Why Bother With uBlock Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox::Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs.
I love Firefox. Love it.
But I keep coming across sites that don’t function properly with it. Is this Firefox’s fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don’t, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.
Chrome seems to have such a foothold that it is getting away with embrace/extend/extinguish and I think it’s a very sad thing.
That was Internet Explorer 20 years ago and look where we are now.
I personally can’t remember the last time I had issues with a site on Firefox in the last few years since I switched.
The teams web app was borked for me on Firefox at one point. Idk if it’s still like that. Also Google Chat or whatever tf it’s called now disables a bunch of features on Firefox.
Still worth it to switch. 99% of websites work just fine. They basically have to intentionally design sites to not work with FF.
Ah yes wtf is Teams doing!? Some arbitrary features are blocked on Firefox, like you can’t direct call someone but you can be part of a group call 🤪
But I don’t think Microsoft’s online suite is a reference, most of it feels buggy or bloated at best.
Makes sense since the browser microsoft pushes on it’s users is chrome based.
Just spoof the user agent and it works fine.
Those are literally restrictions placed by the site in question, not a limitation of Firefox. Get a user agent changer, and set the user agent to the “required” browser, and magically it will work!
When I was using Firefox I felt like spoofing user agent was essential to make websites work the way they were supposed to. I could loose some rounded corners here and there but it was still better that some features completely missing
Chrome turning into Internet Explorer was something that I didn’t foresee some years ago.
Heck they have literally done that with Edge lol.
Been using it for years, and the only few times I had issues was due to worthless websites creating artificial obstacles with an “unsupported browser/OS” page or banner rather than something actually breaking for being incompatible.
Discord and spotify web versions don’t work on Firefox for me. On discord in can’t connect to a call and Spotify doesn’t play songs or it takes a long time after pressing play for the song to start playing.
This is an especially common problem on Android. I have found many sites whose mobile version simply does not work in Firefox. It’s very frustrating.
I also feel their number grew in the last year. I’ve recently tried using Mull again (mobile firefox privacy-focused fork) after using Bromite for a year, and it was so unbearable I had to switch back. I’d say I had less websites that worked than ones that did not
Unfortunately tracker blocking can lead to even more issues as many sites have started relying on it for basic functionality.
I tried to bring this up as an issue back on Reddit, and I got downvoted into oblivion.
I think sometimes switching your use agent to Chrome can bypass some issues.
So many tech minded people, but at same time, so many of us fail to consider others POV and priorities.
JUST DON’T VISIT THAT WEBSITE! - sure bro, that means i won’t be able to pay the bills this month because the only traditional way of doing this is visiting a physical kiosk at working hour. Did i mention that i gotta work?
Similar with messaging apps.
YOU NEED BETTER FRIENDS LOL - trust me I’ve tried. i also need to send my resume using this app to whoever interviewing me. no, no email. yes, i tried teling that. no, i won’t be that guy preaching about software freedom when all i want is a fucking job.
The first sites I really noticed it on were banking sites. Pretty much essential. Then I noticed more and more sites. Switching to chrome based solved it. But it really, really bothers me that I had to resort to that.
Would love to just ignore such sites, but that becomes a pretty big ask… Sigh
There is an addon that does this automatically.
Some pages load weird like a pop-up on mobile that should take over your view window is a side bar instead. Still fully functional but slightly harder to read.
But you know what makes it way harder to read? Ads
I’ve visited pages in Chrome without an ad blocker… Almost unusable, my eyes couldn’t even focus on what I actually needed to do.
I’m not sure if it’s better, or worse, than the cancer that was the dot come era. Pop-ups everywhere. Random fucking toolbars. So many toolbars. A clippy version of a titty dancer if you’re unlucky.
Make sure to only do that temporarily and only if it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise just avoid using said website and look for alternatives.
I keep seeing this sentiment on these posts, often with a suspicious number of up votes that don’t seem to correlate how many up votes everything else in the topic get.
Literally the only place I have EVER seen this issue was a state toll road website, which was using a timezones that didn’t actually exist but chrome added (and documented on the Internet to trick people into using it). A simple email to the website with an explanation and the correct timezones name and the problem was fixed.
Pretty sure a lot of this sentiment is either astroturfing, or people passing on astroturfing trying to be helpful.
Yeah, I’ve been exclusively using Firefox dev edition for the last 2-3 ys. I can’t remember one site not functioning properly apart from the odd visual bug from time to time.
Typically banking sites for me. And a few others.
We should add another E… Embrace, extend, extinguish and enshittify.
Mr. Lahey?
“Eye am the liquor, Bobandy.”
But I keep coming across sites that don’t function properly with it. Is this Firefox’s fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don’t, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.
Reminder for others that they can report to Web Compat
This is a good comment! I’ve reported to them in the past. A good reminder.
Give me examples. I’ve been using Firefox exclusively for over ten years and I can recall one website I’ve had to use chrome on. That was draw.io to get shared drawing through a Google drive to work.
For me there are certain sites where the site icon doesn’t show up in my bookmarks. While not world shattering, it can be annoying.
That’s such bullshit. People keep saying SO MANY SITES DONT WORK ON FOREFUX
with zero examples.
I see no examples. You’re making a ridiculous claim with no proof and I’m astounded at how many people believe you here.
I think someone needs a hug.
I still see only empty claims lawl
on desktop I don’t think I ever notice an issue, but on mobile it’s really noticable
It blows my mind how many people do you not understand how essentially useless Chrome is now and how much it has changed.
What I don’t get is that my browser experience is legitimately better overall, I don’t know what was keeping me from switching all these years. Familiarity perhaps.
I had the same reaction. Used to love Firefox with all it’s awesome plugins but it took me soo long to go back to it. I just became so used to Chrome that the switch seemed daunting, although, I’ll admit it took a little while to get comfortable with it again.
What about chrome is useless? What makes chrome so useless that a normie would want it to change? In the end both let you browse the internet just fine. from work i use Firefox and at home i had chrome for years. I did not recognise any diffrenses except ram usage and it beeing a Google product. I changed to firefox at home a few months back so it is the same at work and at home. Can’t say it feels any snapier or whatever. For a normie Privacy is no reason to change. They don’t care. Ram, they probably don’t even know what that is. You have to search for new extensions in the mozilla store if the same one you used does not exist there. That is the reason firefox will not dominate Chrome in my opinion. For a normie there is absolutely no reason to change and normies are the majority of people. Some anecdotal story. At work i installed for some colleges Adblockers because the said some of the ads where anoying and after i did in the following months one after another wanted me to deactivate it again because they could not figure out to visit some websites. As i offered them to show them how they could get around it they just denied. “that is to complicated for me.” So yeah. Normies do not care and even worse adblock blockers work.
Not to mention that Youtube and Chrome are run by the same company.
In my book, nothing changed because I refuse to run anything closed source on MY computer.
Very Stallman of you, unfortunately for many people’s use cases they will want at least proprietary video codecs or drivers. You could even argue using most websites with minified JS is closed source.
Whatever you’re willing to be exterminated for.
Edit: All you fucking morons come here and downvote me but fact of the matter is you will all die and there will be zero reproduction of humanity in far less than a decade from now.
Only Free and Open Source AI Software will save you. Only. But go on, like your vote makes any fucking difference.
Well, that escalated quickly.
You’re missing shit. Like, the fact that you and everyone else will die for ignorance of the only survival possible on this planet being FOSS.
Neither I nor you escalated shit. The patriarchy in its attempt to murder everyone already did that. You’re just ignorant of that and misread that happening here and now.
The… patriarchy.
That was an unexpected addition to your disassociated rants.
Dissociated? Just exactly what do you draw that from? I ain’t chugged in months…lol.
Why’re you so angry over this?
You read emotions in words written down. You a fishing. You are ignorant.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. I’m genuinely curious as to why you’re getting so angry over this, that’s all.
There’s no angry. You’re reading shit. Not observing a person.
I’d mark this comment to return to in 10 years, but I have a sneaking suspicion you won’t be around to answer me when I point out that we are all neither dead, or sterile.
So I’m just gonna say, 10 years early: Lol
We need a remind me bot. I’ll make one in 10 years when I have the time.
If it ain’t global soaring, it’s viral (synthetic or genetic, don’t matter), or war & tyrrany, pollution & poison, I’m only saying probably within a decade but I guarenfuckingtee it won’t make two.
Tbf every time is the best time to switch to Firefox
I would gladly if their Android app wasn’t filled with bugs and performance issues on my phone
It’s bad on Android, but is good on desktop
i’ve been on Firefox in the last 8 years. i don’t even know what’s going on in Chrome and other browsers lol.
Same… I don’t understand the appeal of Chrome. I think they used a new java engine like 10 years ago and beat Firefox in a handful of benchmarks, and then Firefox conclusively and irreconcilably trounced Chrome a few months later, never letting up a bit.
I remember when they released Firefox Quantum. Too many tabs was never a problem again.
Remember when Firefox started dealing damage to IE’s insane monopoly, and then Chrome came along and shanked them both?
I hope Chrome finally eats dirt after basically becoming knockoff IE 2.
Literally every new HTTP standard is coming out of Google’s dev team. That is not a good thing.
As long as Chrome was convenient people preferred it. Now that they are showing their true face and squeezing it in favor of being more ad-friendly I hope people realize there are better choices.
Am I the only one concerned Google may try to pull a fast one and block Mozilla from using the Widevine DRM?
Time to boycott widevine and insist websites switch to an open standard … (though honestly good luck with that, Google might very well win that battle)
Not that easy since the W3C mandates everyone use Widevine or something similar. There was such a shitshow over this that the EFF pulled out of the org.
Google has the internet by the danglies via this little whatsit and the W3C can do nothing about it, because Google accounts for a sizable amount of their funding, and dropping Widevine/EME would break everything.
Also, Google could just more simply stop funding Firefox: Mozilla gets a lot of money from Google just to be the default search engine. Then again, maybe Firefox can switch to Bing or Duckduckgo, though I don’t know if those would pay as well as Google.
Google is not funding Firefox only for the search engine being default. Google needs to keep Firefox alive because it is their sole competitor. If Firefox (Mozilla) goes down, Google can be accused for monopoly practices which is something they want to avoid.
I mean, they could also argue that all the Chromium based browsers are not Chrome, and so there is competition (we know how it really is, of course, but they have good lawyers…).
But I’m sure that’s at least part of the reason why they keep funding it.
Chromium comes straight out of Google though. It is not another browser. It is the same engine. They give their engine for free and different companies use it to make their own flavors of the engine of the “Google browser”.
They’re actually increasing the market share of their browser engine by having chromium open source.This is not competition.
Mozilla has good lawyers too.
Yes of course, but I guess they could argue that legally they don’t count as the same browser, because each company using chromium as a base for their browser is adding or changing it as they like.
Someone could, in fact, fork Chromium and bring back support for Manifest V2 extensions, or disable whatever things Google does to block ad blockers (and in fact, I bet someone will).
Nah they don’t. If they had, the whole IE2 debacle would have been over in a court of law.
I’ve never seen any websites use it… btw mozilla kinda abuses widevine by running it in an isolated container (because no one wants proprietary drm software running directly on their machines!)
I wouldn’t really call that an abuse.
is there a word for good kind of abuse (?)
It’s weird how lots of devs treat chrome as a standard, even though when developing I have a lot more issues with Chrome browsers than Firefox browsers
I haven’t had any issues with browser compatibility since IE. Occasionally Safari might have some CSS issue, but it’s been probably 10 years since I had any major issues with browser compatibility. Html 5 and CSS 3 tend to work across all browsers without issue.
Across all two of them.
I would really like to see how broken the web would be if someone in theory create a new complete implementation of the basic standards.
Three: Chrome and friends, Safari, Firefox
I think devs go chrome first and then adapt the site to firefox.
Because Chrome rendering and dev tools are effetely superior to Firefox. That’s why.
I’d disagree on Dev tools. Both are really great and useful. What I’d say is that Firefox may have less support for external debugging, but that’s more others choosing not to do Firefox debugging
If you are concerned about things like PWAs like I was, try it out anyway. PWAs require a bit more setup, but are a lot more flexible in Firefox. For example, PWAs with http connections have a huge banner in Chrome, and just an icon in Firefox. Everything I’ve noticed is that firefox is just as snappy as Chrome
I thought PWA’s didn’t work on Firefox. That’s good to know, because I’ve been using chromium specifically for PWA’s.
Same here, I tried the PWAsForFirefox extension a few years back and found the setup to be too much of a pain in the ass compared to the Chromium forks. I tried again around 9-12 months ago when Manifest V3 drama was making the rounds and found the extension had been overhauled and that’s no longer a problem. As a bonus each PWA is a self-contained browser instance, so performance is improved when only the PWA is open, and extensions are per-PWA. So I can run only Purple Adblock on my Twitch PWA, or only uBlock for Youtube, etc.
I’m using them heavily as well. Mostly good. Painful though when moving between computers as you have to set them up on each one. If they can get it to sync eventually that’d be handy.
What PWA do you use? I think they’re a neat idea but I haven’t come up with an actual use case yet.
I just use it for any tab which I always have open, so they’re organised on my taskbar. That way I don’t end up with 40 tabs of like 5 different websites that I just pathologically open up a new tab for each time I revisit, having to scan through them all each time I want to switch to find one from before. That’s an ADHD thing though. Effectively for some websites I want the tab to always be pinned and easily accessible with a large icon for a visual cue, and this way that all happens automatically
Gmail x2. Pulse SMS. Keep. Calendar. Whatsapp, Facebook, Messenger. All as task bar icons.
I used to use Chrome for this but every now and then it’d break and they would either open in the wrong profile, or they’d add a tab to the main browser rather than opening as a window.
Any idea how to get links clicked in a PWA like Google Messages to open in a normal browser tab? I’ve tried nothing.
Go to the PWA settings and enable “Open out-of-scope URLs in a default browser” and restart your PWAs.
Why would I use a PWA on the desktop?
I mainly use them when I want something windowed but without tabs taking up space. Like monitoring my solar panels
Aesthetic and productivity. Which are good reasons.
Let’s say you access your company ERP system through a PWA, or the HR system. You want to alt tab back and forth to it like a regular app. You’re checking supplier data on the web and entering it on the system. It’s a lot easier to do so if your ERP is an app. But if it’s not available as a native app, PWA is a good alternative.
It would be nice to spend one day on Lemmy without seeing a half dozen posts telling me to switch to Firefox nor 100 comments on every post that’s even vaguely browser-adjacent about how ever since they switched to Firefox their life has been nothing but joy and rainbows
May I interest about about switching to Arch Linux instead?
I’m using arch and Firefox. But I keep chrome as a backup because I also have a ton of nest devices… Is your mind blown?
If it makes you feel any better (it probably doesn’t), the same article was on reddit too. And hackernews also had it hit the frontpage.
People who are on an open source reddit alternative like open source software and an open internet, holy shit!
Start hanging out in different communities.
Make those other posts.
agree, no matter what communities you browse, you just get repeatedly hit over the head with the same 5 topics.
I didn’t switch to anything, I simply never stopped using Firefox as there was no pressing need to do so.
Holy crap yes, honestly I get so tired of these firefox posts. I only get a Lemmy once a week or so now just cause every post is literally just how bad Chrome is and why you should switch to Firefox. XD
You are free to filter instances, communities and users.
The people who know what UBO or a firefox even is is the vast minority. Google could single handedly completely fuck over the free internet and a majority still wouldn’t give a fuck as long as they get that sweet sweet one click convinence. The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options. They just want their shit to work, privacy and daddy google violating their basic human rights be damned.
Oh and also some websites make it a huge pain in the ass if you aren’t using chromium. I think its a bit of a conspiracy but could be wrong.
Also stop shilling firefox and start shilling Librewolf
is librewolf on mobile?
Nope only desktop. FF on mobile does have UBO available to install and I hear they are making plans to have all desktop addons be available on mobile at some point. I use kiwi browser for mobile. It is unfortunately chromium based but lets you install all the desktop adds from the chrome store including UBO
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The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options.
Doesn’t this apply to most things? Phones, laptops, desktops…and cars, refrigerators, garage door openers, light bulbs, etc etc
This “article” is an ad lol
The irony is real
As if Mozilla was profiting from Firefox.
I switched from Chrome and it was seamless. After a few weeks I didn’t notice any negative difference.
uBlock Origin
Any numbers from Mozilla about increase in usage or anything?
Without this fiasco, i would’ve still use chrome. Yeah, now i use firefox.
I used to use edge. Switched to Firefox and started using duckduckgo out of protest after my pal got screwed over by Google products
