- 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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Thank fuck I switched to mozilla
Can’t wait for nothing to change 'cause 90% of chrome users don’t use add-ons.
How horrifying
How does this affect browsers like Brave?
Brave’s ad blocker is not an extension so it’s unaffected.
Same with Opera / Opera GX
Don’t recommend Opera. Owned by China now, with very unethical practices
Don’t recommend Brave either lol.
I mean, Google has probably even more unethical practices, I would have thought. (compared to Opera, not to China. Though the US is worse than China for sure.)
I miss the old Opera, back when it had its own engine. It was a really good browser. I used it from 2002 until 2012.
I remember it also let you spoof your user agent, and had a built in email client. It was just generally feature rich.
I’m not recommending it. I’m saying that’s how its Adblock works.
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.
won’t stop pihole
And they never will.
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.
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?
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.
By using the same hostnames that you need for wanted content.
Nerd fight! Nerd fight! Nerd fight! Show 'em your bionicles collection!
By refusing to load
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.
Man for real.
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 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 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’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
What does google expect users to do once they realize they get better extensions with firefox?
Imagine ad blockers not working on youtube only on chromium browsers, or tracking cookies/pixels/scripts not being blockable only on chromium browsers.
80% of people I know does not use an ad block, even the ones more tech savvy. I have no clue how brainwashed they are for eating ad garbage all day.
To be fair, let’s be glad that 80% of people don’t use an ad block. If it were the opposite and 80% did use ad block, web services would be much more aggressive in combating ad blockers and many more of them would end up pay-walled (although it seems we’re heading there anyway).
On one hand, I feel kinda bad that my ad-free experience is only supported thanks to those who do undergo the torture of ads, on the other hand, the companies have only themselves to blame. If web ads were decent, only limited to sides and headers or even between paragraphs of web pages and didn’t cover the content you’re trying to view, didn’t try to trick you into thinking it’s part of the content, didn’t lead to malicious websites, didn’t autoplay videos with sound or didn’t put unskippable ads before and inside videos, I would have never felt the need to install an ad block.
They expect most users to not care, and sadly they’re right.
I think, they just stopped caring about users instead. They’ve got enough market share. Might as well internet-explorer it for a while.
I think people just genuinely don’t know that firefox (and I suppose Safari) is the only true alternative browser i.e. Not based on chromium.
I do my best to transition people I know across, but people are retty comfortable on chrome. If ad blockers stop working, I think there will be people who care just enough to switch.
I think people just genuinely don’t know that firefox (and I suppose Safari) is the only true alternative browser i.e. Not based on chromium.
Safari is only “not based on Chromium” in the sense that the heredity goes in the other direction (Chromium is based on it).
Firefox is the only browser that maintains a rendering engine codebase fully separate from Chrome. That’s why using Firefox, and evangelizing it to help keep up its marketshare, is so vitally important for the health of the web.
Huh, I didn’t know that about Safari/Chromium. Absolutely agree that having a Google-controlled browser monopoly would be catastrophic.
Used Firefox on and off since it came around, not a fan. But if chromium blocks ad-blockers, I’m switching instantly. I doubt many people know or care enough to switch.
I’ve been on Firefox almost exclusively for about a decade and I can’t really tell the difference between them honestly in terms of performance of normal web browsing.
I’m having some weird graphical issues with my NAS frontend Web portal display on Firefox atm though, so keep chromium installed for that.
I honestly don’t understand why anyone would refuse to switch from away Chrome. It’s not like the other browsers lack functionality or are slow. The only problem they might encounter is some rare incompatibility which is the result of Firefox (and its forks) small market share and web devs not caring enough.
I’ve never used Chrome as my primary browser and I don’t think I missed anything. I started using Opera years before Chrome was even a thing (back when everyone was using IE) and then when the old Opera died, I didn’t think even for a second about switching to Chrome and went straight to Firefox. Which could at least be highly customized to bring some Opera exclusive features (eg. mouse gestures, tab grouping) back.
What does google expect users to do once they realize they get better extensions with firefox?
If that happens en masse, which is extremely unlikely, Google can just pull its funding for Mozilla and cripple them
The entire sector is fucked because of lack of regulation
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Other groups don’t agree with Google’s description, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which called Manifest V3 “deceitful and threatening” back when it was first announced in 2019, saying the new system “will restrict the capabilities of web extensions—especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit.”
Google, which makes about 77 percent of its revenue from advertising, has not published a serious explanation as to why Manifest V3 limits content filtering, and it’s not clear how that aligns with the goals of “improving the security, privacy, performance and trustworthiness.”
Like Kewisch said, the primary goal of malicious extensions is to spy on users and slurp up data, which has nothing to do with content filtering.
Google now says it’s possible for extensions to skip the reviews process for “safe” rule set changes, but even this is limited to “static” rulesets, not more powerful “dynamic” ones.
In a comment to The Verge last year, the senior staff technologist at the EFF, Alexei Miagkov, summed up Google’s public negotiations with the extension community well, saying, "These are helpful changes, but they are tweaks to a limited-by-design system.
For a short period, users will be able to turn them back on if they visit the extension page, but Google says that “over time, this toggle will go away as well.”
The original article contains 692 words, the summary contains 230 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Brave Chads keep on winning
Meanwhile, Firefox.
Removed by mod
As with others, I use Firefox for my main browser, and Brave when I need a Chromium-based browser for something. I don’t see many ads…
Consider ungoogled chromium instead. Brave is not great, it just has the advantage of being heavily promoted by the middle part of the (privacy nerds) and (want privacy because their beliefs are rejected by most of human society) venn diagram.
I use that on my personal computer, but at work I’ll occasionally hit sites other than what I’m debugging, and Chromium has ineffective ad-block, whereas Brave has reasonable ad-block. I can’t control the network at work like I can at home, so I can’t really rely on something like a pi-hole or whatever.
As a web browser with an embedded ad-blocker, it works fine. I’m not going to stop using something because someone distasteful is using it, I’ll stop using it if it no longer meets my needs. It blocks ads and renders as Chrome would, so it works well enough for me.
I disable the crypto nonsense and pretty much only use it for debugging work stuff. Sometimes that means I need a JSON formatter or something, and those sites are riddled with ads w/o an ad-blocker.
oh, hrm. Im not sure what specific build you’re using, but the one I’m using has mechanisms for installing normal adblockers like ublockorigin. note: afaik, this doesn’t solve the problem indicated in this thread – I’m operating on the basis that the blocking functionality will be nerfed. However for me, I use it purely for (stuff that doesnt work in firefox) and my jellyfin server (since firefox is kinda particular about hevc videos…you can kinda get them to work in windows, but in many cases I dont fully understand jellyfin still tries to transcode to 264).
worth stating that “because someone distasteful is using it” is a reasonable misunderstanding due to me assuming some knowledge. Brave was created because firefox kicked a homophobe out and he wanted to make a browser. Said person is also clearly a cryptonut, which makes him a yet more negative person in my book. Now, unrelated to that base, you have a lot of people out there who are promoting it by my personal experience in more privacy centric groups is that these promoters are often quite…unsavory. Is that enough to stop using software? not necessarily. Is it enough when there are far better options out there? to me, absolutely.
At home, it’s whatever ships with my Linux distribution. I use it mostly for web dev testing (I dev on Firefox, test on chromium) for personal projects, and for my kids to play certain games (Firefox works most of the time for that).
Brave was created because firefox kicked a homophobe out and he wanted to make a browser.
Sort of, but I don’t think that’s really telling the whole story.
Brendan Eich was the CEO of Mozilla for many years and was the initial creator of JavaScript. He was ousted because he made a private donation to block gay marriage legalization in California. There is no evidence that he was or is a homophobe, just that he didn’t believe that gay marriage was something that state should legally recognize. By all counts, he was pleasant to work with regardless of sexual orientation, the issue was that someone found out about his donation. He didn’t harm anyone and wasn’t unfair, he just made a private donation.
I think he was a great CEO, and Mozilla needs a technical CEO imo (in fact, everything started going downhill around when he left). I disagree with him politically, but if I avoided every product where I disagreed with the executive team politically, I’d have to avoid pretty much every product (and quit my job).
So I need a better reason to avoid Brave. I’m not sure what the plan is for their cryptocurrency, and I honestly see it as more of a gimmick than anything. It’s easy to disable, so whatever, it existing doesn’t impact me.
I also don’t actively recommend it to anyone, I always recommend Firefox or a Firefox derivative. The only time I recommend it is if someone needs a Chromium-based browser and wants ad-blocking, and Brave works well for that. If they just need Chromium and don’t need ad blocking, I recommend Chromium.
If you have a better alternative, I’m interested. I literally just need a Chromium-based browser that works on macOS (what I use for work) with proper ad blocking. I don’t need to sync anything, it’ll only ever exist on that one device. I also need something for Linux, and open source is more important than ad blocking there.
I’m also interested in Brave Search since it uses its own index. I currently use DDG, but search results are kinda crappy so I’m looking for alternatives.
To my shame, I’m still deeply ingrained in the Google ecosystem. I settled on it like 8-10 years ago and I’m not sure how to dig myself out of this pit. More than Chrome, I heavily use Docs, Sheets, Drive, Wallet, YouTube, Gmail, I even have a Pixel (I hate how bloated Samsung is).
I’ve used Firefox a little for work because of the nice containers feature. Is Google Drive bad too? It’s so easy to share things, I torrent a lot of books and I’ve shared with a bunch of friends, idk if there’s an alternative that others could easily use.
I did it by selling soul to apple completely, I mean I am not going to peddle another company but at least it isn’t google. However I can afford to throw some cash on their overpriced stuff. They suck but at least they aren’t google. I don’t use any google services right now. Not even maps. Without any cons because obviously I just use apple stuff for everything wallet etc
I could use framework laptop linux + graphene os but I need to live and thrive among ppl and also get that sweet social credit for not being a total nerd that yells about evil corps and how I have superior privacy in the basement left and right. However I would if it was socially acceptable.
Here’s what I did:
- switch to Firefox - works with all the Google crap, so it’s an easy switch
- get a slim wallet - I don’t need Google Wallet at all anymore, I just keep the two cards I use for everything easily accessible
- install GrapheneOS on my Pixel phone - can install sandboxed Google crap if you want (I do it in a separate profile)
- YouTube - install ad-block and use Grayjay on my phone to make it easier to watch non-YouTube channels
- forward all gmail to a new account (I picked Tuta, but Protonmail is probably better for most) - easy to configure forwards in gmail, and then I just give out my new email to family and friends; plan is to keep gmail for spam once I’m no longer getting important emails sent to my new email
I’m still stuck with Google Drive though. As you said, it’s just so convenient. I’m trying out OnlyOffice with a self-hosted NextCloud instance, but there’s a lot of sacrifices. I have some complex spreadsheets, and switching to literally anything else loses features (I like the
GOOGLEFINANCE()feature).But yeah, I wish Google didn’t suck, they have some really convenient products, I just don’t trust them anymore.
Don’t fret, I think a lot of us are on a long-term journey to de-Google. I’ve actually found that changing browsers is one of the easiest things to do, especially with the ability to import your bookmarks and such. With Firefox Sync, you pretty much have the same functionality as you would with your Google account signed into Chrome.
Gmail is probably the hardest one to kick. I’m fine with paying for an email service if it’s functional and doesn’t siphon my personal data, but finding a quality trustworthy provider and then migrating 20 years of data to it seems so overwhelming.
Why do you need to access 20 years of data in Gmail? For archiving mails there is a cost-free tool called MailStore Home. It’s portable and fits on a USB thumb drive. Save two or more copies for data safety.
https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/
So you can archive your mails without a hassle. Then you can choose any provider you want.
Oh my gosh thank you!! I need this exact thing but hadn’t gotten around to figuring out a solution. Much appreciated!!
I think migrating is the hardest part. My email history has a lot of important records and notes that I don’t want to lose.
By the way, I recommend checking out this video, which makes a great point that email is inherently insecure, regardless of the provider you choose.
Why do you need to migrate 20 years of data? Do you actually look at anything more than a month or two old?
That said, Protonmail has “Easy Switch” to copy emails and whatnot.
The harder part for me is Drive, since there just isn’t a competitor that’s anywhere near as good in terms of overall experience. I’m going to try out OnlyOffice, but I know there are a few features I just won’t have anymore.
I do occasionally need something from 10 or even 15 years ago, needing the exact date I sold a property or started a new project or even just jogging my memory of an old contact I am reaching again. While none of this is strictly necessary, I could make do without it if I had to, it does create inertia.
I really need to check out Proton, Google is just getting worse and worse and the sooner I can get away from their ecosystem the better.
Give it a shot! Worst case scenario, you just go back.
The silver lining here is that you’d hope that more people will simply adopt Firefox. It’s user share has been too low for too long given how great it is
They messed up 10 years ago when for some reason it took ages for Firefox to load compared to Chrome, and sadly it never really recovered the user base even though the performance is vastly improved.
To be fair, even in 2006 the Mozilla corporation was never going to outspend Firefox
Especially not given how much Mozilla wastes on executive compensation ;)
Their user share was pretty okay for a while, but bombed when Chrome first released because it was much more performant. Unfortunately, that stigma never quite fell off and they lost a huge opportunity to overtake the market.
How was it more performant? As I remember it, Chrome was loading websites not noticeably faster than Firefox, as website loading speed depended and still depends mainly on your internet connection and hardware anyway.
As I remember it, Chrome exploded because it was pushed onto users at every possible opportunity while Firefox depended (and still depends) on users actively looking for it.
Used Google or Google products? Get ads for Chrome. Wanted to download Google Earth? You had to activly uncheck a box such that Chrome wasn’t going to be installed as well. Meanwhile no ads and not the same amount of exposure for Firefox.
That way they achieved a critical mass and snowballing did the rest. There were so many users using it that it was considered a good choice just because it was used by many people.
Regarding the performance aspect, if there even was a noticeable difference, it was worse than Firefox. Where else did the “Chrome eating RAM” memes come from?
I’m right there with you. I hear people talking about how slow and bloated Firefox was, which I do not remember at all. I remember Chrome using some tricks to seem faster like preloading websites and preferential treatment for Chrone with Google websites and stuff, but in terms of raw performance I felt like they were roughly equal. I think the main reason for Chrome’s popularity is how firmly entrenched Google is/was with Google Search, Gmail, YouTube etc. and constantly having the “get Chrome!” ads pushed to users.
I remember it as, Firefox was fast enough, but Chrome was shipping a weirdly quick JS engine and trying to convince people to put more stuff into JS because on Chrome that would be feasible. Nowdays if you go out without your turbo-JIT hand-optimized JS engine everyone laughs at you and it’s Chrome’s fault.
I was a Firefox user at the time, using adblockers, and the swap was a huge improvement to my browsing experience. I can’t even remember all the ways, since this was a decade ago. But at the time, Firefox was in a lul.
Things likely swapped pretty fast, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time because I was already using Chrome.
No ads swayed me, no Google specific sites, it wasn’t side loaded with anything.
The Chrome eating ram memes came much later, after the enshitification process reached the third step. You seem to be compressing the entirety of both browsers into a single moment, and that’s not really how time works.
I understand that you made such an experience, but I can’t share it though. I’ve been a Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox exists, which is almost two decades. (I think I joined somewhere between 2005-2007). I’ve tried other browsers, sometimes I had to. However, I didn’t notice any benefits compared to Firefox. Especially not in performance. Even though benchmarks have always shown clear differences, they weren’t significant enough for me to consider switching, as the difference really didn’t impact my browsing experience.
Regarding the memes: That was just a random annectode which I found suitable here. I don’t claim it has been that way since the beginning. (Can’t relate to that anyway.) But given that it has been around for a while, I don’t see how performance can be an argument in favour of Chrome in this.
I just remember Firefox around that time and for like over a decade just felt bloated and super slow in comparison. No idea if it’s better these days or what.
I’d say give it a try and see for yourself.
I can just recommend using Firefox for a multitude of reasons. However, I am biased as I have been using firefox for almost two decades and did not have many reasons to complain.
I think you are misremembering. Chrome won at the start because it was fast as fuck and Firefox was not. Firefox caught back up in the 2016 time frame iirc and they’ve been back and forth ever since.
Ironically chrome was named so as a goal was to reduce the chrome of the UI and focus on the web content, something recent versions of chrome and Firefox have abandoned in favor of massive swaths of whitespace and giant chrome buttons (on Firefox you can enable “unsupported” compact mode to reclaim some of the space if you’re on a laptop)
I’ve been a loyal Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox has existed. So I’m probably a bit biased. However, when I used other browsers, and if it wes just to try them out, I didn’t notice any benefits in terms of loading websites and executing their scripts. This includes Chrome. In benchmarks there are obviously differences visible, but to me as a user they didn’t matter. I wasn’t so short on time that I needed those microseconds. So I really don’t get how performance could be an argument in this.
agreed. chrome was bare ones and super fast when it was released. over the last two years it’s a fucking monster memory hog
I think you’re ignoring the functional aspect of the integration of Chrome into the Android platform. A lot of people’s entire online life is stored within the walls of the Chrome ecosystem. And moving all of that to a completely different browser that is not fully integrated with Android is daunting to say the least.
What’s the new chrome integration?
Didn’t say new, I’m assuming they refer to the WebView that many apps use which is chromium based. However if you have a calyx- or graphene- compatible phone the WebView will be non-g chromium.
For work, I use Chrome, but only because Firefox’s profile management is (more or less) nonexistent. Once they have that, which I understand isn’t too far out, I’m ditching Chrome entirely.
Have you thought about installing a Firefox fork? On my Work PC I use Firefox for work and Floorp for personal browsing.
