trying it out on FF again.
What problems with YouTube did you have?
Something was going wrong with video playback. Unfortunately, this was about 10 years ago so I don’t remember many specifics about what the problem was.
I’ve exclusively used firefox to watch youtube on Arch and Ubuntu for years, never had a problem so far for what it’s worth. I keep a laptop in the livingroom with Arch specifically to have adblocking and piping the video out to the TV. The youtube apps are terrible on the Roku last I remember, haven’t tried it in forever but I think the main reason was I didn’t want to see ads anymore.
My wife and I used the YouTube app on a Roku TV for some time, and it was rough. I’m not sure if the intense lag was caused by the app or the low specs of the TV, but either way it was a poor experience.
Glad I don’t use chrome anymore. Though unfortunately everyone else I know still does.
the what store now
But ublock origin lite is by the same dev… Not as many features but it conforms to the new rules and is still much better than not having a blocker if you use chrome or edge.
Missing critical features:
Filter lists only update with the extension, you cannot update them dynamically
No making your own filters and thus no element picker for blocking annoyances on a webpage (a feature so good apple literally baked it into safari)
No support for external lists (which means if you back up your own filters into a list you cannot easily reimport)
No changing behavior on a per site basis
A number of other features as well that are more strictly power user features but still really handy like dynamic filtering and strict blocking domains.
If you have the option stop using chrome and edge, they are some of the worst options you could choose. Even outside of adblock and manifest v3 chrome is horrendous for data harvesting bullshit and edge isn’t great. If you don’t have the option because of an overzealous it dept or whatever and are forced to use it ubo lite is your best option probably and my heart goes out to you
I’m a bit confused as an Adblock Plus user, why did the ublock dev drop those features? ABP uses manifest v3 too and it still has all of those. So it’s clearly not about them being impossible.
According to Adblock Plus’ own blog post about the matter:
With Manifest V3, Adblock Plus is required to limit how many filter lists we have available to users. We’ll have the ability to offer up to 100 pre-installed filter lists that you can turn on and off depending on your preferences. From these available filter lists, users will be able to choose 50 that they can keep turned on at any given time. We’re working to ensure that popular filter lists our users love are supported by us, and that any updates to these lists are brought to you by frequent new releases of the extension. This does mean that initially, our users will no longer be able to subscribe to any filter lists outside of what is provided in the extension.
Re: Element Blocker:
The Block element feature will continue to exist even after the Manifest V3 version of Adblock Plus officially launches. Manifest V3 does require us to adhere to limits with filter lists and user created blocking rules, so there’s a chance things may change in the future. However, we don’t have details quite yet! If you have any more questions about this or anything else, our support team are the best people to ask at support@adblockplus.org.
So this says to me that baked in filter lists are now required, custom lists will not work, and Block Element is probably functioning illegally if it is indeed still functioning though that may change in the future in either direction.
Changing blocker behavior on specific sites is the only thing in that list that I see UBO disallow and ABP not mention at all. Not sure why that was changed.
I’ve read that too, but I still have the ability to add a custom list. It says initially, so I assumed they got around that issue by now, considering it isn’t the case for me.
I technically use Edge which afaik still allows MV2, so in case the extension somehow implements both and defaults to mv2 if available, I’ve decided to install Chrome and get ABP there to test. Even in Chrome, the ability to add a custom list is still there. As are all the other features, like manual updating. With custom list I mean both the ability to add a list per URL, and the ability to add custom arbitrary rules directly.
I don’t really see why element blocking wouldn’t be possible or allowed under Manifest v3. Like, it’s entirely client-side. Manifest never comes into play there.
What I can imagine is that custom lists might work that same way too, removing the ads from the page after they’ve already loaded rather than blocking the web request directly which is afaik how adblocking works in mv2. I can’t tell you if that’s the case or not.
Lol who downvoted this
Probably because of the Adblock Plus mention. It’s mired in controversy because of its acceptable ads toggle and requiring ad giants to pay for it. So I can imagine people downvoting comments that put it in a positive light compared to other adblockers.
You may be right, but whether you hate ABP specifically or not should be irrelevant to the question. The question was why other extensions - like Adblock - can have those feature but uBlock Lite can’t. What’s different?
I’d also like to know, personally. I’d wondered the same thing.
Or just use Firefox
My work uses a web-based interface that’s very annoying to use on Firefox. I’m unfortunately tied to Chrome in the meantime, so uBlock lite is a lifesaver.
Or just use a fork of firefox. Firefox isn’t looking very favorable lately.
I’m giving Floorp a try right now. It’s actually pretty good.
Try zen browser too!
Im a huge fan of the default(?) webpage feature thing.
Who will develop the underlying browser then?
Firefox was stubborn enough not to support H.265 till JUST recently and only on windows… Doesn’t work with my 4k security cameras as well as Chrome or Safari based browsers.
H.265 is patent encumbered. Blame the 2 or 3(?) patent pool holders (for-profit corporations, unlike non-profit -and-slowly-losing-market-share Mozilla) for not making it free to use for everyone.
This is why AV1 is preferred, it saves bandwidth and there’s no threat of being sued into oblivion.
The best option here is to just tank Chrome’s market share instead of making something that’s obviously not ideal, work.
Everyone should ditch chrome
My fucking organization refuses to support anything but Chrome. I hate it so much.
Brave user here. Never looked back.
I think the Brave CEO recently said some Trumpy shit (in case you’re at all curious for the downvoting).
Honestly, hadn’t logged in for a few days, so didn’t even know I was severely downvoted. Leaving Reddit has helped me not scroll through every day for hours on end on Lemmee.
And good to know about the Brave CEO thing. I legit cannot keep up with everything.
I wish more people were like you. Not everyone can keep up with everyone’s beefs (this one not so much) but it really grinds my gears when I see seemingly polite, on topic, engaging or contributing comments with no replies but still geyting down voted. Especially on a forum as thirsty as Lemmy users are for more user involvement.
It makes me think there are too many people in the world conditioned to be preset to hate thst the fact a person doesn’t know they’re supposed to hate something is enough grounds to be shunned and hated on. Lol. It’s cool to see someone jump in and say:Hey homie, we don’t hate you we hate a person who is unrelated to the topic of the thread or the context of your comment but we do hate them enough to hate on you
Edit: the parenthesis comment was meant to imply hating Trump monkeys is glaringly obvious. My comment was about lemmy etiquette and wasn’t about why or why not OP was getting downvoted.
It’s gotta be some kind of sheep brain activation; crowd following behavior. It can be very annoying sometimes.
Sometimes you’re just voicing a neutral opinion and it gets destroyed. And by neutral I mean it’s not controversial or anything, like racism, it could just be something not exactly everyone would agree with.
I wish people would use the down vote as Reddit once intended it to mean: off topic and not contributing to the discussion, or perhaps rude, etc. Not “I don’t agree with this”. You should explain why you don’t agree with something, or up vote a comment that already explains it.
