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.
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.
They think ads are just
the normal price you pay for surfingpart of the webI personally wouldn’t mind ads, if they weren’t too obtuse and/or malware ridden.
I often turn off the adblocker for independent news sites, as theirs are less obtuse and are vetted better than just running an AI to detect nudity and/or slurs.
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.
Data serves a great role in this. It’s a currency of control.
Political, social, etc.
Which is why privacy is so goddamn important.
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?
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 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
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.
You say that like they didn’t just remove several other adblock extensions themselves
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.
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.
It’s just another source of telemetry for advertisers and won’t stop any of the existing methods of tracking.
There is no reason to trust Mozilla more with your data than anybody else.
From what I’ve heard, they only “removed” uBlock Origin Lite. Normal uBO is still up.
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.
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.
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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.
It’s all fun and games till they check for web USB support. They don’t need to actually use web USB but it’s a telltale sign that you’re not on Chrome.
A plugin could very easily have Firefox claim to support WebUSB, but return no devices or junk devices. Some of the anti-fingerprinting add-ons already do, iirc.
You get my point though, all they need to do is start supporting a feature that’s not easy to spoof.
The real defense against this is for people to refuse to use Chrome. It’s not the tail that wags the dog, Make The Firefox user base so big the developers can’t ignore it. Basically IE all over again
I agree with your conclusion, but as long as they’re offering data up for download to your machine, they really can’t control how you access it or what application you use for it. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, but even if it requires reverse-engineering some website DRM, somebody’s going to do it. And if Chromium remains FOSS, it won’t even be terribly difficult.
Remember, they tried to defeat ad blockers on YouTube, and they gave up because it wasn’t worth it. uBO was updating to block their attempts within hours. They’ve tested inserting the ads in the video stream, but that’s probably also not going to last for long.
They’re trying to assert an ownership over the Web; and yes, the best way to defeat it is to build a strong and united resistance against it. But even if we don’t, there are ways to quietly refuse to comply.
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
They can in theory make tricks showing that you are using an ad blocker or a specific browser. Even if you set Chrome’s user agent in Firefox.
I personally wouldn’t make such effort to use such websites then.
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Issue is, a lot of people think the only browser in existence is “google”. I even had people looking me at funny for having an e-mail address ending in outlook.com rather than the usual gmail.com, and not because of some anti-MS sentiment, but because they thought e-mail was invented by Google, hance the name “gmail”.
but because they thought e-mail was invented by Google, hance the name “gmail”.
Life is scary.
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.
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.
Looks like time to find a new browser!
May I interest you in browsers based on FireFox?
why not Firefox itself?
I thought they already killed it? They keep killing it multiple times.
We’ve known this was coming for a while now . . . but I suppose not everyone reads tech news.
I mean… Even if everyone knows it’s coming, you still need to have notice when it actually happens right?
Been using Firefox for quite a time now! What are the other alternatives?
I suspect this will soon be followed by a renewed effort by google to kill firefox compatability.
How many times has this been announced already?
Yes
Lmao get rekt, I’m on a gecko based browser.
Wtf is Chrome Canary?
Chrome Canary, the pre-beta release version with the most far-out feature set
I see. So the beta version got the the “feature” later than the production version? Google really is in great hands.
Thanks!
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’m currently using safari on a MacBook. Way more power efficient than chrome.
