cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/20260243
Google Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled
Google Chrome is now encouraging uBlock Origin users who have updated to the latest version to switch to other ad blockers before Manifest v2 extensions are disabled.
I think people come down a lot harder on Firefox than they should. It’s a great browser, and they do a lot for the freedom of the community and as an open source ambassador.
I feel like people generally feel that, given their prominence, they could do a lot more. This is certainly true. Their weird corporate structure, their half-baked experiments like Pocket or VPN, their Google ad money, these are all valid issues.
But do you know what else is supported by Google ad money? Chromium and every browser built on it. Do you know what has a far more corporate culture? Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc. Do you know who else had weird little money making experiments? Every other browser (Brave’s Basic Attention Tokens, DDG’s Privacy Pro, etc.).
Firefox makes a bigger target because of their relative popularity and long history.
It has always felt so goofy to see people say “x” based Chromium browser is better than Firefox because Firefox takes Google’s money but “x” based Chromium browser doesn’t. Like… It just completely ignores the investment Google puts in Chromium lol. Google’s money into Firefox equals bad, but Google’s money into Chromium, oh, that’s actually not bad because we just cover our eyes and ears and go “LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” or something???
All that to say, I’m glad to see someone else explicitly share this opinion.
Isn’t the only reason firefox gets google ad money is because google is afraid they would slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit? Firefox getting money from google doesn’t seem like a valid criticism.
When Chrome came out it was heavily promoted by everyone I knew (apart from my best friend) I tried it, didn’t like the UI (still don’t) and didn’t see the point of it.
People talked abour how fast it was, and I felt that Firefox was fast enough, and Firefox just worked as I wanted it to, why change?
I kept stedfast with Firefox, apart from when the horrible Australis UI was launched, then I switched to a fork called Pale Moon, which I used for several years untill the current UI was launched.
it actually WAS really good when it first came out and for a few years, it was also back during the days where google still kind of follows the “don’t be evil” principle.
Yup, I used it for a year or two, then I found Opera, which was about as fast and also had an independent rendering engine. Around that time, the independence of the rendering engine really mattered to me, so when Opera switched to a Chromium base, I switched back to Firefox. Firefox has since caught up in perf and is the best non-Chromium browser for me (well, I use Mull on Android because FF isn’t on F-Droid and has some defaults I prefer to Fennec).
Chrome was so lightweight and fast when it was launched. And it had a blazing fast Javascript engine. No other engine came close to it.
It was a pretty awesome browser back then during the “do no evil” era of Google.
Sure, I get what you are saying, but I never had an issue with Firefox and Javascript.
Honestly it’s more that Lemmy as a whole is just a big group of curmudgeons. Most discussions on here veer strongly negative, not limited to Firefox.
That was after the reddit migration. Lemmy was much better before the reddit doom-and-gloom gang made themselves home.
I don’t see what’s relevant about your argument. Whether they came from Reddit is irrelevant, they’re here now and this is how they behave.
I’ve best heard it described as: people love Firefox to death.
People, use whatever you like, but if you actively discourage everyone to stop using it, we might lose it - and with it, Librewolf, Palemoon, Tor Browser, and everything that’s not Chrome or Safari.
Not true.
Navigator died a horrible death, and Phoenix (later Firefox), being a fork of it, survived just fine.
Building a browser was a hugely different (and waaaay smaller) job back then.
But let me know when Servo or Ladybird are viable. Until then, don’t burn any bridges.
I want there to be a competitive market so that Firefox gets better. Without good competition it will continue to rot.
I don’t understand the premise of this statement. Do you think Firefox doesn’t have competition in the browser space?
It only has Chromium which somehow is worse than Firefox. We need something that supports all the same features as Firefox but isn’t a fork
It doesn’t have competition in terms of a “private browser”. As far as I can see there is only Brave, and Ungoogled Chromium which is soon to be an unviable option because of the switch to Manifest V3 for Chromium.
There are of course browsers like Mullvad Browser, GNU Icecat and Librewolf etc. but they are all based on Firefox, so I wouldn’t really count them.
That’s exactly what happens if we lose Firefox - Chrome (and those based on it) now have all the power to disable all ad blocking - enabling Google’s horrific privacy-less future
There’s still WebKit, which doesn’t suck anymore! (At least from my end-user standpoint)
At least for mobile—I cannot attest to the desktop version.
I suppose anything on the iPhone cuz it’s all WebKit under the hood hahahah
It’s a good opportunity for any Chrome users in the crowd to switch to Librewolf. It may be a small project but it’s been around for a while and they haven’t made any mistakes that I’ve heard about. Google has its various off-brand browsers using the engine, why shouldn’t Mozilla get some? It comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled, and has none of the telemetry and ads of Firefox.
One thing to note about using forks is that they have no chance of being on corporate software whitelists, while firefox does. For that reason, adding to firefox numbers is potentially important. I’ve already seen companies wanting to only allow chrome/edge/safari (even while they officially support firefox …)
I don’t care about telemetry that reports what features I use and sends crashes, only actual marketing telemetry. Is Fennec a good choice for me? Stuff like Pocket is annoying but you can sort of disable it in about:config. Basically, I hate stuff like Pocket but don’t mind stuff like syncing or non-ad based telemetry.
Yeah IMO there is nothing in vanilla Firefox to complain about that you can’t disable easily from the settings. You only need librewolf or the arkenfox user.js if you’re a privacy nut.
I also recommend iceraven (Note link uses github) which adds pc extensions to mobile and removes telemetry and more
Have they implemented the update option yet, or does it still rely on unofficial methods for updating?
They provide official deb and rpm builds for linux, which get updated in the usual ways. I don’t know about windows but the website says:
you can choose to install the LibreWolf WinUpdater, which is included in the installer.
Firefox stands as the lesser of two evils.
The problem is that for the past 8 months, Mozilla has been accelerating making Firefox more evil, and if it continues at this trajectory, it might catch up to Google.
I’m not really sure what you mean. Firefox is pretty good, and I honestly think the privacy-friendly ads thing is a good initiative. If you’re going to block ads anyway, it won’t impact you, and if you won’t block ads, having them be more privacy-friendly is a good thing. As long as Mozilla doesn’t sell my browsing data (and there’s no indication they are or will), I’m all for harm-reducing features/settings.
As long as Mozilla doesn’t sell my browsing data (and there’s no indication they are or will)…
Mozilla thinks so poorly of PPA data collection that they didn’t tell their users, and then basically said their users were too stupid to be told. Consider, they hid this from their user base then Google hid “privacy sandbox” from theirs.
If you don’t consider this an indication of Mozilla’s bad will, and I’m not sure why you would ignore it, Mozilla FakeSpot already sells private data to ad companies. Directly.
…I’m all for harm-reducing features/settings.
Which this objectively is not. In what universe are advertisers going to use this instead of, not in addition to, other telemetry? Especially because this is a proprietary technique that works on 3% or less of browsers, whereas advertisers that cared about privacy could have just used different URLs in their ads to do their own private telemetry.
At best, this introduces data funneling through Mozilla corporate servers for no functional purpose.
They didn’t really hide it, they just didn’t advertise it. It was in the release notes, hence why the media picked up on it. And on release, there was a checkbox in the normal settings to opt-out, so it’s honestly not that bad.
FakeSpot
That’s an opt-in extension, it’s not part of the core browser. I honestly don’t know much about it, and their privacy policy isn’t appealing, so I won’t use it. If it becomes part of Firefox by default, I’ll disable it.
In what universe are advertisers going to use this instead of, not in addition to, other telemetry?
What telemetry is this providing? AFAIK, Mozilla isn’t providing any kind of personalized info, it’s merely aggregated data.
And the reason they’d pick this is to get access to privacy-minded people who would otherwise block their ads, but may choose to exempt these ads. Mozilla has some anti-tracking features, and there’s a significant subset of Firefox users that block ads out of principle of avoiding tracking. If websites want to get some of that advertising revenue, they’ll comply. That benefits all Firefox users, because some sites may choose to use this method of targeted ads, which still provides the site with ad revenue without providing the advertisers with details on their customers.
That’s the idea here. It’s not going to happen on day 1, but having the capability means Mozilla can pilot it and see if websites are interested. And it’s possible Mozilla’s ads are more relevant because they have access to browsing history, not just whatever advertisers were able to figure out from their network of ads.
I don’t see any issues with Firefox?
I’ve been using FF for more years than I care to remember, and with the exception of a couple of sites that weren’t really that important, I’ve never had an issue. I certainly never had an issue running uBlock Origin and YouTube.
I flat out refuse to use anything even loosely based on Chromium on principal alone.
There’s a few irritating ones on Android at least.
On desktop it’s been solid since Quantum
Yeah same.
People on here love to go all doomposting on every little thing though, so for them stuff that they’ll never actively interact with is automatically horrible. But them, I bet those very people are the ones that do “proper privacy stuff” like blindly turning on hardening settings, and then in turn also complain that Firefox “keeps making FF use more memory and be slower and not load pages properly” when they have changed so many settings that they’d in turn make a compelling case for why most companies don’t allow so much fiddling with settings: It just leads to endless complaints.
