this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 300 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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??!!

XKCD Comic depicting a conversation between someone who send an essay in dot doc, MS Word format, and another trying to convince them to use open source alternatives.  The first person is abusively unconvinced, doesn't care about ensuring we have good software infrastructure and dismisses the open source advocate as smug and "probably autistic".  In the final pane, the first person runs to the open-source-advocate second person panicking about facebook taking over everyone's social lives and doing evil things with it, in response to which the second person simply plays their "world's tiniest open source violin" as a clear "i told you so gesture"

[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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
[–] [email protected] 186 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (30 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 88 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 months ago

"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.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 months ago (2 children)

The uBlock Origin chrome extension ~~has~~ had 34 million users. Chrome has 3.45 billion users.

Even if every uBlock user switched, it’s less than 1% of chrome users.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I’ve been on Firefox since manifest v3 was announced. Firefox has its own shortcomings but no dealbreakers.

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[–] [email protected] 138 points 3 months ago (14 children)

Meh. They had plenty of time to move to Firefox but they ignored all the warnings.

[–] [email protected] 99 points 3 months ago (3 children)

It’s not like they contracted some sort of terminal illness. Anyone can migrate whenever. It’s not hard.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 129 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"The browser built to be yours"

Hahaha sure thing Google

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[–] [email protected] 105 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 91 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I'm in the process of switching to firefox on all my devices.

I've had enough of Google pushing features like this.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 3 months ago

Having ublock on mobile is such a breath of fresh air. I wish I had made the transition sooner. I knew this was coming and completed my transition a few weeks back so I could abandon Chrome on my own time table and not on Google's. Other than a little headache trying to find extension replacements for pc, I'm LOVING it.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"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

[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 months ago (1 children)

as long as data caps exist anywhere on the planet all internet advertisement is theft.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 3 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 66 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I miss the "dont be evil" version of google. Its like, large amounts of money ruin everything

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] idefix 65 points 3 months ago (7 children)

There's only 34 million uBlock Origin users on Chrome? So, billions are using Chrome without any ad-blockers? That's crazy and unsafe

[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Most users are fucking idiots and will continue to raw-dog the internet while visiting the most malicious sites possible.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I feel like you've worked helpdesk at some point.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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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[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Advertising company makes it harder to block ads on their browser, news at 11.

Or did anyone forget that they made an explicit effort to block another ad blocking extension a while back, including blocking it from the Chrome store, blocking you from installing it manually and even blocking at least some versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode?

Ad nauseam, because it also simulated ad clicks and thus ruined their metrics.

EDIT: Fucking phone autocorrect. "as clocks" -> "ad clicks".

[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 months ago (27 children)

At this point I am seriously wondering why people would like to use Chrome over Firefox for instance.

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[–] ayyy 46 points 3 months ago (29 children)
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[–] [email protected] 45 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Used Chrome forever, switched to Firefox back when this stuff first started going down. No ragerts.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Simple solution. Don't use Chrome.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 months ago (10 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 months ago (5 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 months ago

If they can pay 5-8 milion the CEO while laying off employees, they do not need donations.

[–] fernlike3923 25 points 3 months ago (18 children)

Mozilla still does pretty good without any donations, and your donations will most definitely not be spent on Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (7 children)

This is what drives me mad about Mozilla. Let me donate to Firefox! I don’t want to donate to another hairbrained idea to “diversify your revenue streams” - I want to donate to Firefox.

As I’ve said many times before, Firefox would be better off as an opencollective-driven, smaller (50-ish) team, with code on Codeberg, than driven by a 600 strong org who needs to compete with SF salaries and fancy offices. They have become Google by another name and it ain’t healthy.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 months ago (8 children)

Huh... I couldn't tell with all the Firefox I use.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It's like the reporter went out of his way to not mention ff at the end of the article:

uBlock Origin will continue to work as usual across other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Opera, and more.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

I pulled the plug on allowing chrome user agents on my domain.

Granted its tiny but I'm making people switch.

This is the juncture.

P.s. yes I know the cavaets all my services work fine tyvm.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago (6 children)

With Google providing 80% of Mozilla's finding, I think we can all see whats going to happen next.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (3 children)

How long until YouTube blocks Firefox?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago

There's an easy fix for this. 🔥🦊

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