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.
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.
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.
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“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.
There’s also other chromium browsers with built-in ad-blocking that still work AFAIK. If all extensions and forked brower’s ad-blockers stopped working, I think there would probably be a surge in firefox usage (even if there’s not that much change in chromium usage).
Yeah I use Vivaldi as my daily driver and love it. There’s built in ad blocking but it’s not as good as the extension. If the extension stops working there I’ll switch to Firefox in a heartbeat though
Is there any other browser that does a right-side vertical tab bar with compact tabs?
There’s an extension for Firefox to do it, but it’s a bit clunkier than Vivaldi’s - definitely something I’d only switch to if I really had to… but every other browser I’ve seen only offers left-side vertical tabs at best, which is terrible if you want 3 monitors in a left-to-right layout with your browser on the left.
I think what you want is in Firefox nightly right now: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/08/07/firefox-sidebar-and-vertical-tabs-try-them-out-in-nightly-firefox-labs-131/
That expands and compacts based on the sidebar state and can be flipped to the right side of the window in the ‘customise sidebar’ settings.
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.
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.
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“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.
half of the websites are google-owned
I’m using the Chrome Mask extension on the few sites that complain
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.
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.
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)
Worked IT. Can confirm.
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.
How long until YouTube blocks Firefox?
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Those who don’t like FF can use brave, it’s brave shield works well
At this point I am seriously wondering why people would like to use Chrome over Firefox for instance.
I use multiple profiles in chrome for my different logged in usages, for some reason Firefox makes it hard to switch profiles.
“Hard” is a strong word. It’s not built into the default interface, granted, but it’s not that hard to use FF’s command line:
firefox -PThey have said they’re thinking about rejigging the whole thing though.
Ok, telling people to open a command line and TYPE firefox -P is HARD. In chrome you just click the icon in the upper right and select whatever profile you want.
It makes no sense that you have to either open about:profiles then select “launch in new window” or open the command line to start a new profile, makes NO sense at all.
You can open a firefox private window with a keyboard shortcut, but if you want to be logged into two different accounts in two different profiles, you have to go through a minimum of three non-intuitive steps.
Even the extension that adds the profile switching doesn’t work anymore because it’s not maintained.
Dude, if that’s all-caps HARD, then I don’t know how you’d classify, say, compiling things from source and fixing any problems that might crop up along the way. Or fixing missing DLL / OCX hell when trying to get an old Windows game running under Linux, because let me tell you, I’ve done both of those and had to give up.
firefox -Pis heaven by comparison.You could even put it into a shortcut and you wouldn’t have to type it any more.
Yes the interface sucks, but HARD is not it.
The profile manager is definitely annoying, but it shouldn’t be that hard to visit about:profiles to switch / open other profiles. Afaik they do work on a better one though.
Use chrome to download Firefox.
Back in the day when I still used windows, I did not even use IE to download Firefox. I used the FTP functionality inside the explorer to download Firefox from the Mozilla FTP.
Because I use chrome for standard use and Firefox for sailing the high seas. And I much prefer just having 2 separate browsers for containerization. I’m just going to have to use librewolf or something when I do get the the mv3 update.
Why not just use something like Fences on Firefox? It allows you to containerize individual tabs. I use it all the time to separate work and personal accounts.
Does this allow you enable/disable add-ons on a per container basis? What about bookmarks?
In case anyone here needs this
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-chrome-firefox
I’m in the process of switching to firefox on all my devices.
I’ve had enough of Google pushing features like this.
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.
Simple solution. Don’t use Chrome.
Ive been testing out ungoogled chrome with uBlock, and it still seems to be working. But I think I’m going to add Waterfox along side of my Firefox to look at that one also.
But I’m also not sure you can install uBlock anymore from the Chrome repository either.
Not sure about the repo route, never went that deep with Chrome. Firefox has always been my mainstay (and Netscape before it.)
