Discord, slack, bitwarden, steam, Microsoft teams, visual studio code, balena etcher . Anyone else know of any electron apps or heavily modified version of chrome?😄
What pisses me off is how many websites don't work right with Firefox now. There's been several times where I've had issues with a site functioning on Firefox and had to switch to a chromium browser.
This happens very rarely, but it does happen from time to time. When a website starts acting weird out of nowhere I keep a copy of Chrome installed just for that use and then promptly return to Firefox.
I only have Chrome installed for the rare occasion where a site doesn't work in Firefox. I feel like we've gone a bit backwards as of lately in building websites that are browser agnostic.
Does this happen in you work environment or on your private managed system?
I raise this question because I started to realize that governing firefox apparently is a hard task. Never did I experience a faulty site on my private desktop devices but on my work stations.
Im currently running firefox 115.13.0esr.
I was recently trying to add tickets from ticketbastard to Google wallet to be able to use them offline. I have chrome disabled on my phone. Surprise surprise it doesn't work with any other browser except chrome. The ticketbastard app just throws an error and nothing happens. Took me a lot of searching to realize it was because chrome was disabled.
Unfortunately for work I may have no choice:-(. Several of our daily work products I've tried on Firefox without success. Those also don't have ads.
I wish there were better alternatives. I may try out LibreWolf but I could not imagine it somehow being easier, though with enough effort put in the end result may be all that matters. Until the first update (possibly forced on the server end even if I don't on mine) that breaks everything and I cannot do my work for the day, in which case I will absolutely go crawling back to Chrome, bc they have us by the short hairs there.:-(
I'm grateful for FF, but they also annoy me at times. Just little stuff probably not worth bitching about in detail. But also a peek at the potential for problems that you're talking about.
So of course I'll bitch about it.
I call it the "stop whatever you think you'd rather do right now and pay attention to our product" type shit.
Imagine you have a combination wrench and whenever you take it out of the toolbox it starts yammering at you about how great of a wrench it is and all if its shiny features. Fucking ridiculous, right?
So why do we tolerate software that does that?
Way too much software does this pushy shit. Just stay outta my face and do your actual job, software.
Yeah, it's strange just how readily the blinders go up wherever Mozilla is concerned. They're a corp, just like any other; if they had the money and leverage, they'd be just as aggressive as Google. Have people already forgotten that time they laid off 200+ employees and then gave all the execs bonuses?
E: Apparently y'all have forgotten. In 2021, Mozilla laid off a few hundred employees. CEO's salary doubled that year. Fuck Mozilla, they're no more your friends than Google or Microsoft; they're the same evil, just smaller-scaled evil, is all.
You're overreacting. Firefox knows their users. I am a huge "stan" for Firefox, but I will delete it like a time traveller if they make it impossible to ignore ads. I will salt the earth and poop on Firefox's grave and actively avoid it everywhere... However. If I'm wrong, there will be a Next Thing...
Yeah I'm using Fennec, which doesn't have that. But as long as it's a flick of a switch to disable, I don't really mind. Still a million times better than manifest v3.
If you use a DNS solutions you can block all the telemetry shit. Frankly FF has been phoning home in a lot of undesirable ways for many years even before this, like most browsers.
Anyone else been having issues of not being able to load YouTube videos past the first few seconds on Firefox using ublock? I couldn't find any recent information online. I don't know if this is part of the war on ad blockers, or unrelated.
Same. Firefox Mobile had been a laggy mess when I used it a few years ago, but a combination of some really aggressive advertising and the announcement of manifest v3 caused me to give it another shot about a year ago. It's a dramatic improvement in phone browsing.
I hear the term 'broken up' a lot in media and discourse, but it's never explained. In your eyes, what actually happens when a government 'breaks up' a corporation? I mean, what are the steps, objectives, and outcomes?
Not the person you're asking, but my general understanding is that different products would be required to be their own companies, so advertising, Android, and Chrome would all be separate businesses.
I envision it like AT&T's break-up, where the singular Google is broken up into regional companies that will (hopefully) have to compete with each other.
It really wouldn't change anything in the long run. Any company that creates a browser is gonna need some form of income and people aren't willing to pay for a browser. What would be their incentive to continue to work on the browser when they aren't being paid?
Google isn't just disabling an extension, they're attacking a boycott comprised of 200,000,000+ people, all around the globe, standing up to forced manipulation of our beliefs and habits by profit-hungry corporations.
If Google presented me with ads for things I might be interested in and in a non-invasive way, wouldn’t mind looking at them at all.
Instead I get ads for the seemingly random shit I have absolutely zero interest in buying. How they are consistently wrong about my spending habits is unbelievable. I have two fucking hobbies! I don’t see ads for anything relating to them. Ever.
You can bet 300 new uBlock replacements to spring up practically overnight, some of them scams, reducing trust in the Google ecostystem.
Unfortunately it's a bigger problem.
Google doesn't plan to block uBlock Origin itself, but the APIs it uses to integrate into Chrome in order to function. This will effectively disable all adblockers on Chrome. uBlock won't be removed from the Chrome extension store, it will just have 90% of its functionality removed.
Additionally, this isn't a Chrome-only change, but a change in the open source Chromium, an upstream browser of Chrome all other Chrome-based browsers use (essentially everything aside from Firefox and Safari themselves).
The change itself is involved in changing the browser's "Manifest", a list of allowed API calls for extensions. The current one is called Manifest v2 and the new one was dubbed Manifest v3.
Theorethically Chromium-based browsers could "backport" Manifest v2 due to the open source nature of Chromium. However that is unlikely as it's projected to take a lot of resources to change, due mostly to security implications of the change.
Vendors of other Chromium-based browsers themselves have little to gain from making the change aside from name recognition for "allowing uBlock", which most users either wouldn't care for or already use Firefox, so the loss for Google isn't projected to be large, just as the gains for other vendors.
TLDR: uBlock won't be removed from the Chrome extension store, but the mechanisms through which it blocks ads will be blocked. The block isn't a change in Chrome but in Chromium and affects all Chromium-based brosers (all except Firefox and Safari). Other vendors could change that to allow adblockers but it's projected to take a lot of time and resources.
No, they will not, if they didn't already. Because convenience it key.
The browser war is over, and humans lost, corporations won. Google and other huge corporations control the biggest websites and most of the access to content on the internet.
They just need to make it inconvenient to use ad-blocking browsers.
They built their business on advertiser gambling, which seem to be flawed concept, because they keep on squeezing that tube for every penny more and more, in a race to the bottom.
But they are still in control of both browers and content so they have options to keep squeezing more.
So you want to use a ad blocker? Well, the browser that supports them might not be white listed (anymore) by the bot detector, and you have to solve captchas on every site you visit, until you come to your senses and use a browser, where ad blocking is no longer possible.
Oh, and all that is ok, because of "security". Because letting the users be in control of their devices and applications is "in-secure". They are just doing that to protect you from spam and scams, just trust them! Trust them, because they don't trust you!
I'm looking into the possibility of moving my organization to FF. Office of about 200 endpoints. The sticky wicket that I don't fully understand is Auth passthru to 365.
Its not the IT guys themselves, its the aggregate influence. One large school campus flips the switch to Firefox on their next image deployment its a drop in a bucket, but when 1000 schools, 2000 government agencies and 5000 businesses all suddenly stop using Chrome the graph starts to move, because laypeople just accept the default.
IT guys are like browser-influencers, they tell their parents what to use, friends, and so on. We all used to recommend Chrome, I don't anymore.
Not only a bigger market share. What's keeping Firefox alive is the financial support they get from Google. If enough people move from Chrome to Firefox without Firefox also securing finances from elsewhere, Google could easily kill Firefox by just not giving them money and we'd all be left with just Chromium.
I think the real reason Google is funding Firefox is because they're afraid of being targeted in antitrust lawsuits. As long as Firefox is around, they have someone they can point to, to say they're not a monopoly.
So, what they're saying is: Chrome will have severely decreased functionality and users will no longer be able to protect themselves from sketchy ads that contain scams, malware, and other nefarious bullshit (often hosted on Google's own ad networks)?
I guess you want the internet to be a place for finding useful information, and/or the entertainment you choose to access, over it being a long uninteruptable stream of infomercials for crap products you have no interest in? Then groogle is not for you. In fact groogle is not for humanity.
MV3 doesn't kill ad blockers. uBOL (uBlock Origin Lite) blocks ads, is by the same author and uses MV3. The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.
Some of these "features" that classic uBO used are available in MV3 but requires different permissions. Some of them could also be implemented with native messaging. The main uBO author though feels slighted by Google and went on a trash talking campaign against Google, and to be fair had a few good points. Anyway, most people on social media now care more about how Chromium and Firefox makes them feel now irregardless of facts. They think their emotions somehow are the same as facts.
The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.
Then allow a savvy user to choose to keep MV2 mode via an opt-in control instead of depreciating years of hard work by non-malicious extension authors. uBlock Origin is, in fact, the ONLY browser extension I use in Chrome, as Firefox is my main browser.
From my understanding, MV3 kills vital features of ad-blockers in that
Some filtering rules do rely on the ability to read the content of the webpage, which can't be migrated, per the FAQ linked in the article
The declarative API means an update to the rules requires an update to the plugin itself, which might get delayed by the reviewing process, causing the blocker to lag behind the tracker. It might not be able to recover as quickly as uBO in the recent YouTube catch-up round.
And yet the likelihood of Google publishing a malicious extension is quite low. Not sure why you're so adamant about defending their shitty anti-adblock actions, making excuses for a mega corporation.
I already know a few people who were just marginally digitally literate, and now they can't read things like news articles and access several kinds of services anymore, unless someone helps them, because they don't property know how to close invasive popups and solve captchas.
The internet is literally becoming unusable for some people.
Got my boomer mom to finally install an ad blocker. She was tired of looking at a webpage, having an ad give some kind of script run error, and then it reloads back at the top. It’s a big problem on the cooking websites she goes to.
I would rather go back to the days of shitty pop-ups you can just close. These ads are far worse, and none of them even make sense.
Oh no, they are about to lose the $0 that uBlock origin users bring!
They know they will lose users and they don't care. They will make much more per user selling ads than before. Google is an ad company. They're not a browser company, or a mobile OS company, or an office suite company. It's all about ads.
Could turn out to be a good thing. All power users will dump Chrome practically overnight, a huge boon to the alternatives, that could actually give them enough momentum to compete with Google for a change. I'm sure they've considered this, probably an empty treat.
I'm not sure how wide the intersection of power users that use uBO but also haven't heard of the manifest v3 deprecation coming since like 2019 actually is, but that could be because I'm the type of person to randomly recommend browsers to people and discuss them a lot.
Every browser is either chromium (open source captured by Google) or exists because of a Google search contract (this represents 80% of Mozilla's revenue), Google can't lose
With the direction FF is taking it's gonna be forks for now.
The only thing that held me back from using LibreWolf over Firefox was that it disabled (automatic) dark mode on websites. I understand this is part of the "resist fingerprinting" configuration. There's a workaround now ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1732114).
Seeing that half of my extensions (it was seriously like 10 of them) were going to be disabled is what pushed me to finally switch to Firefox because if I have to find alternatives to them it might as well be on another browser
I am one that switched. I have Linux Mint which I use 99.9% of the time, and a windows 10 laptop that I use 0.1% for that one windows program.
I think more people are wanting to get out of the grip that google, apple, and Microsoft have over them. Many are overwhelmed because they are in so deep. It took me months to get out, which I did about 6 years ago. I never looked back though.
I know people that want out, but are not strong enough to commit to switching all their services and apps.
The reason for this is because switching from Windows to Linux is a lot bigger change, requiring a fair amount of technical know-how, and even knowing that Linux exists in the first place. Swapping browsers is easy in the technical sense, it's breaking the habit that's the hard part, but if they piss people off enough all it takes is uninstalling it in order to break the habit, not a drastic paradigm shift. I'm a long time Chrome user, like over a decade and with the recent "unverified download" nonsense unless you enable their invasive tracking has put me over the edge. I had both the Chrome and Firefox icons pinned to the taskbar and just out of habit kept clicking it, I finally removed it last week
I'm not so sure about that. Windows despite its ads is still generally usable or at least readable, but adblockers affect almost every website, and in a much more extreme way, without which renders some websites virtually unusable. As someone else said, installing another browser is also far easier than taking backups, installing an entirely new OS, implementing your backups, and learning an entire new OS which may not readily support the software you have licensed from windows for most users.
Users care a lot about convenience. I expect that they weigh installing and learning linux etc as less convenient than the ads in windows which is why they would not switch, but I expect when it comes to this case, they would weigh installing a different browser with adblock as much more convenient than using the internet with ads on every single website.
I'm showing my age, but back when IE was basically the only browser and Firefox (Firebird back then) launched, people often lamented that things didn't work in Firefox. The solution? People used Firefox and web developers were forced to make their shit work in Firefox. When Chrome came out, suddenly we had three real options and the way to make everything work? Open Standards.
Now, Chrome is in the position IE was back before Firefox came around. How ever will we make sure things work in Firefox??? Use Firefox. If enough people dump Google's malware browser, the web has to go back to supporting multiple browsers through open standards.
Have you reported issues for them? It's in the menu somewhere. If Mozilla get a lot of reports for particular sites, they reach out to the webmaster and try to work with them to improve Firefox support - usually by removing proprietary Chrome-only features or by removing reliance on Chrome bugs that don't exist in Firefox.
You can also report the issue at https://webcompat.com/, just search to see if it's already been reported first.
Same. For me, the big one's my bank that requires its users to use Chrome, else it won't let you log in. I got around this by using an agent-switcher extension in Firefox.
Glad I have firefox as well but also looking forward to a cool new project called Ladybird. https://ladybird.org
Not sure if its the right one but glad there are more projects out there trying to jump into the game. (I know extensions are a long way off for it but i see it as hope.)
Also please consider running pihole or adguard home. Or any other full home DNS add blocker. It will help.
When people say things like this, I wonder if they understand how impossible it is. Google is not just a company. It is a 2 trillion dollar entity. Even if Google search entirely fails, it will still persist. At this point, you may as well say, "The wind needs to be ended." You don't end the wind. The wind already won. It will outlive you, me, and our children.
What we can do is protect against it. We can deal with it. We can contain it. We can redirect it and repurpose it to be helpful. But ending it? That doesn't happen.
Most people here have a device in their pocket with either Google hardware or Google software. If even the nerds with a passion against ads can't not buy something from the biggest ad company, who can?
I honestly can't wait to see how this plays out. Only Chrome, chromium and edge in their pure forms have dedicated to doing this. Most of the Chrome forks have said they're going to fork and keep it running. It's certainly going to give Firefox a shot in the arm, but there's no lack of other competition either.