So use Firefox! On Android its ad blockers work well too
The fact there’s extentions on FF & it’s forks for mobile makes me sooo blown away anyone ever choses anything else!
Agree - I just don’t understand why you’d use anything else on a PC.
100% It’s just somehow way more blatant for me with mobile as it’s BEEN like this… which propbably helped make Google more confident in doing the same thing with PCs 🤯
mobile has forks and adblockers. you can even use brave if you want. ironfox is one firefox, but i stopped using it, because it does something wierd with different websites, and and on reddit where i browse sparingly.
There are mobile clients of Firefox and related forks, FYI, not just on PC. Firefox and Fennec are probably the most popular on Android.
The IT equivalent of throwing a sabot onto the gears…
The forks of Firefox are just as good or better, and largely lack the AI bullshit.
Firefox is my go-to browser, but don’t trust Mozilla and be ready to switch to an alternative just in case Firefox gets enshittified too much.
“But my cousin told me the fox fire is used by hackers or something, and the Google one said it was faster.”
I shit you not, I used to work for a company (with no IT dept btw) that refused to use Firefox because they said it was “a trojan virus.”
What I think happened is one of their dipshit employees downloaded something they shouldn’t have and got a virus and the bosses blamed the browser.
Our IT exclusively allows us to use Edge. So yay.
okay sit down this one is going to take a lot of brain. if a lot of hackers use it, the people who are good at computers, right? why would you not use the one that hackers use?
most “regular users” dont know about the forks, or even extensions.
And safari on all platforms (all 2) supports ad blocking. Not my first choice on Mac (or even my 3rd really) but it’s basically my only choice on iOS
It already has.
This is misleading.
UBlock has been deprecated on Chrome, for a long time. UBlock Lite is its replacement and will continue to function (albeit with more limited efficacy).
What they are talking about is a complicated series of command line flags to re-enable Manifest V2+installing UBlock from source… But who in their right mind would still be using vanilla Google Chrome and jumping through all those hoops?
It will be an issue for forks like Helium or Ungoogled Chromium. They’ll just have to patch in a native blocker, I suppose.
TL;DR: Headline is wrong.
Chrome users will notice nothing. The end happened a long time ago.
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.
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.”
You mean those people that were born in the digital age so that it’s second nature to them?
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:
- 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.
Well, the isolation allows you select what’s appropriate for each bit of data.
For example, my financial data have to live elsewhere - namely the financial institutions I use. I’ve been paying Todoist $36/year for the past 12 years and they have zero pressure to enshittify, so I’m okay keeping that data elsewhere. I also outsource my email to Fastmail because it’s generally inadvisable to self-host email.
However, for most things that I’ve started using recently (karakeep, miniflux, baby-buddy, homebox, ghostfolio, and so many others), I’ve chosen open source apps and run their servers on my homelab. Linux on the server (unlike the desktop) is extremely well funded. There are a ton of different types of container and micro-vm configurations you can mix and match to give the exact level of isolation, resource, filesystem, and network access you’re comfortable with.
Also, I don’t think it makes much sense to use proprietary software for much in the future. The cost of software development has been going down at increasing rate for as long as I can remember for a variety of reasons, and LLM-assisted AI Agents is the just the latest iteration. With the latest SOTA models, it doesn’t take much to create an maintain a selfhosted OSS app - someone with the will to put in time and the most basic understanding of the basic fundamentals of software engineering.
Certainly not things I would trust particularly personal or sensitive data with. But remember that breaking out of server-side containers/micro-vms is really hard, and way beyond the capabilities of any AI slop.
So yeah, from what I’ve seen so far the best tools out there for enjoying the largest variety of software (including potentially undisclosed AI slop) safely is server-side Linux containers + client-side browser isolation. The closest thing we have to sandboxes in the desktop is flatpak, and it’s so trivial to break out that I’ve watched people do it unintentionally, just trying to make their app work in it.
But if you are self hosting, do you need to worry about that?
Either way, I appreciate the detailed response. And looking at the browser as a strong sandbox does seem smart.
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:
- 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.
Viewing a web browser as the “open internet platform” is the crux of this issue that has gone unchecked for years. We turned a document reader into an application environment. This is the issue I have with PWA. A plastic bandage on a festering wound.
On your points regarding sandboxing, I believe that should’ve been rolled into OS userspaces for years as well, and only developing the technology as it relates to web browsers is a huge oversight that has and will further lead to security issues.
Not everything needs to be an application but building applications in a document viewer is a bit silly.
edit: less cynicism; I want to take a moment to charade all the efforts gone into Linux distributions that take sandboxing and immutability seriously. They aren’t very good solutions either, but it all starts somewhere.
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I mean literally though. “Good thing I use Firefox” was literally my first thought.
This one rules!
Edit: Here’s the F-Droid repo for IronFox, it and it’s predecessor Mull have always been Librewolf mobile to me
It’ll mark the end of Chrome for anyone who gives a shit about their privacy.
It’ll mark the end of chrome for anyone that wants to use a website without 2/3 of it being filled with ads and slowing tons crawl because of all the invasive scripts
Bullshit, there are other, better browsers who do not intentionally break basic security features like ad blocking. Switch to Firefox and Ublock Origin or any of the many forks it has.
If you are using Chrome, Brave, or similar, you should stop using it and switch to something that isn’t shit. Ads are a major attack vector for malware and scams. If you are not blocking them already , you need to start immediately!
Brave has a built-in ad blocker based on uBlock. There are lots of reasons people don’t recommend Brave, but the lack of an ad blocker isn’t one of them.
I never said that was the reason, Brave sucks because of shit like AI, trying to sneak in redirects that send money to the devs, charging to get rid of unwanted features, etc.
Chrome is the modern day IE. We use it for work, but not much else.
Why use anything from google? They’re an advertising company.
It baffles me. I told my dad I can get him adfree youtube in just 5 minutes if I install firefox on his phone.
His response was that he doesn’t want to install “yet another app” as if it’s a big deal.
I’m so often left speechless by this stuff. It’s asinine.
Eat your ad slop then… Wtf else can I say…
They don’t want to be bothered learning something new, they’ll just stick to what works for them.
Learning what? There’s no learning involved, unless you count pressing a different app icon and typing in youtube in search as “learning”.
And in the specific case of my dad, he’s no tech illiterate. He has Linux Mint on his laptop. He can get by just fine. He’s just really fucking lazy with this stuff.
I can understand that.
I’m an early Xer, and my mom an early boomer. She’s been a computer user since the late 70s. Right now, She does all these things, install a bajillion apps for things like the BBC and 10 other news services even though I have explained to her that she could have them all as bookmarks in FF, with ad and tracker blocking, etc.
She understands it. She does, but at her age she can’t be arsed to open a website, bookmark it, then go to bookmarks, etc. I’ve even tried to get her to turn things into PWAs, which she gets ! But can’t be arsed.
I’m an IT guy, the eternal tech support for friends and family. Now my eldest son is an analyst at a major telco, and I send him all the traffic, and sometimes even ask him to do or figure out stuff for me, because I can’t be arsed. Same reasons I’ve been on Mint for a few years, until I discovered CachyOS. I started my Linux journey in Slackware, painfully downloaded as diskette images, and have been distro hopping all my life, using all major distros at one time or another. Now I can’t be arsed.
Im still a tinkerer, a maker, homelabber, etc. but the mundane, I can’t be arsed.
Who still trusts fucking google chrome? Fuck them. Firefox bitch.
Librewolf
And mark the end (actually a while ago) of my use of Google Chrome. What a xrap browser it has become.
You might not know, but you can say “crap” on the internet.
You might not know, but you can say “crap” on the internet.
Nice!
- xrap!
- crat!
- crraaaab!
Well, I’ll keep practicing.
crraaaab!
i have chosen. this is your fault. my wife blames youuuU!
I HAVE REPORTED YOU TO THE INTERNET POLICE.
CONSEQUENCES… Will NEVER be the same!
I used to manage software that needed to be tested in all 3 major browsers every time we had an issue, and that was the only reason Chrome was even in my work PC. I moved on from that position, so bye bye Chrome
No… It will mark the end of some of them in Chrome. Not in general.
What actually happens is that some people move away from Chrome, because ads suck.
Google Chrome’s next update will mark the end of
popular ad blockersa large portion of the public using their vanilla product that stops ad blockingSounds like chrome gonna lose a bunch of subscribers because fuck that
