- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Reminder to switch browsers if you haven’t already!
- Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
- The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
- Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.
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Long live Firefox.
hear ye
Pretty great outcome for firefox really.
I don’t think firefox numbers will get a huge & immediate bump, but I think that over time it will support a reputation for firefox as being cool different and just plain better.
I can’t imagine raw-dogging the internet without an ad blocker in 2024. I’m aware that most people aren’t bothered by ads, but surely… surely some people might be interested in blocking them if they become aware that it’s possible and easy.
Been here since Kevin helped the project out?
I’m sorry. I’ve seen this so many times today and I can’t stand it anymore.
I hate this article photo. What the fuck is that shit?? Gloveless fingers? Digit warmer? Turtlefinger sweater?
Finger sweatbands for epic googling activities
The 80s are back! Sweatbands for everyone!
Agreed, but also
How can you not kinda love it
i’m with you it’s really camp
Laughs in Firefox
How long until the majority of the Internet is inaccessible to non-Chromium browsers because the pages “don’t support them”?
Honestly the way the internet is going do you need access to the majority of the internet? I feel like its pretty dead as it is now already.
Lemmy will still work because we mostly use Firefox, and i bet the same will hold true for many others.
Basically the moment mainstream internet becomes google only you will see nerds build new websites specifiably to cater to the non google crowd and i trust random internet nerds a hack of a lot more than a monopoly corporation.
BRING IT ON GOOGLE!, YOU CAN INITIATE THE PUSH TO CREATE A NEW BETTER INTERNET. ^Create demand for freedom trough your suppressive enforments^
Oh yeah nothing bad could ever happen from effectively removing an entire section of the population from certain parts of the Internet completely.
I can’t imagine that ever going badly.
That’s already the case. Facebook etc have been walled gardens (or prisons if you prefer) for decade and a half now.
If it don’t work on Firefox I won’t use it. There are better FOSS options anyways
Sure as long as it’s not my bank or my employer or the gov official website for accessing my taxes…
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“WebUSB is a JavaScript application programming interface specification for securely providing access to USB devices from web applications”
Holy Hannah, NO!!!
Might as well allow a website to direct write to your hard drive unprompted again.
Does noone see how BAD this stuff is?
Stop creating attack vectors with glowing neon signs on them.
Except it’s a very good thing for 2FA USB keys which prevent people from gaining access unless they have physical access to the key. Also useful for USB gamepads etc
I would close my bank account and such to a different bank. It takes literally 5 minutes to open one online.
And yes, I would not work for a company that doesn’t support Firefox
I would also keep pestering support of the government website, that one I will have to give to you
I don’t think that’s going to be the case. People will find workarounds. The whole point of these alternative browsers is to use the web in whatever way the developers think their user base wants to use it. If the web is inaccessible to non-chromium browsers then people will spoof their browser to the site to look like a chromium browser.
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If we get to the point where the corporatocracy can force us into a limited set of compliant browsers then the web as we know it has ended. I don’t think they’ll go that far unless they decide to go whole hog. That level of control will likely look to wipe out any useful plugins like ad-blockers or other privacy features. I didn’t want to go down the slippery slope argument, but that’s pretty much what will happen if they go that direction.
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But most of those only give you a few bits of data. Like if there’s only one technique that succeeded, you might have the same fingerprint as everyone with your exact phone with the rest randomized
Then I guess people will use the web less and less.
I remember the “works best on IE” warnings of old, looks like we might be heading back there.
This is getting more common. Whatever dev accepted that when sizing the story should hang their head in shame. “No, you don’t size for a poor solution, you size for a good solution and let the PMs chip at the things they understand, keeping some things sacrosanct”.
For this reason, we must still take a stand against this stuff.
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Laughs in Waterfox
Laughs in earthfox
Laughs in airfox
Laughs in avatarfox
Laughs in electrofox
laughs in icefox
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Always has been.
I use Firefox everywhere which means I have ads blocking everywhere, including and especially on Android. All my tabs are synced and are easily transferred between devices.
While I dont use Firefox itself any more I am using librewolf on my PC, which sadly doesnt exist for phones yet. Also, GOS comes with its own privacy oriented chromium fork called vanadium, so I’m using that in the mean time.
I also use librewolf and have settled for iceraven on my phone. the list of installable extensions is much longer (even if not everything is working yet, depending on how far mozilla has come along) and it has about:config support, which gives me a pretty close approximation of my desktop browser.
I’ve found the Mull browser (which can be found through the DivestOS repository on F-Droid) works great as a privacy-focused firefox fork, similar to LibreWolf. I hear Fennic F-Droid is also a pretty good but less extreme alternative, but I’d imagine you don’t care much about that if you use LibreWolf.
Firefox is a good option.
But I will raise people one more. Waterfox. Been using it for over a year now and enjoy it.
Firefox’s marketshare is small enough relative to Chrome’s that some websites might just block it at this point, if Chrome users mean ad revenue and Firefox users don’t.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Firefox has 2.88% marketshare.
Chrome has 65.34% marketshare.
It’s gonna be interesting to see what happens…
User agent switcher
Based and
incognitoprivate mode pilled
It doesn’t necessary cost a meaningful amount to a site to allow Firefox users to view it; it does however cost to make it compatible with non-chromium browsers. For most viewing that’s a non issue (I mean, most crms are going to work) but specific sites might stop working (YouTube already got caught throttling firefox, and tbf, streaming would cost more than reading an article or something).
Firefox blocks statcounter tracking by default. It’s an inherently flawed metric, though Firefox is definitely in the minority still vs Chrome
The numbers may be indicative of the general trend, but every single privacy oriented browser and so forth is spoofing the user agent, pretending to be the most widespread and popular os and browser.
Which is why privacy checks on my Linux+librewolf PC return win10 with chrome.
My worry is what the EU changes might mean for the mobile web and beyond. With iOS’s market share and only the same rendering engine Apple used in Safari being available, sites/apps had to support more than just Chrome. If forcing iOS users to Chrome is an option (either through pointing them to the browser or an app built with that rendering engine), then there’s even less of an incentive to test with anything else. It’s great that users get more choice but if providers use it as an opportunity to reduce support for other browsers then it might not be a great benefit after all.
Firefox and WebKit for all!
I did have some issues on firefox om some sites.
But I will raise people one more. Waterfox
Never heard of it, I prefer LibreWolf
https://librewolf.net/#what-is-librewolfbut I’m gonna list some other popular forks
TOR Browser (anti-censorship enhanced fork, bundled with TOR network)
https://www.torproject.org/GNUzilla IceCat (GNU version)
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/Pale Moon (able to use old XUL based extensions)
https://www.palemoon.org/Mullvad Browser (a security hardened fork, IIRC based on TOR, made by Mullvad VPN company)
https://mullvad.net/en/browserFennec F-Droid (Fennec version available on F-Droid, clean of propietary blobs)
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/
https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuildMull (hardened fork of Fenix)
https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenixIceRaven (yet another hardened fork of Fenix, able to install an extended list of extensions)
https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
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Well I will sound like an old bore but throughout the nearly 20 years Firefox is out I never looked at anything else. Seen the rise and fall of Internet Explorer seeing the rise and fall of chrome.
Even Firefox in its dreadfully slow era (2010-2016) it did not made me change. And let me be clear Firefox is far from perfect. But for my use cases (privacy and security balance over certain conveniences) I would not change for any commercially backed Browser.
Moral of the story. It’s better to donate to Mozilla and enjoy the freedom of your browser than giving yourself in on the erratic behavior of the big tech companies.
dont donate to moz lmfao if you look at the source code they collect absolutely everything, just use librewolf + betterfox.js/arkenfox.js
- Firefox doesn’t “collect absolutely everything”.
- DO donate to Mozilla as without them the Firefox, Tor, Mullvad, Floorp, Mull, Waterfox AND Librewolf browsers wouldn’t exist.
- Librewolf disables SafeBrowsing, which is a security must-have for anyone installing a browser for friends/family - and in many cases even for yourself.
- Even the Librewolf developers say “Safe Browsing is still a good security tool and Mozilla’s implementation is privacy respecting.”
- Yes, if you know what you’re doing use Librewolf. For everyone else, Firefox is a great move.
oh, thanks for the information! it appears i was mistaken :}
They collect everything? I’m on mint. I want extensions, and not have to run my browser like I need to tweak an OS. I just want it to work. What do I use?
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox
if user.js editing is too much of a pain then get plain librewolf, go to settings and enable history-saving:
search bar ‘history’ > scroll to ‘history’ > disable ‘clear history when librewolf closes’.
supports extensions just fine too! :)
https://librewolf.net/installation/linux/ installation for mint
edit: why the downvotes? i cited a good source for my claims.
edit 2: hackernews post about plain firefox being spyware, mental outlaw’s video on the topic and eric murphy’s video on this.
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Fortunately I at least have Firefox on Linux. But then when I need to use Windows for something… well look at that, also Firefox!
Good thing I exclusively use Firefox.
won’t stop pihole
It’s still DNS level only, right? That wouldn’t stop YouTube ads, or remove annoyances.
Love my PiHole but you’re hella correct
You can block ads from being served to you.
But the flip side is that the website developer can make a website that won’t function if it can’t load the ads being served.
And most users are gonna want a functional website.
Somebody’s going to need to write a web site with a very, very compelling function to make me give enough of a shit to not just click away if it is deliberately coded to not work with Firefox/adblockers. Like, gives me a million dollars per page load functionality.
Man for real.
And they never will.
You sweet summer child.
How long do you think Chrome will let DoH be opt-in?
You sweet summer child
How are they going to get past my firewall rules?
Nerd fight! Nerd fight! Nerd fight! Show 'em your bionicles collection!
By refusing to load
Personally, I’d like to see them force in-browser DoH down my throat with my computer powered off. They’ll never see it coming.
It’s not up to Chrome.
The day they do their own DoH in-browser it is definitely up to them. It’s already opt-in if you want to see how well your pi-hole won’t work with it enabled.
Next step is to do DoH by default, and finally making it compulsory.
Chrome already does have DoH enabled by default from what I can tell.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/10468685
By default, Secure DNS in Chrome is turned on in automatic mode. If Chrome has issues looking up a site in this mode, it’ll look up the site in the unencrypted mode.
They can do it all they want but it won’t work…
If I “opt in” it falls back to non doh immediately because using doh on my network is not up to Chrome.
use-application-dns.net + nxdomain for any known doh provider
I don’t use pihole but doh blocking works great on my network. It should work on a pihole tho it’s pretty basic stuff.
If you can’t resolve the domain you can’t validate the TLS certificate.
It’s weird that I’ve been on firefox for the vast majority of my life and I always had this perception that “everyone” was using it. Here in lemmy you hear about it all the time, my friends use it, I see it on my newsfeeds etc
But when you check the market share it around 2.8% while chrome is 65.1% https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
I was at my parents house last week because i had to help them with their laptop. I told my mom about firefox and she was very confused because she doesn’t seem to understand that google chrome is a browser and that every browser can access google search or their banking site.
It took a bit of effort to explain that firefox works the exact same but is safer and faster.
She is now using firefox on her phone because i showed her ublock origin works with it to block ads.
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that google chrome isn’t the internet and what exactly a browser is.
I feel like “most people” only learn “one technology per category”. They know of, one operative system, one browser, one app to mindless scroll, one program to edit text. As a developer it shocks me a little because I’m always eager to try new programming languages, technologies and ways to interact with things. I guess most people only know about edge/safari because they come pre-installed
How is that shocking?
I use Linux, Firefox, Lemmy, nano. Why would I change?
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that google chrome isn’t the internet and what exactly a browser is.
It’s been that way for a lot longer than chrome has been the big one, it used to be the same with internet explorer…
I would even go as far as saying that the left meniscus of the gaussian thinks google chrome is “google” and the “thing that finds webs”
Might have to do with the fact that Firefox was the dominant browser for quite awhile until Chrome arrived on the scene.
Iirc it peaked at around 30% market share. I think IE was around 60% at the time. So never dominant, but definitely very very widespread.
I remember a point around 2015ish where a lot of web apps went from recommending Firefox and Chrome for the best experience to just Chrome. Now I often see “don’t use Firefox” as a support tactic.
This is also why there’s such a a prevalence of flashing warning banners, fake pseudobluescreens, and other scary shit disguised in chrome notifications.
The notifications in chrome are as close to on by default as you can get and with the right code snippets you can make it look like the FBI locked down your workstation and you need to call them.
Firefox should start hardening against this behavior now because popularity gets targeted even more specifically.
Make it an end user safety feature.
Force every notification to have
“This is a notification from a website that you elected to receive by allowing notifications. You can disable these notifications here”
with a link to the setting on the frame of of every one, no fullscreen allowed, no flashing, double-check and prohibit the words FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, IRS, Social Security, Microsoft, etc.
I guess average user cares mostly about how fast and smooth the browsing is. Chrome definitely has the edge on that over firefox.
I’m forced to use Chrome quite a bit (workplace silliness) and exclusively use Firefox at home. I seriously cannot see this edge that you claim Chrome has. Do you mean in loading speed? Scrolling speed?
I second you, I don’t see any advantage on using Chrome over Firefox.
same for me. no noticeable difference
Yeah I’ve been using it for at least a decade now. It’s great.
Switched to Firefox at work today. Looks like I still need Chrome to do the VPN handshake, but the more of us there are, the more pressure we have on IT!
If you still need Chrome, consider Ungoogled Chromium!
Is that project going to maintain Manifest V2 support?
I don’t have official information, but I doubt it. They tend to stick as closely to the Chromium experience as possible, with the exception of the ungoogled part, of course. Maintaining Manifest V2 support would also just be a massive amount of work, for which they likely don’t have the manpower.
I have no idea. I’d guess not, as it’s not a strong fork like other Chromium-based browsers. Its main selling point is that it’s nearly identical to Chrome, but with a lot of the Google garbage stripped out. I don’t use it as a daily driver, but only when I need something Chromium-based like the use case mentioned by @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml. It’s very likely to work wherever Chrome does.
I’m still confounded by workplaces that run the old nineties way of VPN handshake by browser. Clunky, clumsy just straight up bad digital workplace setup.
There is no reason to not do it the modern way where all the handshaking and connecting is done under the hood, hidden from the user. At the most you as a user should only see the tiny little systray icon switch how it looks.
firefox extensions are the best patches i have for enshittification
