https://arstechnica.com/?p=1987843
When ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game, make the mouse slower.
I've been using Safari exclusively since 2013, completely sidestepping all of this drama. I haven't seen an ad on YouTube in several years. I also haven't seen any hint of YouTube blocking my access to videos.
But for everyone who needs Windows, and the growing number of Linux users, FireFox seems like the only democratic option left.
There are webkit based browsers on Linux as well, GNOME Web being one; but yeah, I prefer Firefox.
Safari is holding back the web with their old, quirky, outdated engine. However, as Safari's engine is the only option for iOS, most web developers can't afford to ignore Safari because they can't ignore the iPhone. So it's IE all over again - an old, outdated browser that everyone nevertheless has to support as a significant portion of the users are using it. In some ways it's even worse, as iPhone users don't have any choice due to Apple's restrictions, but even in the darkest days of IE's stranglehold on the web Microsoft never restricted what browsers you could install on Windows.
However, as Safari’s engine is the only option for iOS, most web developers can’t afford to ignore Safari because they can’t ignore the iPhone
That's going to change next year thanks to the Digital Markets Act in Europe. Third-party app stores will have to be allowed on iPhones which means different browser engines will be able to be installed on iOS.
I can imagine app-developers that do no want to pay 30% of their earnings to Apple, opensource apps, alternative browsers like Brave, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, game developers like Epic, and others that cannot or don't want to provide their apps on the standard app store, will be exclusive to third-party stores. If some of those happen to be killer apps or start trending, then maybe it's possible Apple users will take a step outside their walled garden.
It's entirely possible Apple will try to make the third party app store a nigh intolerable experience or make advertisements and officials claims that it's safer without third-party stores or whatever. Standard corporate bullshit.
Apple is pretty notorious for holding the web back post Steve Jobs. As an example, it took them forever for push notifications for web apps on mobile (like literally years behind their competition)
I'm not disagreeing in general but I've literally never wanted to use push notifications from a Web app. All it does is create another thing to decline on shirty websites.
I made a chat app for my Minecraft server back in 2016 that was just a website with push notifications. Worked great for the folks that had an Android device to talk to people on the server, for people with iOS it was useless.
I don't run that chat app anymore, but... There are use cases for these things that aren't just "would you like to revive notifications about my blog posts/spam?"
That sounds like a really cool use case! It's a shame it's mostly just basically abused for spam
“Manifest V3 will also put roadblocks up before extension updates, which will delay an extension developer's ability to quickly respond to changes.”
Can’t wait for a day zero exploit to let rip and its impact and exposure increased because of an extension’s developer inability to promptly patch their software. I hope they are considering more than just ad revenue but somehow I doubt it.
They allow extensions to be sold and completely reworked without telling the user jack shit. So I doubt they care about that either.
Stop using chrome, let the market share dry up. The only reason they can get away with this is because they have a monopoly and surely its against anti-competition laws. But who is gonna try and take on google in court?
Break up tech giants.
Welcome to our hellish future.
The one thing I never understood about breaking up the giants is how are the remaining components gonna compete. Bc "YouTube inc" would benefit alot from "Chrome inc" and "Android inc". It's not like when we broke up the oil giants into normal sized oil tycoons that compete against each other. These are completely unique businesses that just feed off of each other instead of taking from each other.
this is when a company needs to be broken into pieces.. when instead of providing new benefits, the company seeks to control access to its product, and control the market.. i want my government to break Google into bits..
Google already did the hard work, too. Just make each letter within Alphabet its own company.
Iceraven is not nearly as good as Mull. Mull is probably the closest thing to LibreWolf on mobile.
It's pretty ok but Firefox Focus is better. DuckDuckGo Browser uses Chromium under the hood and thus supports Google's monopoly on web rendering engines.
Duckduckgo were caught whitelisting Microsoft's trackers. Don't trust them. Mull is better, make sure to install uBlock Origin.
source: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/duckduckgo-privacy-browser-facing-backlash-over-microsoft-trackers
Please tell me that Google was so tone deaf that they actually made a starte page banner for the anniversary of Monopoly or something.
No one is moving to Firefox, because most people don't care. Just like people stay on Reddit or X, they are going to stay on chrome. Google will feed them shit and they'll ask for more.
All we can do is worry about ourselves and keep trying to make alternatives viable.
Most people don't. How do you think in 2023 Google is still raking in millions of dollars nonstop?
The moment adblock stops working I'm out. Haven't made the move yet because I'm lazy and because none of the stuff people tak about has affected me yet. Even youtube works without having to do anything.
Moving to Firefox is long overdue, though. Kinda waiting for that push now.
Well i'm in the same boat a few weeks ago but my pc can't start for some reason and have to reinstall windows, and since every app is wiped i just switched to firefox from then on.
Can you at least recover your files? Been here a couple times. I mean, it’s Windows. 😝
My goto for quick? Backup: • %ProgramData% • Your user folder: Users\yourname
Most apps can be reinstalled. Their settings are in programdata and appdata usually. Anything else you might need is probably in the registry.
The file still there, just that in the process of reinstall windows it also uninstall all app, so i just thought "meh" and start all over again. Now i don't have to clean unused app and obsolete website bookmark myself 🙈
Choice of browser is nothing like the choice of social media, the fuck are you talking about??
One of THE biggest reasons Redditors didn’t leave was because there was more content and already established communities niche as well as large.
With a browser change, you still get the exact same content. Worthless comparison
You're missing the point entirely. It isn't about a comparison, it's about the user behavioral patterns, and there no reason to assume it will be any different this time.
The "average user", the vast majority of people whose choices in software and services directly influence the direction of the market, are on the whole too unwilling or too tech illiterate to use alternatives.
It's the tyranny of the default, and the primary engine behind the centralization of the internet: the average user complains but refuses to move if it would require even a modicum of adjustment or patience. They're drunk on convenience, and will drive a market off a cliff before they'll ever try something else. It's a pattern we've seen again and again and again, and there no reason it won't happen here.
It's not "no one", Because I left reddit and I left chrome. Lemmy and Firefox!
But yeah not many people will actually do it.
I mean, I did. I never thought I would, because I use dev tools all the time and I was worried it would be a problem, but it wasn’t. I don’t miss it. Firefox is fine!
People: If you’re trying to decide whether to switch, just do it! It’s good for the internet and it didn’t even take that long to import my bookmarks, install all the same extensions, and increase the tiny tiny font size of tab names. Like, maybe twenty minutes all tallied up. Worth it!
Can someone clarify why browsers other than the ones that are Chrome based are forced to adopt Manifest v3? What happens if the don't, are they blocked from the web or something?
They aren't forced to do anything. Manifest v3 is just a part of the WebExtensions API (which is not a standard and is really just "whatever Chrome does except we find/replace'd the word chrome to browser") which both Safari and Firefox chose to implement in order to make porting of Chrome extensions easier.
Before that, Firefox had a much more powerful extension system that allowed extensions quite a lot of access to browser internals, but that turned out to be a maintenance nightmare so they walled those APIs off (not a coincidence that Firefox started getting massive performance improvements after that, and extensions stopped breaking every other release) and decided to go the WebExtensions route. I have no clue what Safari was up to but I think they implemented it after.
If they don't implement Manifest v3, extensions that want to work across multiple browsers need to support both the older Manifest v2 and the later Manifest v3, which would be a burden not many extension authors would want to bother with, which would make them just say "yeah we're not supporting anything outside Chrome". Firefox avoids this problem by extending the v3 API to allow for the functionality necessary for powerful ad blocking Google removed in v3 (webRequestBlocking) while also implementing the new thing (declarativeNetRequest) side by side, so extensions that want to take advantage of the powerful features on Firefox can do so, while Chrome extensions that are fine with the less powerful alternative can still be ported over relatively easily.
Firefox does have it's fair share of extensions on top of the WebExtension API already (sidebar support for one), so adding one more isn't too big of a deal.
Can someone clarify why browsers other than the ones that are Chrome based are forced to adopt Manifest v3?
See, that's the thing: pretty much every browser except Firefox is Chrome-based. When people talk about browsers being forced to accept manifest v3, they're talking about all the Chrome-based browsers other than Chrome.
why browsers other than the ones that are Chrome based are forced to adopt Manifest v3?
Then the only browser left is Firefox. Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi and a long etc are all Chromium based.
There is also Safari, but Safari does not support WebExtensions in the first place so it does not apply here.
Safari has supported mv2 extensions for years and recently added mv3 support.
However it never supported WebRequest blocking.
Google is the biggest of browser and http/s internet based protocol, so much bigger that everyone plays by googles rules. if they set out manifestv3 the other browsers that are not compatible will not work, and as a result people will abandon them.
It's just Chromium with a layer of Microsoft on top. It'll have the same extension issues from Manifest v3 that mainline Chrome does.
It's literally corporate spyware made by Microsoft, one of the shittiest companies in history. It also uses the Chromium rendering engine under the hood, meaning you also support Google's monopoly. It's the worst browser choice you can make. (besides maybe Opera or shit like that)
Firefox and LibreWolf are the only good browsers that don't support Google's monopoly on browser rendering engines and give you the freedom to block ads
Won't Edge and all Chromium-based browsers end up with Manifest v3 and no v2? Will extension devs continue to support v2 in Firefox?
Brave claims they will maintain it in their fork but that won’t last long.
Developers don’t need to keep mv2 support, Firefox supports mv3 plus extra APIs on top.
And keeping the v2 (or v3+WebRequest) support in the browser is not enough, they'd also have to start running their own extension store since presumably the Chrome one will no longer carry such extensions.
Yes it does still exist. It came preinstalled with the ThinkPad I set up for my daughter yesterday. That's why I immediately installed Firefox and made it the default browser instead.
Yep, Firefox Nightly is my daily driver. I use Edge Canary for sites that don't work on Firefox, such as the Snapchat web client.
I wish I could run Linux on it, but it's for her online school next semester and they specified either Mac or Windows. I'm guessing there's a proprietary software situation. Honestly though, she's so inexperienced with Windows (her previous school notebook was a Chromebook issued by the school) that I don't think she's ready for Linux. She screwed things up just playing with system sounds and I had to rescue her.
Ah, yeah. That makes sense. But at least you're there to fix it all; many of us learned by breaking things. Repeatedly, lol.
Oh yeah, I messed up plenty of stuff. And I'm sure she will too. Just not 'repeating the same wav forever' stuff.
I'm confident that Mozilla will follow suite sooner or later to make it easier for extension developers to make extensions for both browsers. Mozilla did that when manifest v1 came along, removed a bunch of functionality from Jetpack, and aligned with Google.
They implement Manifest v3 already for compatibility, but without the user-hostile restrictions.
It wouldn't surprise me if they removed features to make popular extensions work. Time will tell. I'm still salty about Jetpack.
What do you suppose Firefox's goal or motive would be in removing features for the end user? Isn't their purpose to compete with Chrome and be better?
I can only guess that there is a monetary incentive. They get 400 million a year from Google. Why would you compete if you get that kind of money for being the underdog?
you're definitely right and it's obvious that Mozilla can't make Firefox as private as they advertise it because of their monetary interests (thus google is default, there are paid promotions in the home page, a lot of privacy features aren't enabled by default).
But at least they make a decent work implementing them and because it's free software then other projects like Tor or Librewolf can enable all the privacy features, remove the trackers and release a damn good browser.
It would stand to reason that if they were as bad as Chrome, that people would just stick with Chrome and they would miss out on profit entirely, I would think. If monetary incentive is a reason, purposely hamstringing themselves seems counter-intuitive toward that goal.
The thing is, firefox is the only other browser out there that doesn't use the same browser engine. They know it too. They have absolutely no incentive to change, unless some other browser engine and a corresponding browser were to pop up that competed with them. If a group decided "we're going to make a browser that is really private and doesn't do what Mozilla does", and they got a footing, only then would Mozilla consider competing, but only to be better than that other browser, not Chrome.
For Mozilla to want to be better than Chrome, Google would have to do some incredibly dumb shit, Mozilla would need an enormous cash injection from another party, or the current stewards of Mozilla would need to be replaced with people who actually care. IMO, those are all unlikely.
I know this will irk some people but... Do you know why using Gmail or YouTube on Firefox feels slower on an Apple computer?
I use Firefox on Android exclusively, but on Apple computers I still use Chrome more since Firefox seems to either be slow on certain websites or use too much memory (I'm sure it's not Mozilla's fault here)
BTW I actually donate to Mozilla because I think it needs to survive (though it must be a drop compared to what Google pays Mozilla and I hope they keep doing it), but I'm not using Firefox all the time as I'd like, since the experience looks a tad worse on Desktop
Google makes their websites slower in Firefox. I don't think this is related to Apple at all. You'll probably have the same experience in Linux or Windows with Firefox and Google. They just want you to use Chrome.
BTW I actually donate to Mozilla because I think it needs to survive
Donations to Mozilla go to the Foundation, not to Mozilla Corp., which is the one developing FF. So you aren't fueling FF development.
Anyway, I've read elsewhere that they're doing fine also without donations: they get 7M$/year in donations and their CEO gets 5M$/year. It doesn't look like they're actually starving...
You may want to think twice before wasting your money:
https://old.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/yy986k/can_someone_explain_why_mozillas_ceo_salary/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary-achievements_correlation_controversy
https://techrights.org/o/2022/02/17/mozilla-salaries/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28116853
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
But it's your money, in the end. Do whatever makes you feel better.
Wow, OK.
I did not know that. I meant to keep Firefox afloat, much like I donate to Wikipedia. Good to know then (there are other important projects to donate too)!
Thanks!!!
Yeah. I consider Wikipedia the most important piece of the internet. Actual, it's the only website I'd save from the internetcalypse.
LOL, here come the downvotes, as usual.
Can anyone point me towards something I wrote which is factually false?
I didn't touch the comment above (and is at +2 right now but I am downvoting this whining about downvotes. It's just fake internet points. Crying about being downvotes is bad form, nobody cares.
I'm not crying, I couldn't care less. It's actually the opposite, in this case. I find it funny, as it's just a symptom of how people become defensive about Mozilla.
Firefox on osx and Google meet sucks. But I use it anyways because everything else is better.
After writing my comment, I did some research again and found an old Reddit post suggesting to lower the resolution to 1280x800 on a 13' screen. I did so, just as a test, and now when I open websites like YouTube or Roll20, the fan is always off. I'll try it tomorrow with Google Meet and Webex, which is also something that made the fan explode.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube can instantly switch up its ad delivery system, but once Manifest V3 becomes mandatory, that won't be true for extension developers.
If ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game of updates and counter-updates, then Google will force the mouse to slow down.
The current platform, Manifest V2, has been around for over ten years and works just fine, but it's also quite powerful and allows extensions to have full filtering control over the traffic your web browser sees.
Engadget's Anthony Ha interviewed some developers in the filtering extension community, and they described a constant cat-and-mouse game with YouTube.
Firefox's Manifest V3 implementation doesn't come with the filtering limitations, and parent company Mozilla promises that users can "rest assured that in spite of these changes to Chrome’s new extensions architecture, Firefox’s implementation of Manifest V3 ensures users can access the most effective privacy tools available like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions."
Google claims that Manifest V3 will improve browser "privacy, security, and performance," but every comment we can find from groups that aren't giant ad companies disputes this description.
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