• knexcar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    531·
    20 hours ago

    This is probably the single thing that got me to switch to Firefox. Privacy whatever, I don’t care about my data or the morality of my tech company or whatever, but mess with my adblocker and goodbye.

    • TehWorld@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      19 hours ago

      I’m mostly in the same boat. If you really want to know my kink-search-history, I really DGAF. The morality is nice to think about but it’s all about your personal morals in a lot of cases.

    • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
      815·
      20 hours ago

      firefox is going through thier own enshittifcation down the line, they changed ther policy about data recently

      • viking@infosec.pubEnglish
        14·
        17 hours ago

        They changed the phrasing, since in some jurisdictions “sharing anonymized data with partners” can apparently be interpreted as a sale of data, if they get something in return, even if it’s not a fiscal payment.

        But after the outrage that sparked, they’ve rephrased the policy again and wrote a lengthy article detailing the reasoning, which is at the very least plausible.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        6·
        19 hours ago

        They changed the wording of their policy for legal reasons. They haven’t actually changed what they do. They already updated the text of the policy to clarify.

          • dan@upvote.auEnglish
            5·
            17 hours ago

            Yes, because the definition of “sell data” varies by jurisdiction, and they can’t guarantee that their usage of ads (eg the default sites that appear on the new tab page) does not fall under the definition of “sell data” in some jurisdictions. In particular, California’s CCPA is pretty strict and some use cases that aren’t actually selling data still fall under its definition of “sell data”.

            • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.mlEnglish
              23·
              16 hours ago

              And they had this revelation and newfound sense of caution immediately after their main source of income was jeopardized? And they made this change at the exact same time they started forcing users to give them a worldwide commercial license to everything you enter through Firefox? Sure, Jan.

              • dan@upvote.auEnglish
                3·
                15 hours ago

                forcing users to give them a worldwide commercial license to everything you enter through Firefox?

                That’s not what they actually did, though. They revised the wording to clarify:

                You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

                For example, if you type something into the address bar, they need to have the permission to take your content (whatever you’ve typed) and send it to a third party (a search engine) to get autocompletion results.

                Here’s the blog post that clarifies the changes: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/

      • enthusiasm_headquarters@lemmy.worldEnglish
        25·
        18 hours ago

        I read about this too, and it worries me. Google has donated over a billion dollars to Mozilla over the years. That alone doesn’t scare me so much as it’s a blatant propaganda tool to deflect the antitrust sentiment that plagues them and will probably some day do its work of breaking them apart.

        Fortunately, there are numerous open source forks. I am currently using Librewolf, a fork of firefox focused on privacy and anti-tracking, and it has worked without a hitch. A couple of my extensions have required fiddling with to get right but it’s part of life if you care about these things.

  • Jimius@lemmy.mlEnglish
    992·
    24 hours ago

    if ads were normal and unobtrusive. We wouldn’t need ad blockers. Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate. I had been running an ad blocker for so many years that when a friend (who doesn’t use an ad blocker) showed me a website, the unfiltered experience was horrifying.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      22 hours ago

      Im old enough to remember the internet before ads, and with ads became a thing and you had to make sure to keep your speakers low/off all the time less some screaming loud ad popped up somewhere to burst your eardrums at 2am.

      There were so many obnoxious, visual cancer ads.

      Then they became actual digital cancer by being injection points for viruses and malware, and thus adblockers became a necessity.

      And they remain a necessity to this day, for the same reason as they were 20+ years ago.

      and yet the ad servers want to blame the end user for adblocking.

      not their absolute refusal to moderate or police any of the content they deliver.

      • TheKMAP@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        1·
        18 hours ago

        It’s even worse when you consider the entire point of advertising is to deliver a targeted payload at a very specific demographic. So you can target IT folks of a specific company, etc.

    • 🎨 Elaine Cortez 🇨🇦 @lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      19 hours ago

      I was about to comment something similar but you said it before I did. Sometimes I’ll mistakenly open YouTube with Chrome and then I realize I messed up because I have to sit through three, sometimes one-minute long ads just to watch a twenty second video. I’ll typically just nope out and switch to Firefox. The worst thing is they’re unskippable and I swear for some of them the ad actually pauses if you switch to another tab or browser. I’m getting ads even on super old videos so I’m pretty sure it isn’t all to do with the channels themselves monetizing their videos.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        17 hours ago

        3 one minute long adds are better than those 2 hour long prageru racist propaganda videos trying to masquerade as “Educational” content

    • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nzEnglish
      4·
      19 hours ago

      I went to help out a friend, a few years ago, he runs vanilla Edge, I can’t believe anyone actually uses the internet like that.

    • padge@lemmy.zipEnglish
      51·
      23 hours ago

      I’d be okay with sites showing me unintrusive non targeted ads, but since it’s all or nothing I choose nothing.

  • g4nd41ph@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    21 hours ago

    I swapped to Chrome years ago because YouTube stopped working right on Firefox.

    I’ve started the process of swapping back to Firefox after 10 years with Chrome over this.

      • ysjet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        18 hours ago

        I know what he’s talking about- there was some javascript spec or something that google proposed, and nobody else bought in, so it never actually became part of javascript’s standard.

        But google implemented it into chrome’s javascript engine anyway, and then used it for youtube. There was some fallback code if the new functions weren’t available, but, because of a ‘mistake’ they didn’t work and basically made playback ass for a while until the open source community basically debugged and fixed the issue FOR google, and then spent a few weeks cramming it down google’s throat that it needed fixed.

      • g4nd41ph@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        19 hours ago

        It probably didn’t have anything to do with Firefox itself. It’s likely related to something I messed up in FF or it was something to do with the ancient laptop I had at the time being a junk heap, but I tried Chrome and noticed that the trouble didn’t exist there. So I started using Chrome.

        I kept using it because of all the google integration, which was really handy when I was using the google business suite to run my own small business. I shut that down two years ago now, so there’s nothing really keeping me on Chrome any more.

        I swapped back to FF a few days ago and YouTube works fine now. So I’m back on the FF train and giving Google the finger the whole way over banning the adblockers that I liked.

    • Mike_The_TV@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      21 hours ago

      There were a few extensions you could run in firefox that told youtube that it was totally for reals being accessed by a chrome browser.

      • g4nd41ph@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        20 hours ago

        Boy, that would have been good to know back in 2015, I feel like I let Google hoodwink me into using Chrome for all that time.

      • g4nd41ph@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        19 hours ago

        Something was going wrong with video playback. Unfortunately, this was about 10 years ago so I don’t remember many specifics about what the problem was.

        • TangledHyphae@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          19 hours ago

          I’ve exclusively used firefox to watch youtube on Arch and Ubuntu for years, never had a problem so far for what it’s worth. I keep a laptop in the livingroom with Arch specifically to have adblocking and piping the video out to the TV. The youtube apps are terrible on the Roku last I remember, haven’t tried it in forever but I think the main reason was I didn’t want to see ads anymore.

    • devedeset@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      15 hours ago

      Ironically YouTube seems to work better for me in firefox, although the issue in chrome may be caused by browser extensions

  • Pulsar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    17 hours ago

    Webserial is only reason I see to install Chrome. For everything else Firefox works great.

    • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      I only use chrome for my work stuff, and that’s because I work with g-suite a lot.

      Chrome fucking sucks

    • trn@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Never has been 🔫 (at least for a couple of years)

        • DontMakeMoreBabies@lemm.eeEnglish
          61·
          20 hours ago

          I think the Brave CEO recently said some Trumpy shit (in case you’re at all curious for the downvoting).

          • 11111one11111@lemmy.worldEnglish
            21·
            18 hours ago

            I wish more people were like you. Not everyone can keep up with everyone’s beefs (this one not so much) but it really grinds my gears when I see seemingly polite, on topic, engaging or contributing comments with no replies but still geyting down voted. Especially on a forum as thirsty as Lemmy users are for more user involvement.

            It makes me think there are too many people in the world conditioned to be preset to hate thst the fact a person doesn’t know they’re supposed to hate something is enough grounds to be shunned and hated on. Lol. It’s cool to see someone jump in and say:Hey homie, we don’t hate you we hate a person who is unrelated to the topic of the thread or the context of your comment but we do hate them enough to hate on you

            Edit: the parenthesis comment was meant to imply hating Trump monkeys is glaringly obvious. My comment was about lemmy etiquette and wasn’t about why or why not OP was getting downvoted.

    • Libra00@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      Yeah, I switched to Firefox when this whole Manifest V3 thing was announced, I only still have Chrome installed because it’s better for PDFs than Firefox and once in a great while i run into a site that doesn’t work right on Firefox.

      • Trashbones@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        22 hours ago

        I actually really like Firefox for reading pdf’s, how is it in chrome? I’ve never actually tried chrome for that because I was still using okular back when I still had chrome installed on anything.

        • Libra00@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          18 hours ago

          The main issue I have with Firefox is that some pdfs have this side-by-side layout (especially rpg pdfs) that Firefox respects and I keep having to turn it off every time I load a new one. Chrome doesn’t respect it and shows it a page at a time like I want. My eyes don’t work too good so side by side the text is just too small.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    511·
    1 day ago

    I take this as a sign that it genuinely still works to block ads and hasn’t sold out and become malware like those others that used to be popular.

    • Bazoogle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      24 hours ago

      It was removed because Google did away with manifest v2 for browser extensions, and uBlock Origin worked almost entirely from a feature provided in manifest v2. So it was removed because it can no longer work on chromium devices, unless the browser manually adds back in support for it. Firefox has chosen to continue to support manifest v2, so the original uBlock origin is still available. uBlock lite is still available in the chrome store, and uses the new manifest v3. It is more limited in it’s capability, but should be able to get the most obtrusive stuff. The lite version is definitely not nearly as powerful as the original.

      On a side note, it seems to me like the link still works for now. Idk how much longer that will last.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    26·
    1 day ago

    And that is why I went to Firefox once Google announced this bullshit.

    Swapping is pretty painless. It even brings over all your passwords and stuff these days. Best get to swapping before Google disable that as well. They’d just love to keep you hostage.

      • zer0@lemmy.mlEnglish
        10·
        24 hours ago

        Some suggestions:

        • Bitwarden (US based but with EU hosting, free tier, open source)
        • proton-pass (Swiss based with free tier)
        • Keepass (open source system, free “self-hosted” through cloud saves)
        • 1pass (Us based, paid tiers only)
        • Lastpass (US based, free tier. Lots of breaches in the past so I can’t recommend)
  • jam_scot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    13 hours ago

    I switched to Firefox many years ago, after their announcement I switched to Waterfox and I’m very happy with it.

  • Nanook@lemm.eeEnglish
    2194·
    1 day ago

    Google is not an IT company. It’s an advertising company. Surprised Pikachu, it blocks ad blockers.

      • JcbAzPx@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        1 day ago

        Because they are at the end of their growth phase and have entered their squeeze until dead phase.

      • ripcord@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        Yes, but enshittification doesn’t happen all at once. And this is a textbook example of the actual meaning of enshittification.

      • Nanook@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        Yeah it’s always been an ad company. And you are correct, blocking apps is new, welcome to the last stage in the ad-blocking arms race. Glad I degoogled my digital life a decade ago.

        • JimBarbecue@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          1 day ago

          Hey, can you tell a little bit about your stack, what apps and services do you use? Also on phone? I guess in a decade you could work that out pretty well.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          37·
          1 day ago

          At large organizations you’re generally not allowed to download much of anything without it passing through IT security and management first. If it’s a no, it will probably stay a no.

          • Flagstaff@programming.devEnglish
            121·
            1 day ago

            I work for a non-profit and they are way more lenient about what we would like to install as long as the job gets done.

            • skulblaka@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              5·
              1 day ago

              Then you have bad opsec and security holes.

              This matters more for some industries than others. But this attitude lets a malicious employee install basically whatever they want in service of “the job” and you won’t even know you’re being breached until after it’s all over.

              • Flagstaff@programming.devEnglish
                2·
                14 hours ago

                Well, we still have to get approval. But it just seems like they don’t mind as much. For example, I don’t know how many companies out there would be fine with installations of AutoHotkey and LibreOffice.

          • datavoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
            51·
            1 day ago

            Just remember,it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission!

            • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              5·
              1 day ago

              Just to be clear, I mean it’s literally managed at the Group Policy level (in Windows server environments at least) and no amount of asking will suddenly give your user account permissions to be able to save files of any kind.

              You generally literally cannot download it without going through IT to get them to approve of and give your account access first.

              • datavoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
                2·
                1 day ago

                Ya I forgot I have escalated device privileges and an admin account, which I definitely would have used for installing anything. Although I believe I can also skirt the rules using winget on a user account. That will probably get you in trouble however!

      • dirthawker0@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        18 hours ago

        If you had uBlock origin already, you may have gotten a message through Chrome that it was no longer supported, so it’s been disabled, and gives you the option to remove it. I noticed you don’t have to remove it, and it can be re-enabled. However, I need someone smarter with adblockers than I to say if this is actually helpful and not hazardous.

        • Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          4·
          1 day ago

          People are saying manifest v2 (the old API that ublock uses) will be gone soon, which I think should effectively make ublock unusable whatever you do unless you stop updating chrome maybe (which could open you up to a ton of security issues) ? Not sure, don’t care since I’ve ditched chrome long ago

    • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
      31·
      1 day ago

      I just downloaded the Kagi Orion browser and I can install extensions from both Chrome and Firefox web stores!

    • FundMECFS@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Is there any firefox based browser on android where I can have easy gestures for the arrow buttons? All the firefox versions I can find require me to do this in two clicks which for the way I browse is a pain in the arse. Can I fix this somehow?