In this thread lots of uninformed people rationalizing why it's actually okay to use chromium.
In this thread lots of uninformed people misunderstanding how the open source Chromium project works (or the difference between Chrome and Chromium). Vivaldi is a Chromium-based browser who frequently disable the parts of Chromium they don't agree with.
This argument not to use anything Chromium is the same as if someone was fanatically opposed to using Linux Mint or Elementary OS because they're based on Ubuntu, and Canonical bad.
I love Firefox as much as the next person, and probably do a 75% Vivaldi 25% Firefox split, but let's not act like Google isn't bankrolling Mozilla, because they account for 85+% of Mozilla's revenue, and if Google does implement this Web DRM and if it is widely adopted, Mozilla either submits and enables it to make sure daddy Google stays happy, or they die.
Typically this thinking is mostly correct - e.g. Manifest v3 - but not in this case. If websites see enough users using chormium, via user agent or other fingerprinting, they'll be more willing to require WEI. And unlike Manifest v3 etc. this affects the whole web, not just users of one browser or the other.
In every case monopolies are bad. Including in tech.
Yeah these half informed zealots really think this is somehow a righteous fight against the man.
And you fail to understand how terrible monoculture software is for the freedom of the web.
Stop to spread misinformation.
they account for 85+% of Mozilla's revenue
So why is a company, one that has a clear incentive to reduce dependence on their competitor, funding something like Rust or Thunderbird?
Google used to give a lot more money to Mozilla, then they massively cut it which led to huge layoff affecting a lot of Firefox dev. Thankfully the new Firefox engine were just completed at that point. People like to complain about Mozilla pushing their VPN and Pocket, but they have to find another source of income to reduce their dependency to Google.
And spoiling Internet for the rest of us. None of us would have to go through this if more people used alternatives to chromium. No website would've accepted a 50% loss in visitors over accepting some companies special protocol
I mean, define "ok" in this context
Will chrome kill you? No
Will chrome physically hurt anyone else because you used it? No
Will the internet become less free if google is able to successfully force this? Yes
Does using chrome contribute to this? Yes, marginally
Would as many people as possible switching off of chrome and chromium and onto an alternative help? Yes
I find this whole thing an interesting argument, as someone who switched from chrome to firefox for extremely unrelated reasons months ago.
The same people say "boycotts don't work". The facepalming here is hard. Welcome to the ad riddled future that you helped make because "people can use what they like" (because it's being pushed by a huge corporate entity and they want you to use it so they can shove ads down your throat and you should laugh at people who would use anything different)
He ain't bright and Google will win this because most of men are just puppets unwilling to discern
I think Google will win this too, just like I think we're going to make the planet uninhabitable.
But I'm not going to roll coal, and I'm not going to use Chrome.
It absolutely is not. Just how it's also not ok to buy the overpriced RTX 40 cards because it ruins the market for all of us.
Exactly right. It requires seeing yourself as a part of a community vs. fulfilling our selfish interests at the expense of others.
Another example were the suburban PS5 buyers who bought from scalpers so "their kids" could have one, not giving any thought to the fact that they're contributing to a system that excludes the disadvantaged (or, even worse, knowing but not caring).
How does participating in the market ruin the market? It's literally a fucking market. If they're so overpriced then why are people buying the cards?
Why don't you flock to their competitor if they're pricing their items right and providing just the right value?
True fucking statement.
Most normal people don't even know adblockers exist. Guys, if you're going to convince people to switch away from Chrome, it won't be on the grounds of protecting against some API or ads.
Just use Librewolf.
>sensible defaults
>no telemetry
>no ads
>no suggested sites
>no crypto bullshit
>it just works
Duckduckgo found tracking attempts in mull for me. It hasn't in Firefox. I don't know what makes the difference though.
I'm not sure about Mull because I've never tried it. I use Fennec, which purportedly removes the problematic telemetry, but I'll be honest I've never actually verified this.
I do know some apps instead of removing trackers will replace them with dummy trackers, so I wonder if this might be what duckduckgo is detecting. I don't really know since I also avoid duckduckgo lol
I can't find librewolf in the play store. Is it PC only?
Edit: confirmed PC only, but I'll try it on my laptop
And thus the brave lammings set out to inform other lemmings, who are as tech savvy and know this is happening, that this is happening by posting memes. Hopefully the people, who would already be using firefox if they cared, switch to firefox so we can breach the 3% market share and that'll show Google, maker of Chrome and Firefox' main sponsor, people care enough to stop this madness! - I'm not against activism, but activism in an echochamber can turn into a circlejerk. Everyone stop stroking please... I'm here for the memes.
I'm not against activism
You just spent like 5 minutes reducing activism to "cIrClEjErK". Can we leave that stupid ass phrase on reddit for Christ's sake?
Just look at all the people in the comments patiently explaining what the problem is and what can be done. At what point would you consider this common knowledge that is propagated and confirmed because people on this plattform have reached consensus? It is good we had this discussion for a few days, plenty of awareness has been spread on lemmy. I'm proposing to stop posting about this topic as there is nothing new added except repetition that gains traction because we agree. Call that whatever you want.
You're not wrong that this discussion would be more productive in a privacy community or one dedicated to web browsers, but at least people see it here.
The problem I've seen isn't the discussion, but the fact that some users have become disproportionately hostile toward others, using childish insults to describe their ideas like "stupid" instead of contributing anything of value.
Firefox mobile app sucks on my phone. Not sure about the rest of you. Doesn't seem like there is a great alternative though.
Works just fine for me. Though it's been a while since I used anything else, I don't really have a frame of reference. That being said, I can install ublock origin and dark reader in firefox so I won't ever use anything else on my phone.
It does seem slower on my Samsung Galaxy S10e, but I just downloaded it and as you said, there really isn't a great alternative, so for now I'll use it. I'm sure that someone will develop something better at some point.
It is extremely slow compared to chrome. But I still prefer to use it, unless I am in a hurry.
Somehow it's shit on 60Hz displays. My 120Hz display phone, it's quite snappy. But on my older 60Hz display phone, it's unnaturally slow. If your phone isn't HRR, then maybe this is it? I don't quite know wtf is wrong with it
Kiwi browser is very good. You can also install desktop extensions and there are built in dark mode with AMOLED settings
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The only Chromium-based browser worth a damn is Vivaldi.
It's privacy-focused and made by the same people who originally made Opera before it got sold off and turned into malware.
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Ungoogled chromium (github) also worth taking a look at.
I use FF + very strict arkenfox 99% of the time, then if a site breaks I fall back to ungoogled chromium
It is for everyone. Be careful saying that, it has gotten me a ton of downvotes from the Firefox brigade
Don't be like them and generalize everything. Browsers are complex piece of software with many use cases. For mine for example Firefox works great without major issues. It might not be the case for you and that's fine!
There are plenty of people without issues using FireFox (like me). That being said, I'm sure there are those that have issues, so no downvotes from me. It is however better to not generalize like that.
It's literally not. I've seen multiple performance-impacting bugs that people mention, which is a bummer for those users... But none of them happen to me (Pixel 5, android 13) or plenty of other users. Insisting that FF is just hopelessly broken on Android is simply untrue.
It absolutely used to suck performance wise since I used an S4 for about 2 years. Since then, it's been great. As someone who used to dislike the performance, and now loves it, even over chromium stuff, I can safely suggest your oversimplified opinion is without any real basis. Sucks is such a vague word, and I guess it stops you having to detail and rationalise your personal opinion.
It's always been great on the desktop.
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The past week every post has just been browser icons.
FFS, go browse the bottom of the Potomac.
Edge also uses Chromium. If you want to avoid that then Firefox (including derivatives like LibreWolf, Waterfox or SeaMonkey) and Safari are pretty much your only options.
god damn it, i laughed WAY too hard at this. thanks for that, my shame knows no bounds.
Yes, for now. But also brave, which I'm told I should stop doing as well. You can see how well I listen to advice.
if you want a decent browser, there is firefox and basically all its forks and brave
you shouldnt use brave if
- you dont want to support google, as brave is based on chromium
- you dont want to support the people behind it, as there are some people who say theyre bad people but i got no clue if its true
i dont like chromium so ill stick with firefox (and mullvad browser), even though im still technically supporting google since most of mozillas revenue is from google (though i believe it is better since its not software made by google)
Honestly, it's mostly my comfort using chromium browsers (specifically chrome) for dev. I know the Firefox dev tools are way better than they used to be, but that's one more thing to sink time into when I could instead just get things done lol.
But, it's about that time.
Brave is basically degoogled chromium. Brave's patches block pretty much everything Chromium normally sends to Google. The only real exception is if you use extensions, it will check for updates from Google's web store.
It feels like last week we were defending proprietary software, ads, and tracking against those mean old FOSS zealots who actually care about privacy and freedom. Are you saying we care about those things now?
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I like Firefox for Android. It has an extension to play YouTube videos in the background, and you can block ads using uBlock Origin. It also blocks ads on the mobile Twitter website, so I can avoid using those two shitty apps thanks to FF for Android.
I don't know why it never occurred to me, while scrolling through ad-choked recipe blogs on my phone, that Firefox might have an ad block extension on mobile.
I just opened a post for Earl Grey cookies and I can actually read the damn recipe. You just changed my life. If I ever had kids I would name my firstborn after you.
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I recently switched and I'm really enjoying the reader mode. Also, I highly recommend revanced for YouTube. (´ω｀)
I switched from bromite to firefox(with exactly those addons you mentioned activated) years ago because it just adblocks perfectly while bromitr had issues multiple times that were fixed only through updating the app.
Bromite(android)
Cromite, a maintained fork of Bromite for Android:
Cromite is a Chromium fork based on Bromite with built-in support for ad blocking and an eye for privacy.
For browsers, you could use cromite like others suggest
I'm on many social media platforms like discord, telegram, whatsapp, lemmy, mastodon, matrix chat, etc
you said only arm64 and x86 apk I'm asking why you said that
https://lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz/comment/929729
are you using risc-v or something else?
snapdragon 801! wow how is it running with daily useage?
are you using lineageos or some other ROM?
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Bromite was abandoned a long time ago. Highly recommend getting off of it ASAP as there have been critical security patvhes that it hasn't gotten.
I guess because of the web environment integrity API proposed by Google. It enables your browser to tell the website it hasn't installed AdBlock or any other undesired add on. This is marketed as improving security, but will mainly be used to block browsers which block adds.
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And big plus for google: it can be extended very well. The site sees any extension installed, if the browser is headless. So only google can use bots in the future and can rake in all the ai training profits and sell all the searchengine ads.
Wei is a lot more than ad block control.
It's not just open to Google and it doesn't stop there either. Amazon could refuse to work if you're on a phone and don't have their app, or it could tell you to uninstall the Alibaba app before using
The possibilities are endless, and all benefits to be had are on the corporate side
I mean for some rare specific usages it could be usefull like ensuring bank webpages integrity or similar but mostly and the main usage would be for what you said.
It doesn't though - it basically ensures your device settings.
Is that integrity? Maybe - if the attester code is flawless and handles all situations perfectly, it could theoretically add to integrity, but that's not a realistic outcome
It's not designed for that. It can only block the site - it doesn't add to security, it takes away from it.
Say a bank designs their own attester - suddenly you have code that, if compromised, is always run in the most privileged execution context, in a way the user can't control right before you enter your bank password
Those cucks aren't going to stop using chrome, they like it and it's good for them, so it's a win win, they get their stupid people browser.
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Because Firefox honestly used to be shit, especially in the early Phoenix/Firebird days, but now it isn't anymore, and they just haven't bothered to check it out again. The "killing all the existing extensions" thing really didn't help matters either.
Firefox in the Phoenix/Firebird days was amazing compared to ie6, Opera, and SeaMonkey/Mozilla suite
I agree it was a heavy blow when they announced that, I didn't update for a few months, but man was it a nice fresh start, and I'm grateful that all the addons I had before have now made it over to the new system.
I admittedly didn't use FF before it was FF, I think I got into it around probably 2006 or so, but it's been great in my opinion ever since then.
I was really sour about the Mr Robot prank where they modified pages without informing the user. But weighing a prank gone wrong against the active goal of dicking over the internet I'll take the well meaning pranksters.
Some that I have heard (some are outdated and/or mostly irrelevant):
- slightly slower
- websites develop for chrome first
- sites (0.1%) don't render properly
- default Firefox still has telemetry
- still has ads
- no dinosaur game
- Mv3 AdBlock still works fine
- better security because more devs contribute to chromium
- mostly funded by Google anyways
- Brendan Eich (left 2014)
- invented JavaScript
- political opinions
That said, I'm still using Librewolf.
I know you didn't say these were your opinions, but I'll still see if I can comment on them:
It's not. It's actually faster.
Ehhhhhhhhh. Source?
Everything has telemetry, but Firefox shows you right where to turn it off, unlike the rest.
??? Which browser has no ads?
Fair.
Adblock? This a joke?
Source?
Source?
Relevance?
Also, Librewolf is just a fork of FF, you can make main FF exactly like Libre but get same day updates and security patches.
??? I literally never said anything about hating Firefox, I was merely asking a simple question...
I used to use Firefox all the time, then they killed all the extensions. That doesn't mean I somehow "hate it" LOL
But like, y'know, anyone that doesn't agree with you is literally Satan, right? 🙄
I have one thing missing from Firefox that keeps me from permanently switching: vertical tabs. I know there's ways of hacking it into FF, but nothing sustainable. I know it seems minor, but in Brave/Edge, it just works so damn well.
But those leave the horizontal tabs as they are. Such a waste of space with wide screen monitors being the norm.
I prefer Tab Center Reborn with CSS edits, but Sideberry absolutely gets the job done, and well.
There's not a lot these days ever since Opera and Edge switched to Chromium. You gotta move to Apple's ecosystem for an alternative.
An actual, insightful answer that isn't toxic, and doesn't throw shade or insult anyone or anything? My goodness, I must be dreaming!
Thanks for not disintegrating me, cuz that's where the bar is at, apparently 🙄
I don’t know if you’re being serious or sarcastic.
I use Safari with Apple’s private relay and various ad blockers and have been quite happy. Are there reasons to be concerned? (other than Apple=bad)
Concerned no I think... But I am gonna guess you missing on some features and specially extensions but I might be wrong. Except on iOs since there you are missing on that anyway.
Well the privacy/security enthusiasts will prefer open source browsers, as these are viewed as more trustworthy.
Safari is closed source (although WebKit, the rendering engine that Safari uses, is open source).
Ok thanks.
I’m willing to sacrifice some FOSS for convenience, as long as it’s reasonable. But in general I’m a strong supporter of open source and publish my own code that way.
Epiphany uses WebKit, but it doesn't have working add-on support yet, so you will still have lots of ads and cookie banners.
I use it as a secondary browser if something doesn't work in Librewolf, but for me the internet is pretty much unusable without "i (still) don't care about cookies" and UBlock Origin, so it only works as a backup for me.
There are also some Browsers using QTWebengine which uses Blink (the core of Chromium (meaning technically not chromium itself)) like Qutebrowser and Falkon.
Pale Moon and Basilisk which are based on an old version of Firefox and diverged quite a bit.
Konqueror which uses KHTML (predecessor of WebKit (predecessor of Blink)).
NetSurf idk haven't tried it.
Then there is stuff like Ladybird, which will crash all the time. Links, ELinks, Lynx, w3m, Links2 are text based. Discontinued Internet Explorer. Old versions of MS Egde. Old versions of Opera. Basically nothing else that is usable.
That's the core of the problem. There is nothing that can browse modern web on windows, Linux and Android except Chromium and Firefox. If Firefox dies, then Google will be an effective monopoly in the browser industry.
Better start moving to Firefox now because with WEI and Manifest V3 it's not going to be very long until ads are unblockable
A lot of panics turn out to be nothing, or nowhere near as bad as people thought. No reason I can't wait until it happens to move.
If you wait enough websites will start requiring WEI and changing to a browser without it will just click you out of them
I know that switching away from a Chromium based browser would be great, but Firefox just can't compete with the Chromium bookmark system. That was actually the main reason I switched to Brave instead of Firefox a few years back, and from what I can see, Firefox still hasn't changed anything about their bookmark-manager. :/
Right what platinum coated bookmarks are they using? Firefox syncs bookmarks, has them organized by folders, has a bookmarks bar, can pin them to the start page, idk what else they need
As I've stated in the other comment, I mainly ment the UI. But there is another feature I like to use, which is the window-specific bookmark manager. I usually keep my browser activities separated with different windows(e.g. one for youtube documentaries and one for learning). With the Chromium manager, I can have one manager-tab per window. That's not possible with the Firefox manager. It's a small thing, but hey, it's convenient.
Then again, the bookmark manager wasn't the only reason I chose Brave over Firefox. If I remember correctly, I had three reasons why I chose Brave in the end:
- The bookmark manager - Reasons are stated here and in the other comment.
- Brave Ads - The privacy respecting ads make my mind feel at ease when using an adblocker, as I'm still contributing something.
- This one is the weakest one: Firefox just felt slower for me, to be honest.
I would've just put up with point three, but in order to leave the first two, Firefox would have to have other features I really want tu use. And that's the problem - it doesn't have those.
I probably should have specified that I meant the UI. You can do everything in Firefox, but for me, the Chromium UI just looks nicer, it's "cleaner" for me, even if it comes at the cost of having the address-bar in a submenu, for example. Because I use the bookmark-manager quite often, that's a majority points I consider. For 99% of the people, Firefox will do the job just as well as Chromium especially if you just use the bookmarks, not the manager. For some it probably looks even better. It's just preference.
I don't care what browser you use
Also I like Edge. It works great and Google can kiss my butt
If Google does push web DRM through, edge will surely adopt it. The best time to switch is now and there will no second best time if they actually do it.
Yeah, it's basically chrome without the bloat, less spying, and without the prohibition on ad blockers
That's fine but the point of the post is that you have to use a non chromium browser to avoid wei. Once it's implemented it's likely that edge and others will have to implement it too.
It would be a monumental effort for smaller browsers to keep chromium extensions working, while the rest of the ecosystem moves to the new APIs. The only way that could work is if they all fork chromium and base their browsers on this new fork, and even then it's not guaranteed to develop a real ecosystem of plugins since chrome has more users than all of those other chromium browsers combined.
So yeah you have to use Firefox if you want to avoid that, at least for now.
Lmfao. Bro edge is chromium my guy. You just switched from one skin to another is all. It's all the same under the hood🤣
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Lmfao. Bro edge is chromium my guy. You just switched from one skin to another is all. It's all the same under the hood🤣
They are definitely not all the same, and Vivaldi is a fantastic example of that. Just because it's Chromium-based doesn't mean it's chock full of bullshit and a Chrome reskin, it just means that it most likely is. Vivaldi definitely isn't.
Yes. It's chromium. It's based on the open source base engine for Chrome. Which means, it has all the benefits of Chrome without the Google bullshit.
Chromium is not free of Google's bullshit. Chromium development is under direct control of Google.
These are not conclusions based on the other half, these are distinct facts. Also, if not for this, why would a chromium fork named "ungoogled chromium" exist?
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Always amazing how much people can know without actually „getting it“. Just use firefox. You don’t get anything for „winning“ on a technicality. Just leave it be.
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It’s a fallacy. Why would I stop drinking alcohol, why would I stop smoking, why would I stop sunbathing without protection? Why would I leave the titanic? It is unsinkable. It works for you because you haven’t gotten to the bullet in the chamber yet.
The people here are trying to tell you that it’s not safe and that it will only get worse. And in opposition to your arguments, these facts are based on professional opinions and the known business practices of the companies these products are associated with.
I know you have your opinion but an opinion is not your personality. You can let go of it without ruining your life, again in opposition to keeping it and actually harming yourself, either financially or otherwise.
Why is it so hard to trust people who do this stuff for a living?
@Haui @Cleverdawny, the discrepancy between Chromium and Firefox users is absurd, if there is a common enemy that endangers the existence of both and all the other minority browsers, it is this that in the end ends up that only Chrome, EDGE and Opera exist anymore, because these have no qualms about including this Google Tokens shit.
It is a matter of thinking and acting together against this barbarism, something that Mozilla and Vivaldi are already doing, but more is needed.
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Thanks. That is very kind of you to point out. Also, I don’t care about firefox at all. It was just the best I could find at the time and since am watching industry news if something not only marginally better pops up. Hasn‘t yet. As a sysadmin it is my job to keep systems running and ideally not vendor lock the company or myself. That’s why I stay away from google as much as I can.
@Haui @Cleverdawny, I also use Chromium, Vivaldi since over 7 Years, not because Firefox or Otter Browser, which I also have as second an third one, because of something called business ethics which has Vivaldi, because it fits best my needs, because it's faster than FF, because it's de-googled and don't have third party investors, because it's a European employees-owned Cooperative, it's a safe Browser with good privacy, products associated are Mastodon, Vivaldi mail, own userblog, sync.......
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That sounds pretty awesome. I read about vivaldi pretty often. If the need pops up I will definitely check it out. Thanks :)
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I‘m glad you see that there are no good argument against privacy and keeping away from giant corporations.
It ruins the internet. Google controls Chromium, if most browsers are Chromium-based, that means those browsers will eventually get whatever Google implements which means other browsers are forced to implement them or you can get broken websites.
from the first sentence on the wikipedia page: Chromium is a free and open-source web browser project, mainly developed and maintained by Google.
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Correct. We would not even be here if corporations could be trusted. Everyone needs to get this somehow. Federation (open source project development is kind of federated as well) is the key. Actually, we‘re having the same oppressive authoritarianism that gave birth to federated states. Looks like a pattern.
Have you tried the one recently implemented in Firefox? I'm not sure about Edge, but it's much better than Chrome's. I rarely have to use anything else.