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.
I thought they already killed it? They keep killing it multiple times.
Hoping that Vivaldi is going to hold off somehow - perhaps with their built-in ad blocker. And before you say “switch to Firefox”, I’ll say I’m not gonna, at least not until I see native mouse gestures implemented and working everywhere.
Lmao get rekt, I’m on a gecko based browser.
Looks like time to find a new browser!
May I interest you in browsers based on FireFox?
why not Firefox itself?
Vanilla firefox needs to be hardened, either manually or with arkenfox
Been using Firefox for quite a time now! What are the other alternatives?
Ladybird is working really hard to become good enough for daily drive. Will they succeed? Idk. How long will it take? Idk.
Is that Firefox alternative?
Not right now.
Brave, Librewolf (didn’t test yet)
I suspect this will soon be followed by a renewed effort by google to kill firefox compatability.
So you will need to have a backup browser to use only Google services and everything but Google search blocked in ff
I’m currently using safari on a MacBook. Way more power efficient than chrome.
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.
Normal price is usually offered before charging 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.
By all means bring back the banner and side ads that are just one banner and a couple of side ads. Breaking every paragraph up by two more ads is just a miserable experience. Have you tried to look up a recipe lately? Trying to find a recipe without an ad blocker pisses me off and off that I just give up on the recipe. Even though I know it’s on the page, between the 5,000 word essay trying to convey their nostalgia for the recipe and the 27 different ads that break that 5,000 word essay into 25 pages, I’d rather DDOS them then get the recipe from them.
They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.
Which is great, offsets us who do use adblocks. It would be awful if majority of users would use adblocks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Then apple would whip out their giant throbbing cock and smack them with it because they want people using safari.
Visit about:compat. Sites already do that. Firefox can deal.
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.
That’s the problem. Google is working so that there’s not going to be a next thing.
There always is a next thing. It’s called Gemini and it has the problem of guys like Google fixed by having a non-extensible standard.
I’m not joking, too - sometimes even wide masses become practical and just want “no bullshit” Internet publishing. Which Gemini delivers.
But - would be interesting to have something like Gemini, but serverless.
That is concerning, but Internet Explorer used to be the only option too. Of course things are different now, but I have faith (for lack of anything else).
That was for a different reason, though. That was Microsoft forcing you to use their software on something you owned. A website can say, “you have to use chrome to access our site,” and that’s not antitrust behavior on the part of Google.
Thats the thing.
There is basically no alternative. Firefox exists on the mercy of google which is its biggest donor.
There are very few attempts at a truly open source browser and neither can tackle the biggest problem, which is google pushing websites to adopt their standards, weaponizing ad income to guarantee compliance.
Currently more then 80% of internet users have a chromium browser while websites creation for many entities is often outsourced out of lack of own IT knowledge. When firefox dies there will be no economic insensitive to build sites accessible by anything but chromium.
Low key i wish this fires back into anarchy. I hate the corporate web and the only sites i like to see are those free of economic insensitive and all in on an ethical free digital world.
Incentive
try changing your user-agent to mock chrome in Firefox while you visit YouTube.
you should see a drastic difference in UX.
I tried YouTube in Chrome on desktop (for about 2 minutes) and I didn’t notice any difference. I’ll just keep using NewPipe on my phone though.
it takes a whole 10 extra seconds for the interface to be usable for me in Firefox. but not when I spoof the user-agent as chrome.
at least that’s how it was about 4 months ago.
Do you use YouTube?
NewPipe exclusively. YouTube has been unusable long before I fully moved back to FireFox.
Smart choice. YouTube has been fucking Firefox users for a while now. Implementing stuff like a 5s wait to load videos.
Maybe part of the monopoly ruling will have chrome taken away from them.
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.
times of website incompatibility are long gone.
cries in dev
I’ve cried also in dev a lot in the past, but mostly don’t cry so much anymore
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.
firefox.exe -P -no-remote
Yep so happy with Firefox having switched back a couple years ago.
some people dont want firefox bcs its kinda slower then chromium based tbh but it aint bad am not saying firefox is bad
They’re not that different any longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883
Oh
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 have to use their browser for telehealth and virtual teller banking access.
Sadly these are also things that require better security.
Yup. Firefox doesn’t work for me unfortunately, so I have to maintain Chrome on at least one device for these things
I use Firefox for some teleconferencing, but my therapist’s software only works on chrome
Hey, member when you always had to have IE for one of “those” sites and it was basically just an awful browser everyone was forced to have like as a legal requirement or something?
Heh. IE. Then when you’d use it to download firefox it’d say “Nooooo! Wait! I’m teh Best Browser!!” Hahahahah
IE. Ded.
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.
TIL Firefox doesn’t support HEVC. Hadn’t really noticed that before, I guess it’s why some Jellyfin streams started transcoding for me.
It is supported in the nightly build and full support is in the works currently.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/hevc-support/idc-p/63424/highlight/true#M36557
Neither does it support HDR content
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
I use MS teams for meetings every day at work, in Firefox, in Linux. It’s nice that even the camera works when I need it to.
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.
It’s so frustratingly annoying. I primarily use Firefox, but switch to Chrome for specific Google services on my mobile. Once in a while, the search suggests I take a photo? Why?
Y’all got any more of that data?
/Google
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 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.
From what I’ve heard, they only “removed” uBlock Origin Lite. Normal uBO is still up.
Actually, they flagged UBO Lite and the dev removed it himself in a fit of pique.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2474353/popular-ad-blocker-removed-from-firefox-extension-store.html
and they only flagged it because it violated privacy rules
No. It didn’t. That’s why he was upset. Mozilla even admit this. Did you read the article or what?
“Mozilla later admitted in an email that they had made a mistake regarding the extension, but Hill has ultimately decided to cease development of the uBlock Origin Lite add-on for Firefox.”
Except they didn’t… If you read more than headlines
The one they removed isn’t relevant until Firefox also removes manifest V2 which they have no plans for.
Firefox has a different manifest v3 that still retains webrequest functionality, so even when they do switch over it’ll be fine.
shrugs in books
They have no idea how stubborn I am.
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?
one might say that this piece of news is the… canary… in the coal mine?
I used to recommend uBlock as a no-brainer, now folks really need to change towards a better browser.
Or get network wide blocking. Doesn’t prevent everything but it does prevent most ads. Makes the internet tolerable at least.
Pihole is good for a private network, but you can forget it in a work setting, especially corporate networks.
nah, lets get them switched away from chromium based spy machines.
Not everyone can. Work machines for instance.
Can’t install extensions on a work machine but you can add a network wide blocker?
Possibly, if you work from home
Wouldn’t a company VPN bypass all that even though you are using your own internet connection to connect to the outside world?
Typically yes, assuming that the company VPN sets DNS to a set of company DNS servers. That is how my company’s works and several others I’ve worked for in the past.
Maybe, I guess I don’t know enough to answer that. I do know that being on a company VPN isn’t always a requirement, though.
Either way, I’m not trying to argue for one approach to ad blocking over another as a one-size-fits-all solution, I just wanted to point out that it’s possible to have more control over the network than the computer in some cases.
sadly, agreed. mindshare leads to adoption, tho - so putting Firefox in front of more faces is always a positive. after all, its how google dominates.
Depends on how lax the IT department is when it comes to random executables. I was able to move the firefox installer to the appdata root, and run a non-admin install to my user profile.
Something like NextDNS as a no-brainer? It works but hits the limit of the free tier if people use it beyond their phone.
PiHole and a TailScale exit node so you can use it for DNS whether or not you’re on your home network.
Or a variation of this is TailScale configured to use NextDNS and a TS exit node. That’s for anyone who doesn’t want to maintain a PiHole. I’ve done both. Personal choice.
ControlD then.
I recommended pihole to my senior webdeveloper. She didn’t know about it and was blown away by the concept. She installed it immediately and is now living happily ad free.
How many times has this been announced already?
Think of it as an iceberg & Chrome users as a boat.
Assuming no changes, this is landing in Chrome Canary now, so we’re watching the Chrome Canary boat hit the iceberg. The Chrome Beta boat is going to hit in a few weeks. Finally the Chrome Stable boat is scheduled to hit in mid November.
Now Google may choose to hold back actually enabling this flag immediately. It wouldn’t be the first delay. But likely in mid November is when all the posts will start to appear of people asking where their ad blocker went.
(Although I’m guessing it actually is delayed until after the holidays and in the new year, but that’s just wild speculation.)
Yes