With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
Most people aren’t concerned about privacy outside of places like here and Reddit.
With Chrome killing ad blocking, they’ll quickly care
Honestly, it seems like people have basically created internal adblockers where they seem to not notice ads.
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They won’t. The vast majority aren’t using any kind of ad-blockers in the first place or Google would go out of business.
I’m going to use Chrome as long as I can. If they update and break my Adblock extensions (and there isn’t a fix in a day or two from devs), I switch browsers or find some other workaround.
I’m glad people with more ability to avoid the problem are trying to do so proactively (via ad-on updates, alternative browsers, etc)… so I don’t need to worry about an ‘escape route’… because I know there will be one.
The plan to deprecate Chrome V2 extensions has been constantly postponed again and again for years now. There is NO SCHEDULED DATE for this to happen currently, and when it is announced it will be more than 6 months out.
Source: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/zQ77HkGmK9E/m/HjaaCIG-BQAJ?pli=1
If Google really wanted to kill ad blockers, they would have done this years ago.
They don’t. They want to force ad blockers and other similar extensions to use more efficient APIs that don’t slow down the web. Extension developers overall (not just ad blockers) aren’t happy with the changes, so they’re still working on the APIs.
Hmmm, on the bright side, with lemmy going mainstream maybe some of this culture (including privacy and FOSS) becomes more and more openly discussed.
As much as I love Lemmy I don’t see it going mainstream :/
It’s too weird for the general userYeah I agree. Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream, and it is exponentially larger than Lemmy now and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I’m really loving Lemmy, but it is not even remotely a factor if we are having a conversation about things that are mainstream enough to reflect popular opinion.
Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream …
… with just 0.91% of US social media visits
this yearin March this year, if this isn’t wrong:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265773/market-share-of-the-most-popular-social-media-websites-in-the-us/FB 53.09%, Twit 16.25%, IG 13.85%, …, Reddit 0.91% …
[Edited to fix my error.]
[I have no affiliation with the linked site.]
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Reddit was too weird for most people until they ended up being in their Google search results for most topics. It will take a while but the Fediverse will eventually reach a level of popularity and mainstream utility.
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But your content would go over so much better in those places. Pretty sure you’ve already found that your Musk-loving, antisemitic, anti-lgbtq+, misogynistic, garbage is not going to make it very far here. “cancel culture” back at it again. Guess Musk isn’t the big brain you think he is. I’m sure you’ll be back with your braindead zombie tribe in no time.
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Then why are you here “Generic User 1234”?
I’m sorry, I don’t know if “general user” means what I think it means. English is not my first language.
What I meant was that most people who use the internet and social media on a regular basis aren’t exactly nerdy/tech-savvy. So as soon as you start talking to them about federated instances and whatnot, they lose interest.
I mean I love Lemmy but I don’t see it going mainstream :/
It’s too weird for the general userThe irony of this comment duplicating 😅 but yeah you’re right, there needs to be a lot of streamlining first
I’ve seen this issue hundreds of times on red dot
jsjajsj yeah, Jerboa froze on me so I had to retype the comment. I didn’t realise it had already gone through.
I had that issue with Jerboa a lot so I switched to Liftoff, it’s much smoother!
I dunno. Lemmy isn’t all that weird outside the first little bit of choosing an instance and signing up for communities. Everything since that has felt extremely normal to me. Some more thought about that and a good instance onboarding workflow can be implemented, that seems like a solvable problem.
I completely agree, I don’t find it difficult at all. But I have already tried to recommend it to a couple of friends and just having to go through those first steps was enough for them not to want to use Lemmy.
Not sure why it’s weird, it’s just reddit but open source?
Whole idea is weird and as of now its lacking features. Like no ability to look on the other instance local feed without registrating there (at least not in apps i use). Also needing to type whole adress with instance name if you want some community from other instance is unhandy.
Also, as far as i understand, there can be the same communities on different instances, so you could subscribe to, idk, cat community on lemmy.ml, but not see anything from cat community on lemmy.world. If its true its kinda stupid, i think there should be a way to associate comunities across fedarated instances.
Hell, even registration is kinda messed up. As lemmy.world shown, you easilly can sign up on overpopulated instances which would drop several times a day. Not sure, it probably fixed for now, but that was a problem when i started.
So far i like the idea and want it to succeed and become popular. But with how elitist people here are usually towards users from other platforms and with overall roughness it kinda seems unlikelly. Maybe it will change when current apps get better, or reddit app developers make versions for lemmy, idk.
If you click the All, you can see that I am able to see posts from lemmy.ml even though I’m on lemmy.world
Yes, but you would be seeing ALL posts from everywhere your instance knows about.
I kind of like the idea of being on lemmy.world, filtering to say aussie.zone and getting it to show me local.
Or being able to simply get a list of every community on another instance.These are cool ideas.
But it does show feeds from other instances. Tick all rather than local
No, i mean not all, but local from other instances. I dont remember why i needed it, probably discussion of more specialised instances out there. Most down to earth example i can imagine now would probably be trying to find instance on your local language (other than english, ofc).
There are instances dedicated to other languages, but because they are new, and has not a lot of people, they won’t push at the top of your feed. The best thing for now is to help those instances grow by contributing to the instance and communities. As more activity sprouts, more and more specialized communities and instances will get pushed to the top.
As a start, you can select Hot or New rather than active and see if there are specialized regional instances. Or try directly searching for it.
If not start your own community in the language you desire. Bear in mind that lemmy only has 200k users. And most are probably from the US. So you’ll likely see more mainstream communities and in English.
If that’s still not enough, the best I can advise is to wait until it matures. The more mainstream it gets the more lesser known communities and regional instances can develop or start.
I think what would help would be a way to create a multilemmy feature like the multireddit one where you can include communities together.
cat@sopuli.xyz
cat@lemmy.world
So long as they are all Federated with each other you could have a multilemmy feed for “cat”
Agreeing that it’s not a seamless transition in user experience from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin. But one thing that at least the instance that I’m on (kbin.social) makes easy is subscribing to various communities (or magazines, which is what they are called on kbin):
I go to the Magazines screen in kbin.social, type.in the general topic I’m interested in (in your example, cats). The search results in kbin.social bring me all of the magazines and communities that have cat in the name, and I subscribe to them all. (Meaning, I don’t have to type out the full community address.)
Yes, a lot of it will be redundant and if I don’t subscribe to specific communities I may miss some stuff. But I can say that now I have a ton pf.contwct that I’m interested in my “Subscribed” feed (similar to the home feed on Reddit).
Lemmy isn’t weird at all. Now P2P platforms like secure scuttlebutt and aether, that’s some weird stuff. I couldn’t get them working at all (or maybe nobody is using these anymore). P2P is very confusing for me. I assume that a federated network is as confusing for many people as p2p social networks are confusing for me. I guess there will be someone out there who reads my comment and be like: “What? P2P networks are so simple, what don’t you understand?” I guess people just have different amount of tolorance to being confused by complexity of something before they just give up. I couldn’t figure out those P2P systems so I just give up.
I wish that was the case. Privacy is barely a thing in the general public’s eye. FOSS is a spec in the wind in comparison.
WHAAT? I CANT HEAR YOU OVER THE MEEEEEMEES!!. SPEAK LOUDEERRR!
Firefox + Ublock Origin blows Google Chrome out of water.
In adittion to this make sure to disable the telemetry that’s on by default. If you want even better protection from fingerprinting etc, use arkenfox/librewolf (librewolf being preconfigured fork of firefox)
I’d also recommend disabling Normandy in Firefox.
Thanks for this!
Firefox is a weird buggy mess that constantly freezes.
This is definitely not normal, Firefox never freezes for me. May be worth checking that out, especially your extensions.
Especially your security programs, like third-party antivirus or firewalls. They can install system-level plugins in your browsers, and sometimes those don’t work well. Windows defender and the built in firewall are good enough and play nice with other programs.
The whole Reddit debacle has really made me rethink all my services. I recently installed duck duck go and still getting used to it, so not quite sure if I’m ready to make another drastic change.
I used to love Firefox in 2006 or so, but got Chrome when it was released and forgot about Firefox. I think I’ll open a tab in my chrome browser for the Firefox page now…this is how I remind myself to delve deeper into stuff later. Thanks for the inspiration, everyone. Google has irked me ever since removing the Don’t Be Evil mantra.
Firefox has a super simple way to import everything from your Chrome install. And from what I can tell it has every feature plus more. Was very easy for me to switch. I was actually inspired to try it as my daily driver since Chrome hogs an uncomfortable amount of RAM on my laptop
There was one extension I used in Chrome that I haven’t found a Firefox replacement for, but I stopped trying to look a while ago and just live without it.
Was a specific kind of cookie manager: you could whitelist a set of websites to keep their cookies. Everything else would be deleted when you told the extension to do so.
Too many websites need cookies that stick around indefinitely. But I also don’t want to delete everything everytime I close Firefox, because I may want to keep a website around for a few days without wanting to bother adding it to a whitelist.
Most Chrome extensions can easily be run in Firefox. Simply download the CRX and upload an copy to addons.mozilla.org as an unlisted extension and within a few hours the extension should be approved and ready to install in Firefox.
Firefox has strong support for the extension cookie management APIs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/cookies
I think this might be what you are searching for. I’ve used it a few times and it does everything it promises imho: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete
You can do that in the browser settings in both FF and chrome
You can do that in the browser settings in bOTH FF and chrome
I want something more complex than a basic whitelist and blacklist. I already use that in Firefox and it helps somewhat but not wholly. I want to manage specifically when it happens and in accordance to said lists. I haven’t found anything that handles that in the settings.
Reddit being enshittified is what motivated me to switch back to Android. I don’t want to continue using a a locked ecosystem only for apple to one day say: “Welp, no more adblocks 😜 Oh you use VLC? Dude that’s for pirates only. Signal? That’s for terrorists. Standard Notes? What evil plans are you hiding? Banned Banned and Banned.”
I used iPhones because everyone else was using them so I kinds fell for the peer pressure thinking “Hmm… what are the odds that Apple become evil? Probably don’t have to worry about it.” The Reddit shitshow just triggered a fear in me that made me rethink about my life decisions. Apple’s locked ecosystem suddenly looked terrifying to me, and I just wanna nope out. So I got an Android phone and gave the iPhone to someone. I love my apks and don’t need to worry about Google-Play shennanigans.
True. It takes a big chance to switch browsers for some. And there may be learning curves, but being intentional about our internet and app use goes a long way to saving headaches in the future. The early investment (ie learning a more open source and free, even FOSS software) will help mitigate loss in case a profit driven company changes or “pivots” to a new direction.
The best time to start with a new browser is when you get a new device. Since you have to re enter your logins or re enable your pw manager anyway, it’s just a convenient time. That’s when I switched, about 1 year ago when I upgraded phones.
Duckduckgo app tracking blocker is my new jam too. Which I leaned about here on lemmy about 1 weeks ago when I joined
If you use a password manager like bitwarden, there’s no need to enter all your logins. I guess that’s why I’m a bit browser agnostic. I use different browsers for different purposes. And I don’t have to worry about remembering my passwords with bitwarden.
Maybe this is silly but I worry about the security of password managers. Is Bitwarden very secure and reliable (im assuming yes in your estimation)?
The difference between ddg and Firefox for me is that Firefox is a genuinely good product, whereas ddg is noticeably worse than Google. Still trying to find a good search alternative.
I recently learned that ddg is a meta search engine which pulls from Bing search, which is probably why it sucks.
Tried out brave search engine (uses it’s own search algorithm) and the results have been better. Probably slightly weaker than google.
If you like the chrome feel, you should check out a browser called brave. It’s built off of chromium (read as: looks like chrome) and can run all the extensions you like, but is built to be privacy minded.
IMO the thing is that people don’t care about their privacy. Sure, some people around here do, but your average person owns an Alexa, has a FB/Instagram account and constantly posts their location, uses the same password on many sites, uses TikTok, doesn’t block cookies, etc etc etc.
Most people don’t actually care. Some claim they do, but then can’t even be bothered to stop using Instagram etc because of the “inconvenience”… So do they really care?
Some companies (Apple, etc) push their products under a narrative around safety and security, and people will repeat that point as a way to justify a decision they already made, but if they actually cared, they would be doing other things too. But they don’t.
The number of us who do actually care about privacy and security is actually very small.
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder how privacy is still a word in the dictionary
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
It’s no wonder. It’s because people aren’t actually concerned about privacy.
If you ask someone if they’re “concerned about privacy” many people will of course say yes. If you follow up that question with “what are you willing to do about it”, you’ll find that the answer is a resounding “not a God damn thing”. If they were they would spend 3 minutes on Google looking for an alternative browser that works even better than Chrome but without the privacy invasions.
A browser is the low-hanging fruit on the “do-you-care-about-privacy meter”. It’s the one step with no sacrifices and the highest increase in privacy.
With the number of people concerned about privacy
That number appears to be very small, all things considered. Out of everyone I know, literally one person cares about privacy. My mother. She will even go as far as to only use her first initial online instead of her name if she can get away with it. However, she uses Chrome all the time because she doesn’t understand that your browser also tracks you.
I think that’s what it comes down to. A mixture of lack of public interest, and lack of public awareness about tracking/privacy in general. If people can’t immediately see how having their data harvested will inconvenience/hurt them, they simply don’t care.
The biggest issue for a lot of people is going to be Microsoft forcing all Office 365 users to use Edge all the time. Our sysadmin recently forced me to uninstall Firefox and Chrome from all workstations unless they had an approved use for it. Everything must be through Edge.
Why? “Security” of course. It’s always “security”. Curious
Edit: the point is Microsoft could have worked to provide enterprise customers with ways to manage third party browsers going forward. They could have worked with Google and Mozilla to make that happen. They didn’t. Not really.
It’s that Microsoft continues to make decisions that create rationale for only using them, because that’s their business. “Security” gives them an extremely convenient cover for anticompetitive behavior. Anyone that thinks their C-Suite hasn’t pulled the defender/365 team into a meeting or two to discuss business strategy has far too much faith in a corporation that deserves very little.
Curious
Not really, it means less work and less risk for them if they have to support fewer software.
There can be other reasons, and while it saddens me to say, we were forced to keep IE for specific web-panels, which hadn’t been updated since the 90s.
Edge does, after all, allow for compability with such sites, which is a good thing.
Please note that this is work work-related machines only. I dont see how it’s an issue when it has to do with your work account. You shouldn’t be using this for other things than work.
I wouldn’t count on Microsoft’s security:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/12/1187208383/china-hack-us-government-microsoft
If this can happen to governments using microsoft, it can happen to little guys using microsoft.
That’s just because Edge is integrated with O365 and can pass device compliance information. There’s actually a plugin to enable Chrome to do the same thing, but nothing yet for Firefox.
What if you run the portable version of Firefox? How would they know?
With the number of people concerned about privacy
Generous estimate there. “People” don’t care. Who cares if your browser tracks your online presence when everything is connected back to your facebook profile or whatever is trending.
Most individuals embrace convenience above all; literally putting all their private stuff on any online service that tout “shiny feature that you won’t even use”. Even some privacy-focused people don’t see putting all your emails/photo/video/agenda/chat/text messages in one third party opaque service as an issue.
Tons of business do the same, outsourcing the most basic stuff like private discussions and storage to anything “convenient” to not pay for two sysadmin to manage it (leading to most major leaks). I have direct experience of business coming to us, asking “yeah, privacy is good, data ownership and control is mandatory, so we won’t host anything and you’ll keep all our data, deal?”. They prefer have us, a third party, bill them for hosting rather than have some control over it.
My take on this is that while pointing that browsers can be an issue is not a bad thing, the first step would be to get people and business interested in their privacy. Without that, it remains a niche. Sadly.
Google has a vested interest in showing you ads and selling your data.
Firefox does not.
Seems like a pretty clear choice to me.
Using firefox exclusively on all my devices since the last major revamp of the Firefox Android.
Gotta love the uBlock Origin extension on Firefox Android!
Yes. And it makes many sites more browsable in phone.
Wish I could get cookie auto delete on Android too
This is the problem! :( Monopoly is never good, in this case in particular since it’s in the hand of a corporation they make money on people data.
There’s no reason you should be using Chrome. Using Chrome:
- Means you consent to spyware (along with everyone else you interact with)
- Allows Google to continue dictating web standards
- Is a resource hog
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading this comic about the dangers of Chrome: https://contrachrome.com/
If you need to absolutely use a Chromium-based browser, at least use Brave (just for that site).
Not-so-fun fact from the comic Contra Chrome: Google Chrome’s URL bar is called the “omnibox.” The name is derived from the Latin word “omnis,” meaning “everything.”
When you type into the omnibox, it’s sent to Google’s servers and added to your profile forever.
Even if you deleted it or didn’t hit enter.
It’s ironic that there are over 60 blockable elements and such over Privacy Badger and Ublock origin on that page.
