Firefox spokesperson Christopher Hilton tells The Verge that the browser has seen a more than 50 percent jump in users in Germany and a nearly 30 percent increase in France.
Firefox spokesperson Christopher Hilton tells The Verge that the browser has seen a more than 50 percent jump in users in Germany and a nearly 30 percent increase in France.
Lol, srsly, why does anyone use apple devices willingly. Like for work I sorta get it if there’s no alternative but it really took government action to compell this extremely basic customisation.
In the US at least, sadly, it’s imessage. It’s a weird social thing - if you have “green bubbles” people really look down on you.
It’s dumb and superficial, but it works.
So they hook you while you’re an insecure teen and by the time you grow up you’re too entrenched in their ecosystem?
They hook you into an ecosystem. That’s it, thats the game. I don’t think it has too much to do with insecurity. Group chats and video chats with people outside of imessage is awful. Group chats lose a lot of features because SMS was all there was for a long time. Standard (not Google-ified) RCS is still too bare at the moment so I don’t think the looming rcs fixes that aspect of it.
Yep. Damn near every tween with a phone just HAS to have an iPhone. If you offered a kid a used regular iPhone 12 with a Crack in the screen, or a new Samsung s24 ultra, they’re taking the iPhone.
The solution to green bubbles? Use Signal, which has blue bubbles across all platforms.
Signal lets me customize the bubble (and background) colors. I can still make everyone green if I wanted.
Copying my comment from a month ago -
“Finally!
And you still see folks thinking color is what’s important.”
Honestly, it’s the first thing to come out of iPhone users mouths, and when you tell them about Signal, more often than not they say “eww I’m not installing another app”.
They’d rather an Android user spend another $1200 than install a free app. It’s not features, it’s elitism.
I graduated school before smartphones were everywhere but I got a pretty mad when I learned about this. the kids are not ok
I’m on iOS and had Firefox as my default for several years. Probably shit journo meant browsing engine.
I believe they meant prompting users to choose a default browser.
Everybody sticks to the default defaults. It’s such a truism that fairness dictated legislators got involved.
The order seems sketchy, that’s not A-z. And if they chose to order by application name, safari would be burried way down the list xD.
It’s randomized
Is it actually thats funny as fuck. But a bit sus that safari is still at the top
Just a coincidence. Safari was 8th or 9th for me while Vivaldi was first.
The only thing new is that the first time it prompts you to pick which app to pick as your default (and installs it). Only the prompt is new, manually installing something and making it default has been an option for a while.
Reading through the replies, I’m amazed anyone went through the effort to install Firefox but didn’t bother changing the default browser to it. Something in this story smells fishy.
Eh. I have fiddled with many different browsers as my default. Doesn’t mean much when it’s all WebKit.
Doesn’t really seem like the same motivation as what would suddenly lead to a 50% increase in adoption in the EU. I just don’t really see the cause and affect between apple prompting you and suddenly firefox uptick. I’m guessing most people who used to install it never realised just installing it didn’t make it the default (but they should’ve when they open any url).
That’s a valid question, and I have a long answer to share.
short version: suitable balance between convenience and privacy.
Long version: I started with Android, because it allowed me to customize things just the way I like it, unlike iOS where ridiculous restrictions was a reoccurring theme at the time (and still is to a lesser extent). Just using a custom ringtone was convoluted enough whereas many other basic things were completely impossible.
Like, does any car manufacturer sell a car where you can’t adjust the seat, open the windows or change the radio station? Well, Apple makes phone in that same style, and it’s completely absurd.
Eventually, I got tired of the spyware part of Google’s business plan, so I switched to to Lineage OS, which allowed me to get rid of most of that nonsense. I was still bothered by GAPPS, so I reinstalled (again), but completely de-googled this time. For several years, I went back and forth between both styles, to figure out what’s an acceptable balance of convenience and privacy.
This went on for many eyars until 2019 when my bank notified me that the paper code booklet will be phased out in the coming years. I was still using the old-school method of verification because the mobile app refused to work with anything other than stock Android with all the Google bloat still in it.
Some other important apps failed a similar way, and various work-arounds didn’t really work. I came to realize, that in the world of 2010, you kinda could still get away with having reasonable levels of privacy, but in the 2020s the world around me had already changed to such an extent that sticking to the same level of privacy was getting harder and harder. So some sort of change was necessary. Either I’ll have to cut down on features and convenience dramatically, or give up a part of my privacy. I chose the latter.
Around the same time iOS 14 came out, which allowed you to change your default browser. As usual, iOS was many many many years behind Android, but at least one of the obvious basic settings was finally made available. At that point I realized that it’s surprisingly difficult to find the right balance between privacy and convenience. I had only bad options available, so I picked the one that seemed least bad to me.
I mean, iOS is still trash, but now it’s barely tolerable trash. It took Apple like 10 years to make the software just barely tolerable, so switching earlier would have been incredibly frustrating.
Brain dead convenience and simplicity
Ease of use. Your average grandma is more likely to understand how to use “the apple” instead of “the droid”.
I don’t think that’s true. Old people are struggling with every phone OS. My mom has an Android phone and nothing really seems more difficult on it than on the iPhone I have to use for work.
It’s just that there are differences, but saying that iOS is so much easier doesn’t seem true to me.
Just look at how difficult it is to move an app from one app to another file on iOS. I might be stupid but I’m always struggling with that😅
I’ve worked in tech support for a long time and personally I also struggle with using Apple devices because of how ass backwards everything is on an Apple device as compared to everything else.
But in my experience the people who don’t understand what file is are more comfortable on Apple devices. It’s by design.
All the elderly people in my family use Android… and they never complained about it. So what gives? I bet that if I’d give them an iPhone they’d be very annoyed and won’t understand how it works.
Apple catered to technologically challenged from the beginning and now they’re all used to using their stuff.
Lol
This change doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do before. It’s just a prompt forcing you to pick an option before you can access the web vs just having safari and needing to find an alternative. It’s the same story as on a PC in Windows.
I use it because I’m tired of Androids shit. I have both an Android phone and an iPhone and I only use the android phone for things that I cannot do on the iPhone. And if I wasn’t a massive computer nerd I’d just forgo the second phone entirely.
“androids shit”
Explanation?
See my other reply
https://lemmy.world/comment/8418612
Care to explain further? Android and iOS do mostly the same BS, except android edges out iOS in side loading, customizability and root access. Even on Google’s flagship Pixels, unlocking the bootloader and gaining root is no problem.
Android has zero browser engine restrictions. Every browser can use either WebView’s engine or their own.
Oh yea I forgot about that lol, android also doesn’t handicap the NFC chip for “reasons” lmao (Dunno if Apple is still doing that, I’m not 100% up to date on their shenanigans)
The UI and UX overall are so much nicer on iOS. Especially with gestures, Android’s gesture system is half baked at best.
Sure you can’t rice your phone, but I don’t want to rice my phone. With Android I’m tempted to do stupid shit to my phone because I could, which then causes the phone to be unstable or just not work at all and I have to wipe and reload. With iOS that’s not an option, and honestly I’ve grown past that shit. When Cyanogenmod died all interest I had left in Android died with it. And over the years I’ve found out I wasn’t alone. Root is great, but have you ever just had a phone that works?
Even when I don’t do stupid shit I’ve experienced so many bugs. My camera for example runs at 2fps on my Pixel 4, and I can’t figure out why. UI and UX for apps aren’t as rigidly followed on Android to the experience is a lot less consistent (insert Apple not following their own guidelines meme). And honestly I run into so many more bugs in various apps on Android. In the past year I’ve had maybe 5 app crashes on iOS using it as my main phone. On my Android phone I’ve had at least twice that + at least one full phone crash.
Also the SOCs available on Android phones are garbage. I haven’t looked much into the SD 8 gen2/gen3, but I honestly doubt they’d be as efficient as Apple’s silicon + deep hardware software tie in. (insert iPhone 15 overheating).
i have a rooted android (running calyx) and it just works and its great. i never fuck around with it at all, whether due to necessity or ricing desires.
Lmao, so most of your problem with android is your own self control and third-party app aesthetics. Btw, I have root enabled right now and my phone has never had an issue just working (and it’s a Pixel Fold, a first gen Google product no less).
You complain of gestures, yet, you’re silent on iOS’s shit notification system? Has iOS finally gotten the ability to turn off individual app notification channels yet? (As in, you can turn all of an apps “promotional” notifications off, but leave actual important ones on)
Bugs are in everything, iOS has had it’s fair share of nasty bugs. On top of that, the Pixel 4 is rather old, latest Pixels have been solid performers for the most part.
Android SOCs aren’t currently beating Apple SOCs, but they’re far from garbage and it’s doubtful you’ll be able to tell the difference in real world usage
I have no qualms with iOS’s notifcation system. iOS handles it in app, vs android you’d have to do that in the settings, and not all apps support this. Slack for example does it in app on both iOS and Android. And Discord just doesn’t do either.
The Tensor chips have been hot garbage. There’s a reason I haven’t upgraded my Android phone to one of those. I won’t complain about this pixel performing on par with an iPhone 2 years older than it, and worse than my iPhone 15. But 2 fps in the camera there’s something wrong. And all the stuttering since new just isn’t acceptable. The difference is VERY noticeable when the phone throttles to 10fps in maps. I had to resort to underclocking in order to maintain decent performance longer term at the expense of even worse performance in day to day tasks.
Fair point, Tensor chips have not been…the greatest…lmao but it’s not that bad on my Pixel Fold and that’s the thing about android, you’re not stuck to one manufacturer.
Samsungs are pretty solid and they completely lock you out of the bootloader so it might be more your style. Or maybe you’re feeling spicy and want to give the OnePlus Open a try. Or maybe the Nothing phone.