shrugs in Firefox
Careful, there are some edgy people out there who don’t want to use more than one browser because Firefox doesn’t work with their cameras /s
Meanwhile, I’ll still be using Firefox too
deleted by creator
Why not LibreWolf? It’s Firefox without Mozilla’s BS.
Haven’t heard of it before now
You say that like they didn’t just remove several other adblock extensions themselves
No they didn’t.
They’re still there. Ublock origin is the god-tier adblock, and it’s still there. It’s even a Recommended by Mozilla extension.
I know people on Lemmy often, for some reason, hate Mozilla more than Google or Microsoft, but Mozilla very much still caters to people who want to block ads, despite the disinformation on Lemmy.
I don’t think Lemmy users hate Firefox. I feel like alot of it is either people who legitimately have whatever needs they have, fulfilled by chrome more than firefox, or…it’s fucking astroturfers/fanboys.
Edit Addendum: Also, if anything, Lemmy users fucking love Firefox.
I don’t mean all Lemmy users. I mean a surprisingly large amount that non-stop hate on Mozilla and Firefox.
I’ve even seen two users that hate Mozilla/Firefox so much that they wrote about it in their account bio, which I find crazy.
Mozilla have made a series of unpopular choices, especially their enabling of telemetry for advertisers that does nothing to benefit users.
It is no surprise some people are vocally unhappy.
Private ads that make user tracking impossible absolutely benefits users, and the ad industry would be a lot less of a cancerous cesspit if it were the norm.
It’s certainly been unpopular, but that’s more because most people on Lemmy don’t read past ragebait headlines and assume the worst.
It’s just another source of telemetry for advertisers and won’t stop any of the existing methods of tracking.
There is no reason to trust Mozilla more with your data than anybody else.
a lot*
I think people don’t hate Mozilla, they want them to do better as there are not many options left if you care about privacy. It’d just be nice to not have to pick the lesser evil for once.
And they are doing better. Making ads private is a very good thing. They’re currently a privacy nightmare.
They are not making ads private, they are adding another tracking vector. This will not get rid of the other ones already there.
No they weren’t. Clearly you don’t know how this system works.
It is impossible to track anybody using this.
You are getting angry at Mozilla for making something that enables privacy, then getting angry at them again because they aren’t dictators of the web who can control everybody’s and networks.
PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.
So, let’s say I trust in everything they are saying, which is the absolute best case scenario, then they have done nothing for privacy, because the whole premise that ad networks only care about ex-post measuring the effectiveness of their ads is false. They could have done that long before.
They want to know who you are and what you do so they can sort you in categories and show you specific ads based on those. That’s the service ad networks sell to advertisers. So, tracking as usual will continue.
From what I’ve heard, they only “removed” uBlock Origin Lite. Normal uBO is still up.
Actually, they flagged UBO Lite and the dev removed it himself in a fit of pique.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2474353/popular-ad-blocker-removed-from-firefox-extension-store.html
The one they removed isn’t relevant until Firefox also removes manifest V2 which they have no plans for.
Firefox has a different manifest v3 that still retains webrequest functionality, so even when they do switch over it’ll be fine.
shrugs in books
They have no idea how stubborn I am.
What could go wrong when you let an ad company dictate the browser standards/rules.
I know we have Firefox and some forks like librewolf, but percentage wise it feels like a lost battle ( even if I am on Firefox ).
If only people switched en masse to Firefox for the ad blocker. Wouldn’t that be something… One big collective FU to Google.
Oh well. One can dream I guess.
The average Joe or Jane have no idea about ad blocking possibilities. They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.
I have even shown people the difference between their browsing experience and mine, and still they can’t be arsed to install an ad-blocker.
But then again, they use tiktok and Instagram and all the other brain-numbing shit out there.
They think ads are just
the normal price you pay for surfingpart of the webThe average Joe or Jane have no idea about ad blocking possibilities. They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.
Actually about a third of all users have an adblocker installed. Adblocking has been mainstream for a while, no doubt why Google finally stopped pretending they were OK with it.
I personally wouldn’t mind ads, if they weren’t too obtuse and/or malware ridden.
I often turn off the adblocker for independent news sites, as theirs are less obtuse and are vetted better than just running an AI to detect nudity and/or slurs.
By all means bring back the banner and side ads that are just one banner and a couple of side ads. Breaking every paragraph up by two more ads is just a miserable experience. Have you tried to look up a recipe lately? Trying to find a recipe without an ad blocker pisses me off and off that I just give up on the recipe. Even though I know it’s on the page, between the 5,000 word essay trying to convey their nostalgia for the recipe and the 27 different ads that break that 5,000 word essay into 25 pages, I’d rather DDOS them then get the recipe from them.
Normal price is usually offered before charging it.
They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.
Which is great, offsets us who do use adblocks. It would be awful if majority of users would use adblocks.
I used to recommend uBlock as a no-brainer, now folks really need to change towards a better browser.
Or get network wide blocking. Doesn’t prevent everything but it does prevent most ads. Makes the internet tolerable at least.
nah, lets get them switched away from chromium based spy machines.
Not everyone can. Work machines for instance.
sadly, agreed. mindshare leads to adoption, tho - so putting Firefox in front of more faces is always a positive. after all, its how google dominates.
Something like NextDNS as a no-brainer? It works but hits the limit of the free tier if people use it beyond their phone.
ControlD then.
PiHole and a TailScale exit node so you can use it for DNS whether or not you’re on your home network.
Or a variation of this is TailScale configured to use NextDNS and a TS exit node. That’s for anyone who doesn’t want to maintain a PiHole. I’ve done both. Personal choice.
Pihole is good for a private network, but you can forget it in a work setting, especially corporate networks.
I recommended pihole to my senior webdeveloper. She didn’t know about it and was blown away by the concept. She installed it immediately and is now living happily ad free.
Maybe we’re thinking about this wrong. Maybe we should all start running plugins that just load whatever ads that show up in the background hundreds of times without showing them to us. Every viewer is thousands upon thousands of impressions and click through rates become absolutely miserable. We can make the ads worthless or maybe even make them cost a significant amount of money to host.
AdNauseam does this to a lesser degree. I’m not sure how effective it is.
It’s mildly effective in the sense that it will decimate click-through rates, but if enough people did it, they would start filtering by IP, and you’d need to change how many ads it clicks on so it looks more human.
It also still gives advertisers your data, since it still has to load the ads on your system to click them, so it’s not as privacy-preserving as a full-on adblocker that outright blocks every advertisement and tracker related network request in the first place.
Yeah, I don’t want to use it because I don’t want them to get some weird over fitted model of my behavior.
I had an add blocker on phone thats worked that way (AdAway). It would just redirect adds into some folder and apps would be satisfied.
And what? If someone can live with ads, they can stay. Otherwise anyone can install Firefox. I was all-in Google since the beginning of Gmail. And switching to Firefox was completely painless. Everything works the same, times of website incompatibility are long gone.
Because Google is trying to turn the internet into a walled garden where only people with Chrome can visit the majority of websites.
I’ve been been a full time Firefox user for three years now. Haven’t experience a single problem like that. Haven’t really experienced any problem at all to be honest
Unfortunately that has not been the case for me. Some sites for buying concert tickets don’t seem to like Firefox.
I’ve had problems with several Microsoft sites we use internally for work ever since Edge went to Chrome.
It’s not Firefox’s fault. Mozilla is abiding by web standards.
If you find any websites that don’t work with firefox, you should report them to Mozilla. Firefox has a list of known bad websites, and has fixes for them, usually just a user agent override.
Your past experiences with Firefox are irrelevant because we’re talking about the future.
I know. My experience with Chrome used to be good too. And we all know what’s up now.
If Firefox fucks up, I’m fine with abandoning ship and moving on to the next thing. I’m not sure what that would be, but I’m sure I’ll figure that out once we get there.
That’s the problem. Google is working so that there’s not going to be a next thing.
That is concerning, but Internet Explorer used to be the only option too. Of course things are different now, but I have faith (for lack of anything else).
That was for a different reason, though. That was Microsoft forcing you to use their software on something you owned. A website can say, “you have to use chrome to access our site,” and that’s not antitrust behavior on the part of Google.
There always is a next thing. It’s called Gemini and it has the problem of guys like Google fixed by having a non-extensible standard.
I’m not joking, too - sometimes even wide masses become practical and just want “no bullshit” Internet publishing. Which Gemini delivers.
But - would be interesting to have something like Gemini, but serverless.
Thats the thing.
There is basically no alternative. Firefox exists on the mercy of google which is its biggest donor.
There are very few attempts at a truly open source browser and neither can tackle the biggest problem, which is google pushing websites to adopt their standards, weaponizing ad income to guarantee compliance.
Currently more then 80% of internet users have a chromium browser while websites creation for many entities is often outsourced out of lack of own IT knowledge. When firefox dies there will be no economic insensitive to build sites accessible by anything but chromium.
Low key i wish this fires back into anarchy. I hate the corporate web and the only sites i like to see are those free of economic insensitive and all in on an ethical free digital world.
Incentive
try changing your user-agent to mock chrome in Firefox while you visit YouTube.
you should see a drastic difference in UX.
I tried YouTube in Chrome on desktop (for about 2 minutes) and I didn’t notice any difference. I’ll just keep using NewPipe on my phone though.
it takes a whole 10 extra seconds for the interface to be usable for me in Firefox. but not when I spoof the user-agent as chrome.
at least that’s how it was about 4 months ago.
Maybe part of the monopoly ruling will have chrome taken away from them.
What if websites decide that chrome users earn much more ad revenue and start forcing users to switch with those “This website only supports Chrome” error messages? What if this practice gets popular? I’m sure there are ways to get around it, but the average users who bothered switching to Firefox at all, will just conclude that anything except chrome has a bad browsing experience.
Can’t you have your Firefox browser just report itself as chrome?
You certainly can. They don’t know what you’re doing.
It’s all fun and games till they check for web USB support. They don’t need to actually use web USB but it’s a telltale sign that you’re not on Chrome.
A plugin could very easily have Firefox claim to support WebUSB, but return no devices or junk devices. Some of the anti-fingerprinting add-ons already do, iirc.
You get my point though, all they need to do is start supporting a feature that’s not easy to spoof.
The real defense against this is for people to refuse to use Chrome. It’s not the tail that wags the dog, Make The Firefox user base so big the developers can’t ignore it. Basically IE all over again
I agree with your conclusion, but as long as they’re offering data up for download to your machine, they really can’t control how you access it or what application you use for it. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, but even if it requires reverse-engineering some website DRM, somebody’s going to do it. And if Chromium remains FOSS, it won’t even be terribly difficult.
Remember, they tried to defeat ad blockers on YouTube, and they gave up because it wasn’t worth it. uBO was updating to block their attempts within hours. They’ve tested inserting the ads in the video stream, but that’s probably also not going to last for long.
They’re trying to assert an ownership over the Web; and yes, the best way to defeat it is to build a strong and united resistance against it. But even if we don’t, there are ways to quietly refuse to comply.
i never understood how those messages work? like how would using firefox ruin your website? or how they even detect firefox in the first place lmfao
They can in theory make tricks showing that you are using an ad blocker or a specific browser. Even if you set Chrome’s user agent in Firefox.
I personally wouldn’t make such effort to use such websites then.
Browsers have user-agent identifiers, websites can see what browser and what version you use.
They are mostly used to run browser-dependent code to avoid some things breaking in some browsers.
Then apple would whip out their giant throbbing cock and smack them with it because they want people using safari.
Visit about:compat. Sites already do that. Firefox can deal.
times of website incompatibility are long gone
I wish I could agree with that. Hell, I have to use Chrome to download my phone bill from Virgin, and a couple of others don’t work.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming FF. It’s these lazy web developers that only target Chrome. I’m sure Safari users get the same shit experience.
Issue is, a lot of people think the only browser in existence is “google”. I even had people looking me at funny for having an e-mail address ending in outlook.com rather than the usual gmail.com, and not because of some anti-MS sentiment, but because they thought e-mail was invented by Google, hance the name “gmail”.
but because they thought e-mail was invented by Google, hance the name “gmail”.
Life is scary.
times of website incompatibility are long gone.
cries in dev
I’ve cried also in dev a lot in the past, but mostly don’t cry so much anymore
Yep so happy with Firefox having switched back a couple years ago.
some people dont want firefox bcs its kinda slower then chromium based tbh but it aint bad am not saying firefox is bad
They’re not that different any longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883
Oh
Everything works the same, times of website incompatibility are long gone.
Not completely true. It’s mostly true. I’ve daily driven Firefox for years, and the number of websites I’ve crossed that wouldn’t function in it correctly but would work just fine in Chrome was very slim… but not zero. Definitely not comparable to the complete shitshow of the 90’s and 00’s. That’s true. But it’s not a completely solved problem.
And with Mozilla’s leadership practically looking for footguns to play with combined with the threat of Google’s sugar daddy checks drying up soon due to the antitrust suit (how utterly ironic that busting up the monopoly would actually harm the only competition…), that gap can get much worse in very little time if resources to keep full time devs paid disappear.
I suspect this will soon be followed by a renewed effort by google to kill firefox compatability.
So you will need to have a backup browser to use only Google services and everything but Google search blocked in ff
Its not google services i worry about ive pretty much degoogled everything i can. Its the google bits so deeply embedded into almost every website across the internet. If they implemented some tpm bs into chrome that somehow Verity’s itself with tpm and google servers before it loads anything then that instantly makes a majority of websites juat not work on ff with no fixes backdoors or bypasses. They will try, we have little hope in stopping it, and most people wont even notice let alone give a fuck.
Didn’t see this coming. Thanks for reporting it 😁
It did its job then. Gave warning.
🐥⛏️
“I’ve got the black lung papa.” cough
-Chrome Canary
Ad Lung
coughs up product placements
also coughs up scams and malware
Looks like time to find a new browser!
May I interest you in browsers based on FireFox?
why not Firefox itself?
Vanilla firefox needs to be hardened, either manually or with arkenfox
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
True. But not like stock Firefox is “good” either.
Nothing that warrants trying to explain to someone what alternatives to it are or bike shedding about which is the best.
Hopefully wikipedia recognizes this as the official Canary in the Chrome mine. I was first impressed with chrome book because of seeing them used for education, getting my own laptop during school would’ve been mindblowing to kid me. I was unimpressed with the strangulation process of the OS but again shocked when they added a linux boot mode. There needs to be better alternatives by now, I would be ok with an OS developed by the department of education in conjunction with higher educational institutions. Could have a decent non-profit approach to a browser and ad blockers could legitimately be built in as a “protect the children” aim of approach.
I take it you’ve never been involved in such an endeavor? What you propose would take a decade a minimum due to the sheer number of nested advisory committees that would be required for those groups to interface. Better a non-profit group begins the work and then solicits these group’s input at the design stage.
Been using Firefox for quite a time now! What are the other alternatives?
Ladybird is working really hard to become good enough for daily drive. Will they succeed? Idk. How long will it take? Idk.
Is that Firefox alternative?
Not right now.
It’s a new browser being built from scratch.
Brave, Librewolf (didn’t test yet)
I thought they already killed it? They keep killing it multiple times.
Yeah I heard it was permanently removed like a month ago. Still working for me.
How many times has this been announced already?
Yes
Think of it as an iceberg & Chrome users as a boat.
Assuming no changes, this is landing in Chrome Canary now, so we’re watching the Chrome Canary boat hit the iceberg. The Chrome Beta boat is going to hit in a few weeks. Finally the Chrome Stable boat is scheduled to hit in mid November.
Now Google may choose to hold back actually enabling this flag immediately. It wouldn’t be the first delay. But likely in mid November is when all the posts will start to appear of people asking where their ad blocker went.
(Although I’m guessing it actually is delayed until after the holidays and in the new year, but that’s just wild speculation.)
Are Opera and it’s derivatives affected by this?
Why would you use a Chinese browser?
I don’t?
My friends do though sadly
imagine opera and opera gx 💀
Not this with built-in adblockers, despite someone’s wishes.
Their adblockers suck though, especially on youtube
Great day to be a firefox user!
Can we get a fork orba dedicated browser that stays on manifest v2? Even Firefoxs lack of plans is disconcerting. I want expmicit plans to not play along
