So … can we like finally dismiss Google Chrome as the obviously awful idea it is and which should never have made it this far and remind all of the web devs married to it that they’re doing bad things and are the reason why we can’t have nice things?
Hmmm … a web browser owned by a monopolistic advertising company … how could that possibly go wrong!!!
Do you remember the Internet Explorer days? This, unfortunately, is still much better.
Pretty good reason to switch the Firefox, now. Nearly everything will work, unlike the Internet Explorer days.
- Firefox User
There’s an easy fix for this. 🔥🦊
With Google providing 80% of Mozilla’s finding, I think we can all see whats going to happen next.
The Google payments were never guaranteed for Mozilla. If they didn’t have a backup plan in place to reduce spending, that’s on them. Let Mozilla return to its garage opensource roots.
I feel like this isn’t talked about enough. Sure
just use Firefox
But for how long is it gonna work that way until they too deprecate v2
I think some people overestimate how many will migrate to Firefox in the near future over this.
- High switching cost compared to finding another extension (e.g. uBO Lite), even if the resulting experience is worse.
- Just as many Firefox users like Firefox, lots of Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don’t want to lose that.
- The kind of tech-aware person who’d switch over this is much more likely to have seen the news months ago and taken action already.
As fun as it is to imagine an Adpocalypse shocking the masses and pushing them to try out alternatives to big tech, it’s also way too optimistic, I feel.
The uBlock Origin chrome extension
hashad 34 million users. Chrome has 3.45 billion users.Even if every uBlock user switched, it’s less than 1% of chrome users.
Depends on their methodology. Sure, a huge proportion of those are users who haven’t heard of uBO, but we’re forgetting a lot of caveats:
- Electron exists and lots of apps are built on top of it and identify as “Chrome”. Judging by the numbers most have been weeded out, but some edge cases do visit more sites so they end up in the count.
- A lot of workplaces mandate the browser, which is often Chrome. This also gets counted.
- A not insignificant amount of Firefox users change their useragent to Chrome.
All of these skew the numbers towards Chrome. Some Chrome users use a different adblocker which lowers the uBO statistic.
Yeah, I thought about mentioning that. But the comparison goes both ways. Less than 1% of Chrome users switching to Firefox could still mean an increase in Firefox users of over 10%, if I remember my numbers correctly. That’d be a sweet boost for most products.
Yeah, same with people here declaring the death of reddit, or Twitter, or any of these massive, mainstream services. People in bubbles (and Lemmy is definitely a bubble) always seem to underestimate how little everyone else cares or even knows about the things that are important to them. The service needs to be extremely bad in a user experience way, not an ethical way, for an extended period of time and there needs to be a big social movement where lots of people migrate to a direct and equivalent competitor within a short space of time. Most people will not do it on their own, they will wait until they see their peers doing it and only then can a migration start to snowball.
“Netflix will die when they ban account sharing!!” - Reddit/Lemmy/Techtubers
Netflix actually went on to have a massive jump in revenue, because most normal people can’t be arsed to set up a Plex/Emby/Jellyfin server and buy a shitload of storage.
I agree folks are overestimating how many will switch. but also maybe you’re underestimating too - a lot of browser installations are managed by the “family tech guy”. the father, mother, brother, sister, aunt or uncle who sets up everyone’s new laptops on Christmas and has the suggestions when you look for a new phone. we all know the type. a lot of us are the type.
setting up granny’s laptop? I’ll install whatever browser lets me automatically block the most “1000th visitor!” banner ads and change the desktop icon to the old AOL icon because that’s all she knows the internet as. she doesn’t know of care about the browser options so it’s up to me. Chrome used to be fast and simple so it was the right choice. Firefox has caught up a fair bit on UX simplicity and speed and now offers better blocking and general security, so it just stole the crown for these installations imo. I trust it more to not let her mess the computer up, so even if I’m not using it as my main personal browser, it gets use here.
For what it’s worth, I hope you’re right.
“The browser built to be yours”
Hahaha sure thing Google
“The browser built to be piping your data into our hands”
There, fixed.
It literally took me less than ten minutes to set up firefox. I carried all my bookmarks and passwords from edge and set up a mozilla account and everything is synced across linux, windows and android.
The only thing I’m worried of, is if some websites require chrome to work, as was the case with some government sites that only worked with internet explorer in the old days.
(Does anyone know if the default user agent is chrome? I used to log in a local streaming site from edge and it wouldn’t work, as it required chrome, but I used an extension to take care of the user agent. On firefox it works no problem.)
I recommend the User-Agent Switcher and Manager Firefox addon for those struggling with some sites.
You can also report a broken site to Mozilla directly via the browser menu.
There was another (third-party?) page where you could report websites but I forgot its url.
I’m using the Chrome Mask extension on the few sites that complain
half of the websites are google-owned
Just use Edge on sites that don’t support Firefox, if you must use them. Same as how we used IE for government sites back in the day.
Why not use chromium or a hardened version of it? Edge is proprietary software.
Edge is chromium…
Yes, but Edge comes with a lot more proprietary components added.
I would recommend installing ungoogled-chromium or using another hardened FOSS version of chromium instead.
Orrrrr
Stop using chromium based browsers.
The person was saying they couldn’t access a certain site with Firefox, that’s why I suggested a chromium based browser.
It deserves mentioning that Firefox on Android supports extensions, so if you uninstall/disable the official YouTube app then add uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock you get a more tolerable experience.
Or just use Revanced or Grayjay, both of which are ad free and support sponsor block. Revanced is still a bit more feature complete imo, but also more buggy on my device, and more of a hassle to update. The browser YouTube experience is so bad, ads or ad free.
Those who don’t like FF can use brave, it’s brave shield works well
In case anyone here needs this
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-chrome-firefox
I miss the “dont be evil” version of google. Its like, large amounts of money ruin everything
It’s not just large amounts of money. It’s chasing more and more money each quarter, and when it starts slowing down panic sets in and they start trying to find any and every possible avenue to keep profits up. It’s how we’ve ended up in subscription based hell and it’ll only get worse.
I’m in the process of switching to firefox on all my devices.
I’ve had enough of Google pushing features like this.
Huh… I couldn’t tell with all the Firefox I use.
Huh… So you’re not using the product the article is referring to?
No I use u-block origin. The very product the article is referring to.
I just use it in Firefox so I am completely unaffected by this.
It’s a great feel.
It’s about Chrome. Using Firefox is unrelated to the article.
It’s about uBlock Origin not working on chrome.
So what does Firefox have anything to do with it then?
Nothing…
Weird. You spent 3 days defending Firefox for an article that has nothing to do with Firefox… You just wanted to say Firefox for some weird reason…
There’s only 34 million uBlock Origin users on Chrome? So, billions are using Chrome without any ad-blockers? That’s crazy and unsafe
Most users are fucking idiots and will continue to raw-dog the internet while visiting the most malicious sites possible.
I feel like you’ve worked helpdesk at some point.
Worked IT. Can confirm.
Yes. Unfortunately. “a virus? How did I get that? What’s an anti-virus? You must be wrong, I just do a little bit of web browsing and downloading music.” (this was in the windows xp days that I’m specifically flashing back to)
My boss once asked me to take a look at her computer that was super slow and barely functional, and the thing that surprised me the most was that she had been running Chrome without any adblock since ever, and when I asked her about adblock, she answered: “adwhat?”. Mind you that she’s still a millennial, and only a few years older than me.
Lemmy has a really biased idea of what the average computer user can do. Imagine Janet in accounting, who calls help desk to reset her password every morning, and takes 30 minutes to remember how to check her email. Or the late GenZ just entering the workforce, who was surprised that their desktop wasn’t a touchscreen, and doesn’t know how a file structure works, because literally every device they’ve used growing up has been either a tablet or a Chromebook. That’s the average user.
Firefox.
This is the way.
This is the way.
This is the way.
I wonder if this leaves Chrome users susceptible to ads that load malware, which has been a problem for the last decade, and a driver of adblocking extension development. You can get spyware and worms from Forbes, for instance.
Adblocking is not just a matter of a cleaner internet experience, but also of good internet hygiene
Oh yeah, I have a feeling we’re about to see 2000s level bullshit on computers/phones again.
The majority of people already don’t use ad blockers though. The Chrome Web Store says that 34 million people use (used?) uBlock Origin, while it’s estimated that around 3.3 billion people use Chrome. If those numbers are correct, only around 1% of Chrome users use uBlock Origin.
I feel sorry for that 3.26 billion people, most of whom have to deal with ads, spyware and malware.
its not just ads and malware, and its not only about beeing sorry for them. ads are also manipulating how people think. not only the obvious things like “that product is good”, but also that products in general would help (with problems you didn’t have). and the format itself of ads (even without considering its contents) already has a changing effects on the minds of those who watch it. i am thinking of some parts of neil postmans thoughts about television back then and i guess there is plenty of possibilities to make a realistic conspiracy theory out of it why exactly the most poisonous parts of television are replicated to the internet with massive force even though everyone ignores ads in the net. i like theories
unfortunately, feeling sorry for them does not help society to stability. 😥
What’s the alternative to ads, though? Not everyone wants to (or can afford to) pay for every site they use.
What’s the alternative to ads, though? Not everyone wants to (or can afford to) pay for every site they use.
its not about paying for the site a user uses, its about paying those who run the site (and less to pay for someone only “managing” the site by doing actually nothing)
maybe these could be alternatives:
- patreon
flattr- micropayment in general
- donations (somafm runs on donations)
- link to shopping platforms (musicians on somafm mostly have links to the songs on amazon that you see while playing the song for free)
- communities, like FSF, local groups
- some small payed supporter part (like lwn.net) while the important stuff that makes the win-win of the site is free to use
- maybe the list from this page can help too: https://kinsta.com/de/blog/patreon-alternativen/
Kickstarter Indiegogo Podia Sellfy Buy Me a Coffee Memberful Hypage Ko-fi Substack Kajabi Gumroad WooCommerce Mighty Networks MemberPress Uscreen
maybe even a combination of multiple of those *whoa!!! mindblow!!! could be a good choice to allow usersvto choose how to contribute.
so really only choosing to offer exactly one option that also puts all users at a real risk of real attacks where they can get ripped off of all or lots of their real money and data for the sake if earning 0.003 ¢ per each putting them at high risk is not really what should be done, or do you personally profit from their users high risk and are thus completely okay with it? hope not.
if you have to earn money with your project or whatever, why not offer several options to choose from? why only one? and while we’re at it, offering an ad-free “membership” for 400 times the price of what they would earn by the same visitor with ads like they try here sometimes, does not make any platform look good, but the opposite.
there are many platforms that i would pay for monthly and i would spend much more money alltogether than now on that if their price would not be artificially pushed into astronomically heights per service…
there is one project where i do donate each month a little bit via recurring bank transfer since years. my transfer says the name of the project and “donation” thats pretty easy to setup for both sides, but too complicated for those who pay designers money so they can place the ad layers on top of the 400 other layers of spypixels and navigation controls… really ? lol*
if those you are talking about cannot afford to have a bank account for some reason, i guess they also cannot receive the revenue of ads on their webpages ;+)
saying there are no alternatives to ads is rather a candidate for the lamest excuse award ;-)
