Google’s going to lengths and bounds to make people leave it.
Firefox users right now:
I still rock NoScript. It helps avoid drive-bys and other silliness. It does take patience though so I get why not many like it.
firefox became bloated so switched to chrome because faster/better. back to firefox last year. too old to keep fighting ads. thinking off button will be next. yeah addons mostly work
What’s “bloated” about Firefox?
I switched to Chrome back then because it ran tabs in separate processes. A tab crashing in Firefox would take the whole browser down.
The final straw for me was the plugins. Flash, Java, Acrobat, etc. Chrome kept them up to date for you. Firefox made you just through hoops, which eventually lead to a rogue site injecting crap onto my machine which took me a day to clean up. Plugins are pretty much dead now, but back then you needed them for half the web to work.
Chrome really was a great browser back then (and MS were still in the “what’s wrong with Internet Explorer?” era), and it’s a shame that they’re now working so hard to fuck it up again.
Chrome did a bunch of things absolutely wonderfully in the beginning. Fast JavaScript engine, removed title bar (tabs on top), simple settings page, sandboxed tabs, and they made some of the functionality of the most popular Firefox extensions the default (such as the downloads bar, instead of a separate window).
It was basically a pre-modded Firefox, but supercharged. Now it’s corporate slop.
that’s how I remember switching to chrome in the 00s. it had become unstable.
Distant past. Few of us recall.
I think it was still called Phoenix when I originally dropped it. Before it got renamed Firefox. Came back around last year after adblock stuff in chrome finally chased me away.
I remember! 2.0 to 3.0 switch wherethe GUI slowed down dramatically. 2.0 felt like driving a sports-car.
It was back before enshittification of the internet, when things were better. Was just big and clunky, chrome came along and ran very fast, until last few years, they swapped places.
And Google was still ‘nice’.
Microsoft, at least in my lifetime, invented the ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’ method, but google was certainly taking notes.
One of the many little compromises.
nobody ever seems to detail what kinda bloat they mean when they say that, i don’t think they actually thought about it that deeply. nobody complains about anything specific like XUL support, for example.
In my experience, there was a period when Firefox crashed all over the place, especially under heavy load. Tabs shared the same process back then, one tab could take down whole the browser session when crashed. I vividly remember how it felt so silky when i switched to chrome. Now I am back to Firefox since 3 years. Firefox is the sexier now with all the shiny addons
Maybe in like Firefox 4 days
Yeah Firefox was kind of a hog around 2013. I have a netbook that I’ve kept around since like 2014 and I remember when I first got it, it couldn’t really run Firefox. Firefox would freeze up and crash. Funily enough today Firefox runs better on that 2014 netbook than chrome does.
I also had a high end gaming PC at the time and Firefox always ran fine as long as you had the reaources to run it.
The transition away from Manifest V2 is a good example of how changes made by major platforms can have a huge impact on developers and users. I’m curious to see how this affects privacy-focused and specialized browser extensions over the long term.
When will people switch away from Chrome to other browsers? I get it, Chrome sets the standards and it’s hard to switch away from them, but it’s necessary to ensure the survival of the Internet.
They wouldn’t set the standard anymore if nobody used them.
The W3 spec is dominated by Google’s submissions afaik.
I doubt most people even know you can change it. Edge is the default browser on windows. Chromium. Chrome is the default browser on android (though I suppose Samsung has a custom browser and they’re the main android device people are buying)
Ugh, any Samsung app is equivalent to internet explorer. Gross
ublock origin lite, the natural replacement but not automatically enabled by google or microsoft. you have to go get it. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home
an alternative is adguard’s browser extension. it is free to use and open source (gpl). https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardBrowserExtension#installation
No you get Firefox
Edge will soon follow. They announced it. Polly will switch to helium or brave
First time hearing of Helium, thanks for mentioning. Sounds interesting, will be keeping an eye on it.
People need to stop using brave
People are not looking this deep into switching browsers lol.
They should tho
Zen-Browser
I’m using Zen now. it took me a while while to get the hang of the UI. But once I did I found it to be very nice to have those spaces that I can organize for different tasks.
Or better yet LibreWolf
Or better yet LibreWolf
I cannot count how many things I had to change in settings to get the browser to just work right, I mean I appreciate them locking everything down to the nth degree but… damn. Finally switched to waterfox, the out of the box experience is a lot friendlier.
I tried LibreWolf for a little while, but too many sites just wouldn’t load at all with it, so I went back to Firefox.
And i removed Chrome from my devices
I think I’ll be switching to librewolf at home. It can install mozilla extensions and comes with ublock origin baked in. Pulling a stunt like this is just going to drive people away from the Chrome environment. Corpos can’t help but shoot themselves in the foot.
Most people I know simply don’t care. They will use it because it’s convenient and they don’t care about the privacy dangers. I can’t comprehend it myself though. Drives me up the wall.
They will use it because it’s convenient
Using web without ublock is amongst the most inconvenient things I’ve experienced
company which makes most of it’s revenue from advertising fucks with their browser’s ability to remove ads. Go figure!
I have to say I’m not surprised. No one wants to pay for a browser.
The irony is that Chrome’s rendering engine was a fork of WebKit, which was a fork of KHTML, a free and open source rendering engine created by KDE for Konqueror. They basically took something free, used Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics on it. Now KHTML is vestigial, only found in the UserAgent string.
But we could have had a truly free open source cross platform browser with Konqueror.
Best we have now is Firefox, but the bulk of Mozilla’s development funding comes from setting Google as the default search. So it is also hijackable.
i am surprised it took this long, but i know that getting everybody using chromium, or at least webextensions, was part of the plan that had to exist first. and the path down mv3 started not long after both mozilla and microsoft were both roped-in.
This is gonna be so bad because now there is only uBlock origin lite and “uBlock”, if you couln’t guess: the 2nd one is a scam that google never tried to remove(it’s been up for some years IIRC) and i am sure that everyone will try to install this scam because they can’t find the original uBlock origin (and everyone just refers to uBlock origin as uBlock which makes it worse)
the 2nd one is a scam that google never tried to remove
It’s a little more complicated. uBlock was the original name, gorhil handed it off when he felt the maintenance burden became too high. Then he forked it to make his own uBlock Origin version.
At some point later uBlock was bought up by the AdBlock people, who in turn were later bought by the AdBlock Plus people.
So it’s not a scam exactly, more like an inbred sideline of the royal family.
It’s a scam because it specifically goes out of its way to not block an ad, as long as that ad pays a bribe to them. It should be called uAd.
Holy shit, seems to be watching a soap opera tf
Ah, thank god I am using Zen (Firefox fork) now for 2 years already. I totally forgot about this manifest bs. Now that Chrome introduced vertical tabs I was thinking to myself “ah, I could give it a try, having less breaking things and so on”. But thanks for this reminder I will gladly stay with Zen.
I switched to Zen a week ago and I haven’t ran into any issues with it, what do you find is broken with it?
I had some websites which didn’t work in some way. Can’t remember, which websites it were, just some big company websites where random buttons would just do nothing or similar. But I think it were only 2 or 3.
Other than that it’s fine. Sometimes it seems like tab management is a bit weird, I once had the browser open with about 100 new tabs besides the other ones I had saved. Just had to close them and done. On my Work-Laptop I have a folder pinned in one space and the popup for it’s contents is shifted down ~200px permanently for some reason. It’s all manageable.
Install Firefox with https://adnauseam.io/, it’s basically ublock origin but internally clicks on every add destroying your adds profile and damaging economics of adds and conversion.
Doesn’t this just track the shit out of you? Does it also click malicious ad banners?
Well, it anonymizes you by “faking” the tracking. I would hope it takes steps to sandbox the ads.
Damn it.
Gotta use chrome at work.
Firefox “isn’t secure and isn’t supported” - my it director
Not using firefox should automatically brand you as not knowing what you are talking about in IT. wtf
This guy?
isnt secure… tell you dont understand security without telling me you don’t understand security.
They’re probably using google workspace and accounts, you can do a lot of monitoring with that
