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
I think lots of people are overestimating 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 some Firefox users like Firefox, many 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 getting them to try out alternatives to big tech, it’s also way too optimistic, I feel.
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.
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
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.
Hopefully it will give Firefox a bit of a boost anyway. Firefox needs a boost.
“intrusive ads” are the least of the problems, an adblocker is a critical part of any computer’s security suite.
The internet advertisement companies wont police their ads from maleware, and untill they accept criminal and financial responsibillity when their ads cause harm to the users being served compromised ads from their networks, I won’t even consider disabling my adblocker
as long as data caps exist anywhere on the planet all internet advertisement is theft.
We should all probably start donating to Firefox. Isn’t Google their main source of income?
There might come a time when they prefer to gut Firefox, forcing Mozilla to either reject uBlock Origin or die (or they could simply pull the plug on funding knowing they’ll earn more when people go back to Chrome-based browsers)
There’s an easy fix for this. 🔥🦊
Simple solution. Don’t use Chrome.
This headline is premature. They haven’t pulled the plug yet. I still have Chrome installed, fully updated, and all the extensions are still there.
and also ublock origin lite is still in the app store and works fine.
uBlock Origin Lite is a Manifest v3 compatible extension and was intended to be the successor of uBlock Origin on Chromium based browsers.
However, it is not at feature parity(and will likely never be due to restrictions in Manifest v3). One restriction is no element picking on websites and then adding them to custom filters.
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.
“The browser built to be yours”
Hahaha sure thing Google
Stallman was right.
Used Chrome forever, switched to Firefox back when this stuff first started going down. No ragerts.
Meh. They had plenty of time to move to Firefox but they ignored all the warnings.
It’s not like they contracted some sort of terminal illness. Anyone can migrate whenever. It’s not hard.
I believe that some organizations restrict what applications can be installed on work computers, so that might not necessarily be true, at least for work machines.
One more vector of malware for these corporate systems. Sucks for them I suppose.
My organization has blocked all browsers other than Edge and Chrome - and has also blocked all plugins except for UBlock. For security reasons, of course.
Everyone knows seeing a bunch of uncontrolled JavaScript-powrered ads from who knows what server is good for security.
For all the firefox fans out there it might be good to note there have consistently been more Safari users than Firefox users since 2014. Hell Safari has been the number two browser by market share since 2015.
Browsers have to get very SHITTY or a new browser has to have a killer app to unseat a dominate one.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-202408
I don’t think safari is even remotely comparable given that it’s a default browser on macs.
Also, I’m pretty sure it’s not possible to install any other browser on iPhones unless you get root.
Edit: It looks like you can with iOS 15.0
Those are all just skins on safari. Until like 6 months ago you couldn’t install any web browser with a renderer other than safari. And that’s only in the EU.
And I mean, there’s still time now. Switching browsers isn’t that bad. Export+import some bookmarks and adjust some settings, good to go.
I think FF has been a good option for a while. But the second best time is now. I can totally get it if people didn’t want to switch until they had more of a concrete problem.
FF still hasn’t brought back a tab group API for extensions or native tab groups. Extensions can only do so much given what they have to work with. I still use FF on the side, but it simply isn’t a practical as a primary browser for me currently.
But for casual users, many probably have never even touched their browser settings.
Tab groups are coming but in the mean time containers work well enough for me with the added benefit that they’ll also block tracking from the sites that are within them.
I imagine most of us here already don’t use Google Chrome, but I’ll be spending some time proselytizing on the behalf of Mozilla for Firefox with the folks I run across.
Firefox.
This is the way.
This is the way.
This is the way.
