shrugs in Firefox
Careful, there are some edgy people out there who don’t want to use more than one browser because Firefox doesn’t work with their cameras /s
Meanwhile, I’ll still be using Firefox too
Who needs to give their browser access to their camera?
May be bad phrasing, but Firefox doesn’t support h.265 so there’s limitations with streaming video on some camera platforms and other sites.
TIL Firefox doesn’t support HEVC. Hadn’t really noticed that before, I guess it’s why some Jellyfin streams started transcoding for me.
It is supported in the nightly build and full support is in the works currently.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/hevc-support/idc-p/63424/highlight/true#M36557
Neither does it support HDR content
I guess it’s why some Jellyfin streams started transcoding for me.
You’re better off using the Jellyfin Media Player standalone application anyway.
People who have to use their browser for telehealth and virtual teller banking access.
Sadly these are also things that require better security.
Yup. Firefox doesn’t work for me unfortunately, so I have to maintain Chrome on at least one device for these things
I use Firefox for some teleconferencing, but my therapist’s software only works on chrome
Does it have to be Chrome, or just e.g. Chromium is fine?
That’s a good question. I don’t know that I can fully uninstall Chrome from my Tablet, only disable. Since I use it maybe a handful of times a month it isn’t a big deal to just use it for the session. I don’t feel the need to have another browser right now, but I appreciate you bringing that up
Hey, member when you always had to have IE for one of “those” sites and it was basically just an awful browser everyone was forced to have like as a legal requirement or something?
Heh. IE. Then when you’d use it to download firefox it’d say “Nooooo! Wait! I’m teh Best Browser!!” Hahahahah
IE. Ded.
People who use Webex, zoom, etc for one use in try browser and don’t normally use those links. Happens at work when an outside vendor doesn’t use what we do.
I use MS teams for meetings every day at work, in Firefox, in Linux. It’s nice that even the camera works when I need it to.
I do this with Discord and Zoom as an alternative to installing their actual apps. 99% of the functionality is there anyway, and the 1% is stuff I don’t want anyway
It’s so frustratingly annoying. I primarily use Firefox, but switch to Chrome for specific Google services on my mobile. Once in a while, the search suggests I take a photo? Why?
Y’all got any more of that data?
/Google
deleted by creator
Why not LibreWolf? It’s Firefox without Mozilla’s BS.
Haven’t heard of it before now
You say that like they didn’t just remove several other adblock extensions themselves
From what I’ve heard, they only “removed” uBlock Origin Lite. Normal uBO is still up.
Actually, they flagged UBO Lite and the dev removed it himself in a fit of pique.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2474353/popular-ad-blocker-removed-from-firefox-extension-store.html
and they only flagged it because it violated privacy rules
No. It didn’t. That’s why he was upset. Mozilla even admit this. Did you read the article or what?
“Mozilla later admitted in an email that they had made a mistake regarding the extension, but Hill has ultimately decided to cease development of the uBlock Origin Lite add-on for Firefox.”
No they didn’t.
They’re still there. Ublock origin is the god-tier adblock, and it’s still there. It’s even a Recommended by Mozilla extension.
I know people on Lemmy often, for some reason, hate Mozilla more than Google or Microsoft, but Mozilla very much still caters to people who want to block ads, despite the disinformation on Lemmy.
I think people don’t hate Mozilla, they want them to do better as there are not many options left if you care about privacy. It’d just be nice to not have to pick the lesser evil for once.
And they are doing better. Making ads private is a very good thing. They’re currently a privacy nightmare.
They are not making ads private, they are adding another tracking vector. This will not get rid of the other ones already there.
No they weren’t. Clearly you don’t know how this system works.
It is impossible to track anybody using this.
You are getting angry at Mozilla for making something that enables privacy, then getting angry at them again because they aren’t dictators of the web who can control everybody’s and networks.
PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.
So, let’s say I trust in everything they are saying, which is the absolute best case scenario, then they have done nothing for privacy, because the whole premise that ad networks only care about ex-post measuring the effectiveness of their ads is false. They could have done that long before.
They want to know who you are and what you do so they can sort you in categories and show you specific ads based on those. That’s the service ad networks sell to advertisers. So, tracking as usual will continue.
I don’t think Lemmy users hate Firefox. I feel like alot of it is either people who legitimately have whatever needs they have, fulfilled by chrome more than firefox, or…it’s fucking astroturfers/fanboys.
Edit Addendum: Also, if anything, Lemmy users fucking love Firefox.
I don’t mean all Lemmy users. I mean a surprisingly large amount that non-stop hate on Mozilla and Firefox.
I’ve even seen two users that hate Mozilla/Firefox so much that they wrote about it in their account bio, which I find crazy.
Mozilla have made a series of unpopular choices, especially their enabling of telemetry for advertisers that does nothing to benefit users.
It is no surprise some people are vocally unhappy.
Private ads that make user tracking impossible absolutely benefits users, and the ad industry would be a lot less of a cancerous cesspit if it were the norm.
It’s certainly been unpopular, but that’s more because most people on Lemmy don’t read past ragebait headlines and assume the worst.
There is no reason to trust Mozilla more with your data than anybody else.
It’s just another source of telemetry for advertisers and won’t stop any of the existing methods of tracking.
The one they removed isn’t relevant until Firefox also removes manifest V2 which they have no plans for.
Firefox has a different manifest v3 that still retains webrequest functionality, so even when they do switch over it’ll be fine.
Except they didn’t… If you read more than headlines
shrugs in books
They have no idea how stubborn I am.
We’ve known this was coming for a while now . . . but I suppose not everyone reads tech news.
one might say that this piece of news is the… canary… in the coal mine?
I mean… Even if everyone knows it’s coming, you still need to have notice when it actually happens right?
What could go wrong when you let an ad company dictate the browser standards/rules.
I know we have Firefox and some forks like librewolf, but percentage wise it feels like a lost battle ( even if I am on Firefox ).
If only people switched en masse to Firefox for the ad blocker. Wouldn’t that be something… One big collective FU to Google.
Oh well. One can dream I guess.
There comes a point where one realizes that those around you cannot be relied upon to leverage solutions. Psychopaths get ahead because they’re willing to play dirty. So much of the world can be summed up as large swaths of population being induced to behave or think certain ways by psychopathic manipulators.
The average Joe or Jane have no idea about ad blocking possibilities. They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.
I have even shown people the difference between their browsing experience and mine, and still they can’t be arsed to install an ad-blocker.
But then again, they use tiktok and Instagram and all the other brain-numbing shit out there.
The average Joe or Jane have no idea about ad blocking possibilities. They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.
Actually about a third of all users have an adblocker installed. Adblocking has been mainstream for a while, no doubt why Google finally stopped pretending they were OK with it.
My wife didn’t even notice when I turned on the pi-hole. She also told me she thinks there’s a virus on her phone.
I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in the intelligence of a woman who would marry a Lemmy user.
Tbf, I wasn’t a leemy user when we met. But I agree. She has terrible taste in men.
I used to recommend uBlock as a no-brainer, now folks really need to change towards a better browser.
Or get network wide blocking. Doesn’t prevent everything but it does prevent most ads. Makes the internet tolerable at least.
nah, lets get them switched away from chromium based spy machines.
Not everyone can. Work machines for instance.
sadly, agreed. mindshare leads to adoption, tho - so putting Firefox in front of more faces is always a positive. after all, its how google dominates.
Can’t install extensions on a work machine but you can add a network wide blocker?
Possibly, if you work from home
Wouldn’t a company VPN bypass all that even though you are using your own internet connection to connect to the outside world?
Maybe, I guess I don’t know enough to answer that. I do know that being on a company VPN isn’t always a requirement, though.
Either way, I’m not trying to argue for one approach to ad blocking over another as a one-size-fits-all solution, I just wanted to point out that it’s possible to have more control over the network than the computer in some cases.
Depends on how lax the IT department is when it comes to random executables. I was able to move the firefox installer to the appdata root, and run a non-admin install to my user profile.
Something like NextDNS as a no-brainer? It works but hits the limit of the free tier if people use it beyond their phone.
ControlD then.
PiHole and a TailScale exit node so you can use it for DNS whether or not you’re on your home network.
Or a variation of this is TailScale configured to use NextDNS and a TS exit node. That’s for anyone who doesn’t want to maintain a PiHole. I’ve done both. Personal choice.
I recommended pihole to my senior webdeveloper. She didn’t know about it and was blown away by the concept. She installed it immediately and is now living happily ad free.
Pihole is good for a private network, but you can forget it in a work setting, especially corporate networks.
And what? If someone can live with ads, they can stay. Otherwise anyone can install Firefox. I was all-in Google since the beginning of Gmail. And switching to Firefox was completely painless. Everything works the same, times of website incompatibility are long gone.
Because Google is trying to turn the internet into a walled garden where only people with Chrome can visit the majority of websites.
I’ve been been a full time Firefox user for three years now. Haven’t experience a single problem like that. Haven’t really experienced any problem at all to be honest
Unfortunately that has not been the case for me. Some sites for buying concert tickets don’t seem to like Firefox.
I’ve had problems with several Microsoft sites we use internally for work ever since Edge went to Chrome.
It’s not Firefox’s fault. Mozilla is abiding by web standards.
If you find any websites that don’t work with firefox, you should report them to Mozilla. Firefox has a list of known bad websites, and has fixes for them, usually just a user agent override.
Your past experiences with Firefox are irrelevant because we’re talking about the future.
I know. My experience with Chrome used to be good too. And we all know what’s up now.
If Firefox fucks up, I’m fine with abandoning ship and moving on to the next thing. I’m not sure what that would be, but I’m sure I’ll figure that out once we get there.
That’s the problem. Google is working so that there’s not going to be a next thing.
That is concerning, but Internet Explorer used to be the only option too. Of course things are different now, but I have faith (for lack of anything else).
That was for a different reason, though. That was Microsoft forcing you to use their software on something you owned. A website can say, “you have to use chrome to access our site,” and that’s not antitrust behavior on the part of Google.
Thats the thing.
There is basically no alternative. Firefox exists on the mercy of google which is its biggest donor.
There are very few attempts at a truly open source browser and neither can tackle the biggest problem, which is google pushing websites to adopt their standards, weaponizing ad income to guarantee compliance.
Currently more then 80% of internet users have a chromium browser while websites creation for many entities is often outsourced out of lack of own IT knowledge. When firefox dies there will be no economic insensitive to build sites accessible by anything but chromium.
Low key i wish this fires back into anarchy. I hate the corporate web and the only sites i like to see are those free of economic insensitive and all in on an ethical free digital world.
Incentive
try changing your user-agent to mock chrome in Firefox while you visit YouTube.
you should see a drastic difference in UX.
I tried YouTube in Chrome on desktop (for about 2 minutes) and I didn’t notice any difference. I’ll just keep using NewPipe on my phone though.
it takes a whole 10 extra seconds for the interface to be usable for me in Firefox. but not when I spoof the user-agent as chrome.
at least that’s how it was about 4 months ago.
Do you use YouTube?
NewPipe exclusively. YouTube has been unusable long before I fully moved back to FireFox.
Maybe part of the monopoly ruling will have chrome taken away from them.
What if websites decide that chrome users earn much more ad revenue and start forcing users to switch with those “This website only supports Chrome” error messages? What if this practice gets popular? I’m sure there are ways to get around it, but the average users who bothered switching to Firefox at all, will just conclude that anything except chrome has a bad browsing experience.
Can’t you have your Firefox browser just report itself as chrome?
You certainly can. They don’t know what you’re doing.
Then apple would whip out their giant throbbing cock and smack them with it because they want people using safari.
Visit about:compat. Sites already do that. Firefox can deal.
i never understood how those messages work? like how would using firefox ruin your website? or how they even detect firefox in the first place lmfao
times of website incompatibility are long gone
I wish I could agree with that. Hell, I have to use Chrome to download my phone bill from Virgin, and a couple of others don’t work.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming FF. It’s these lazy web developers that only target Chrome. I’m sure Safari users get the same shit experience.
times of website incompatibility are long gone.
cries in dev
I’ve cried also in dev a lot in the past, but mostly don’t cry so much anymore
I really wish Firefox implemented easily switchable browser profiles. I am use Firefox mainly but for work I’ll still use edge so I can use this feature.
I don’t know exactly what part of a separate profile you are after, so this may not be a 100% substitute, but I found container tabs in Firefox to work quite well (with some extensions to improve UX). It’s still the same profile though, so passwords and history are shared.
firefox.exe -P -no-remote
Yep so happy with Firefox having switched back a couple years ago.
some people dont want firefox bcs its kinda slower then chromium based tbh but it aint bad am not saying firefox is bad
They’re not that different any longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883
Oh
Didn’t see this coming. Thanks for reporting it 😁
It did its job then. Gave warning.
🐥⛏️
“I’ve got the black lung papa.” cough
-Chrome Canary
Ad Lung
coughs up product placements
also coughs up scams and malware
Hopefully wikipedia recognizes this as the official Canary in the Chrome mine. I was first impressed with chrome book because of seeing them used for education, getting my own laptop during school would’ve been mindblowing to kid me. I was unimpressed with the strangulation process of the OS but again shocked when they added a linux boot mode. There needs to be better alternatives by now, I would be ok with an OS developed by the department of education in conjunction with higher educational institutions. Could have a decent non-profit approach to a browser and ad blockers could legitimately be built in as a “protect the children” aim of approach.
I take it you’ve never been involved in such an endeavor? What you propose would take a decade a minimum due to the sheer number of nested advisory committees that would be required for those groups to interface. Better a non-profit group begins the work and then solicits these group’s input at the design stage.
I think super-apps are the way to go, only way to prevent one company from monopolizing click-stream data for advertising.
some apps already do this and their users don’t suffer from the same issue (granted, they have different issues)
I suspect this will soon be followed by a renewed effort by google to kill firefox compatability.
Have you looked at the market share of Firefox lately? Why even waste time on that?
Because this is likely to drive a lot of people to try switching. And they’re the type of people who try to convince other people to switch, too. Techies, etc.
When forced with trying to keep family safe from abusive and/or manipulative ads, this is a pretty hot topic. Plenty of people tell their family what browser to use and even set it up for them with ad blockers, etc.
I’ve recently had some experiences that tell me my parents are at a vulnerable age and can’t fully protect themselves, so it’s pretty important to have control of this.
A slight misunderstanding, perhaps. I meant why should Google try, as right now Firefox is no threat to them.
They’ve been quietly preventing Firefox from becoming a threat for a long time. There are constant little things that just mysteriously don’t work as well on Firefox, for no reason. People have changed the user agent and found that it works just like on Chrome with Chrome’s agent. Youtube was doing it for a while, and reviews on the search are another instance. I was at the Dentist’s and they were asking for a Google review, but I couldn’t find the spot to leave it. I switched to Chrome and it was magically right where it was supposed to be.
So they already think Firefox could be a threat, and preventing ad-block is going to make it a bigger threat.
How many times has this been announced already?
Yes
Think of it as an iceberg & Chrome users as a boat.
Assuming no changes, this is landing in Chrome Canary now, so we’re watching the Chrome Canary boat hit the iceberg. The Chrome Beta boat is going to hit in a few weeks. Finally the Chrome Stable boat is scheduled to hit in mid November.
Now Google may choose to hold back actually enabling this flag immediately. It wouldn’t be the first delay. But likely in mid November is when all the posts will start to appear of people asking where their ad blocker went.
(Although I’m guessing it actually is delayed until after the holidays and in the new year, but that’s just wild speculation.)
Looks like time to find a new browser!
May I interest you in browsers based on FireFox?
why not Firefox itself?
Someone who repackages/patches free software has different incentives than upstream. So generally speaking, derivative browsers are more privacy friendly, have better features, etc.
That’s not to say that upstream isn’t important. It absolutely is! It’s just that derivatives are generally better.
I’ve looked at one or two variants but how do I trust them? They are also forked from some previous version so presumably somewhat out of date? And then also it’s not clear what they are doing what firefox isn’t.
Trust is a tough problem when you go deep enough down the IT security rabbit hole. I personally trust software more when it has a public github you can look at and see exactly whats being worked on or added to code base. Generally forks of browsers like Firefox or Chromium like to stay up to date and so are updated within a few days of the new browser release if not shorter. There are some older browsers like palemoon that do their own thing independent of current firefox releases but in general most forks you would want to use are regularly updated and fast.
I like Librewolf. Their website is pretty clear about the differences in goals. Firefox by default has a lot of its security features disabled so to not break website compatability. Not just in regular settings either but the real nitty gritty stuff in the about:config section. Firefox also has sponsorship stuff activated by default so mozilla makes some money. Librewolf has more of these security features enabled and rips the sponsorship stuff out. It also comes preinstalled with UBO.
You can go even further beyond with advanced security profiles like arkenfox’s user.js. Remember though theres a trade off you are making between security and convinence. The more locked down your browser the more things are gonna break or more personal inconvinence youll have to deal with. Cookies that last multiple sessions suck for security but damn logging in over and over and over gets annoying. So I’ve been there, i’ve done that. The pain in the ass that comes from a super locked down browser wasn’t worth it for my threat model.
Oh I didn’t even mean trust as in maliciousness, and not even as in “do they know their shit” but do they have the time and money to do things right? And also do I have time to read and learn what all this is supposed to mean?
And the inconvenience with VPNs alone… What I really want is a kind of universal addon or browser project that just “cleans up most websites”. So many websites have bad behavior now and anti-features. I just want to read an article not get a slide in or blinky thing. Internet is becoming unusable even before the dead internet thing. Ironically for such a “website cleanup” you’d probably want advanced AI so Mozilla is probably on the right track.
I see what you mean. The best defense against website crap at the moment is Ublock Origin addon which is why chrome killing it was such a big deal for people. A tool I really like to use when browsing online articles to cut out crap is newswaffle. It gets all the text of the article while cutting out everything else. Its open source and I have had email conversations with the dude who made it hes a great guy. I recommend you check it out if that sounds like something you want in your life.
Are Opera and it’s derivatives affected by this?
Yes. There’s only 3 major browsers. Chromium (Chrome), Firefox, WebKit (Safari). Nearly every other webbrowser is a fork of one of these, most are forks of Chromium, including Opera. As such, most webbrowsers will be affected by the change.
Chrome browser = chromium plus Google
Samsung browser = chromium plus garbage
Brave browser = chromium plus crypto and homophobia
Should probably add this info about Mozilla funding almost exclusively from Google but at least they haven’t disabled mv2 extensions yet. Even though they put in a fucking opt-out ad telemetry setting in recent releases.
I don’t think it should’ve been opt-out, but Mozilla’s ad metrics development is very much the direction ads on the web should go in. It is impossible to determine who you are from the data. They’ve truly done a good job on creating an ad model that’s privacy friendly, and would be a material improvement to the web.
It’s a way to still have ad revenue funding the content we all consume, while also still maintaining privacy. It’s a good thing. It’s just the opt-out aspect for existing installs that’s bad.
That said, I’m personally a proponent of just using adblock lol
I also use adblocking at multiple levels so it wasn’t a huge thing for me (been blocking Pocket and other bullshit for years at the dns and network levels) but I still feel like Mozilla witnessed Google going for broke with killing mv2 and inline ads on YouTube and decided wellll our existing users probably wouldn’t notice or care if we slipped in an opt-out fuckery… But we did. Immediately.
For any browser trying to sell itself as “the only privacy browser on the market” this was a dumb fucking move by any metric. Like why not just openly admit we’re going with the Brave browser model?
Is Chrome’s ad telemetry opt-in?
No it’s not. But if we’re hoping Firefox will be better in some way we’d expect more from them. Wouldn’t we?
Brave browser = chromium plus crypto and homophobia
the crypto stuff can be opt out tho
And yet, the homophobia can’t be
i didnt mention the homophobia bcs it was unrelated to what i was saying
Good, hopefully I can convince my friends to switch over
What’s duck duck go’s browser?
DuckDuckGo’s webbrowser is somewhat unique, in the sense that it isn’t its own browser at all. It’s a “WebView”, using the OS built-in webbrowser with a coat of paint.
This means it’s Blink/Chromium on Android and Windows, and WebKit on iOS and macOS.
depends on the OS!
DuckDuckGo uses the default rendering engine of whatever OS you use it on, so webkit (also used by safari) on macOS and iOS and blink (also used by edge and chrome) on windows and android
even if it uses the same rendering engine on some platforms, it’s not based on chromium, so it’s not a chromium browser
Chromium.
Why would you use a Chinese browser?
what does the browser being Chinese have to do with anything?
You really don’t see a problem installing software from an authoritarian regime that spies on basically everyone and everything and has 0 privacy protection?
the chinese government isn’t behind every software that’s made in china lol
like yea, opera is spyware, but so are chrome, safari and edge, and none of these are made in china
If you think the Chinese regime isn’t using Opera as a potential attack vector then that’s just naive. Browsers are very critical pieces of software infrastructure.
opera sure, but at that point, any proprietary software can be used as an attack vector by the government of the country the software is made in, that’s not specific to china
i don’t see why chrome or safari should be considered more trustworthy than opera just because they aren’t made in china
You really don’t see the difference between a flawed democracy with laws and regulations and an authoritarian regime? Tankie talk much?
Are you talking about America lol
Shit Tankies say.
I don’t?
My friends do though sadly
Not this with built-in adblockers, despite someone’s wishes.
Their adblockers suck though, especially on youtube
imagine opera and opera gx 💀
Been using Firefox for quite a time now! What are the other alternatives?
Ladybird is working really hard to become good enough for daily drive. Will they succeed? Idk. How long will it take? Idk.
Is that Firefox alternative?
Can we get a fork orba dedicated browser that stays on manifest v2? Even Firefoxs lack of plans is disconcerting. I want expmicit plans to not play along
Maybe we’re thinking about this wrong. Maybe we should all start running plugins that just load whatever ads that show up in the background hundreds of times without showing them to us. Every viewer is thousands upon thousands of impressions and click through rates become absolutely miserable. We can make the ads worthless or maybe even make them cost a significant amount of money to host.
AdNauseam does this to a lesser degree. I’m not sure how effective it is.
It’s mildly effective in the sense that it will decimate click-through rates, but if enough people did it, they would start filtering by IP, and you’d need to change how many ads it clicks on so it looks more human.
It also still gives advertisers your data, since it still has to load the ads on your system to click them, so it’s not as privacy-preserving as a full-on adblocker that outright blocks every advertisement and tracker related network request in the first place.
