I hate to be a pessimist but if people hate Musk as much as they seem to, but can’t leave twitter,
or post “Fuck Spez” thousands of times, but won’t leave reddit,
I’m cautious about how much of an exodous I expect to see from chrome.
I think its time we face the fact that most people will trade almost anything for convenience.
The piece that gets continuously underestimated is who moves in these small initial jumps. It tends to be the more technically inclined, who over the next couple years, their recommendations will lead to friends and family moving as well, at a slower rate.
The piece that gets continuously underestimated is who moves in these small initial jumps. It tends to be the more technically inclined, who over the next couple years, their recommendations will lead to friends and family moving as well, at a slower rate.
Sure. And here we are. I’m sure these companies consider us a real fly in the ointment. But I’m not inclined to believe the past is perfectly predictive of the future. What you described is also, in my perspective, how things have gone in the past. But will it happen the same way this time? I don’t know. I’m not confident based on what I’ve seen. They are trying to close in the walls on the internet and they are confident that people are too lazy to stop them.
If Internet Explorer managed to fall from 96% market share to complete irrelevance, Chrome is not immortal either.
You arent wrong. But, acectdata and mine own, convenience drove that. People are fucking lazy and hate nothing more than to be inconvenienced. When chrome was getting traction, explorer was trasshhhhhhhhh and every one knew it.
Chrome might be a bit bloated but its no explorer. If it doesn’t hurt people to stay, I don’t think we’ll see a shift.
Back then internet users werent normies, but nreds and tech savy people. Also, chrome learned from IE’s mistakes. It wont stop functioning and will keep updating, so the average normy user wont mind.
With the way every site is these days, removing adblock is worse than not functioning
I genuinely don’t know how Ill use the web without ad block. Cause I damn sure ain’t going back to paying for anti-virus like in the 90’s for a web experience that is objectively worse and less magical enough to risk it.
Drive by malware and viruses from ads has gotten scarily good at infecting systems without you knowing. It’s worse than ever as it’s not just a sketchy site issue thing anymore either. Even reputable sites have ads that only take one misclick to infect you now
Times have changed. The userbase that dropped IE was a vastly different one. With the internet being more accessible and more alluring to the massed (i.e. because of social media) convenience is king.
You made me proud of myself! I have left all three!
They better watch out. There are dozens of us. Dozens!
I shamefully still use chrome for work hehe
I cannot leave Twitter as I never used it.
Browsers at least, unlike social networks, don’t benefit from networking effects. How many people use a specific browser doesn’t directly affect the usefulness of that browser, as users of different browsers can interact with each other to the same degree as users of the same browser. For now at least, as Google’s Web Integrity API could obviously change that if websites start to require and some browser are unable or unwilling to provide it.
How many people use a specific browser doesn’t directly affect the usefulness of that browser, as users of different browsers can interact with each other to the same degree as users of the same browser. For now at least, as Google’s Web Integrity API could obviously change that if websites start to require and some browser are unable or unwilling to provide it.
Thats a great point and something to consider.
True. I MUST use Edge at work and honestly, its fine. Its not some radical departure from Firefox, i dont have to think too hard about the differences.
I switched to Firefox on windows and android on the same day as I saw that WEI bullshit.
I don’t know why the fuck I was thinking it would be a worse experience… It’s the same thing.
Pessimist, but most likely right
It is a slow process, most will still use it, but it will be less and less as time passes.
Twitter is a different beast, most of the people you follow on twitter are only active in certain groups.
All we can do is inform them and focus on what we do, no need to be stuck on what others do.
I just switched yesterday after learning more about why I should here in Lemmy.
The last time I tried FF (many years ago) it was incredibly slow, so I went with chrome. But the FF of today is actually noticably quicker.
Yeah being able to import all my stuff from chrome to Firefox was so clutch, now I just have to find a good day to spend getting the rest of my shit out of google’s hands and get this pixel phone to run grapheneOS.
Why should I switch? Just curious.
Privacy and not being part of Google would be the biggest reason.
It also looks kinda nice, in my opinion.
It’s also faster than chrome now I think.
It’s also faster than chrome now I think.
Resource management is much better. Chrome will max out the RAM, which slows down the browser. Firefox handles that 100x better.
Apart from privacy concerns, Google has started to add some really bad features to Chrome, such as “Manifest V3” and “Web Environment Integrity”. These limit your ability to block ads or generally modify the websites you’re visiting, and are just a bad for the web as a whole. WEI is basically DRM for the web, so Google checks your device and denies you access to websites if they don’t like it. But as long as the majority of people keep using Chrome they can just force these things onto everyone.
My friggin’ Chromebook (which works great) can’t install FF.
I’ve tried rooting into Ubuntu, but, I can’t get it all straightened out. Until I notice truly diminished issues… I’ll use Chromebook as is.
You have 3 options:
- Enable Linux container and install FF in Linux: https://chromeos.dev/en/linux/setup
- Install FF from Play Store
- If your Chromebook is old enough to not be capable of either, then you can wipe ChromeOS and install Linux bare-metal. mrchromebox.tech
Not even as an Android app? I’ve run Firefox from crostini as well but the Android approach is a lot easier.
I tried FF earlier this year. It sucked. Everything just took extra clicks. The password manager was a pain and didn’t interact with my phone apps properly.
I know the complaints against chrome. When it starts forcing me to watch ads I might try FF again.
Hey, at least installing a foss browser won’t slow down your phone like a spyware app, you could always try something like Mull even for only a portion of your browsing if you have ~80MB to spare. I suggest it because I hate some of that extra bullshit that comes with standard Firefox. Also there’s tons of projects that try similar stuff with Chromium! Like Mulch. Way better defaults than Chrome
Depending on which Chromebook it is, you can always install the Linux container and install it in there
The Android FF is not a great user experience for sure. On desktop it’s just fine but Android is janky. I tolerate anyway to support Firefox but chrome is miles better on mobile.
I can’t believe people still use Chrome, Firefox is better by a mile.
Idk, I’ve used both browsers and I prefer Chrome in terms of features and UI. But it’s not worth the privacy you get with Firefox
in terms of features
Like what? I can understand UI because that’s a personal preference but there’s nothing that Chrome does that Firefox doesn’t. Hell, allowing you to download app extensions on mobile browsers is a game changer. No ads and background play on YT has changed my life
I use Firefox now and have most of this year.
One thing that annoyed me was how much more awkward it is to switch between two user profiles .
In chrome I have a work email a personal email, each with its own account, and a different look. I can immediately tell which I’m using, and can switch between them with the button at the top right.
I managed to mess around and find an extension which kind of does the same thing, so I’m no longer missing the feature, but it’s definitely jankier and doesn’t work as smoothly.
Also, I don’t know if it’s a bitwarden issue, but autofill hardly ever works properly.
Sometimes I want to pull a tab into its own window on the other screen. You’re not allowed to do this when the browser is full screen, only when it’s windowed. Annoying.
These are my only issues with firefox I can think of.
I personally really miss being able to group tabs. I don’t think you’re able to do it on Firefox, right?
Firefox has extensions that can help with this, but I find the way Chrome does it extremely useful. I’d still choose Firefox, but there are certainly a couple of features that Chrome has that can be helpful
I put in a good faith effort to switch to FF earlier this year. I really wanted to like it. I consider myself an expert user to so it wasn’t just “I didn’t know what I was doing.” I recently switched back to Chrome. I hope FF gets better because I don’t like recent Chrome news.
Lol, to me you seem more of a bullshit user than an expert user. No offense…
same problem we had back in the ie5/6 days: it was just there and most people don’t care. i physically cringe when i watch co-workers using chrome with not even a basic adblocker installed, klicking away ads, promts, pop-ups, videos and whatnot just to access a news article. it’s horrible!
I’m forced to use either Chrome or Edge for my work computer and it drives me crazy.
I’m forced to use either Chrome or Edge for my work computer and it drives me crazy.
I’ve been a Sysadmin for a ~decade. I can state with 100% certainty that the reason behind that decision is that you can very easily configure Group Policy to control the behavior and visibility/availability of features in Chrome and Edge. Firefox didn’t have that until just a couple of years ago, and it wasn’t great when it first became available. And to be honest, it’s still not fully baked, but it’s at least usable now from an administrative perspective.
Maybe bring it up to your IT department and include this link in the email/ticket.
Yeah, I’ve been using Firefox exclusively for ages. And also Duckduckgo, I just can’t stand the excessive of Google’s captcha since I always use VPN.
IDK man, Chrome UI is kinda plain
I’d use it exclusively, but there’s no Ad Blocker for it on iOS, and I don’t want to run an ad blocking VPN all the time. I also don’t like how there’s no official PWA support on desktop.
Chrome doesn’t support extensions at all on iOS, only Safari does - because of Apple. Firefox would absolutely support extensions and use Gecko on Ios if Apple let them.
The heck? UBlock works on Mac- ohhh is this an M1/M2 thing I was unaware of?
But there is strict tracking protection which acts like a slightly degraded ad blocker. It has blocked everything except YouTube ads and “you have ad blocker enabled” pop ups for me.
Showing people that they can avoid ads by switching from chromium might make more people use adblockers.
I get flabbergasted whenever I talk to someone and realize they’re unaware that such things exist. I hope all (according to the google store entry for ublock origin) 10,000,000 of the ublock origin users switches from chromium based browsers to, say, firefox…
Feels like chromium is the new internet explorer…
That’s why Google is trying to launch the “Web Integrity API” that will essentially allow them to mandate any website accessible to or using Google Services to ban browsers that have ad blockers.
To me it looks like a tech savy kind of hurdle, once people learn about it and start thinkering they start to use it also.
Better for us when people start caring for what they tolerate from corps.
Firefox Mobile is great, Being able to add extensions is just wonderful.
Honestly I cant live without UBlock Origin after using it for so long. The modern web is so horrible with ads
Try branch -u origin/main /s
The available extensions are limited, but tampermonkey gives you access to lots of custom extension opportunities, I use it to make Twitter bearable.
They just announced that all extensions will be available for Firefox Mobile by the end of the year.
Didn’t they say that any dev is able to port them to mobile?
You wish that was happening.
I’m preparing to be completely unsurprised that Firefox’s market share will still be at 3% next month and the month after that.
I alway wonder how underreported the Firefox figures are by things like that its users are generally more technical/privacy aware (so are blocking the trackers that report these numbers) and also spiders and bots often pretend to to Chrome (inflating those numbers).
If I had to choose between a tracked, ad-filled experience and a slower, protected experience, I would go back to 1990s style Internet in a second.
Slower? I think browsers are all pretty much on par these days.
The killer feature Firefox needs to implement is profile switching.
You may know this, but firefox does support multiple profiles. I regularly open it with
firefox -p "PROFILENAME"depending on whether I’m working or not. you can go to about:profiles to manage the different profiles.Do containers not fit that bill for you?
I find Containers to be very clunky to use. I love the idea, but not being able to just send a tab, cookies, session and everything to a Container is a PITA.
How would that work though? If you start outside a container how can you decide what to isolate to put into one?
You can right click to move a tab to a container, it seems plausible that you could have an option to move the cookies to that container too
Interesting. I didn’t know that.
Hahaha, the wild west!
A few years back when Firefox went through the whole “Quantum” update, I jumped and never looked back. It’s just better in every way, in my opinion.
I use it on my laptop, but it’s crap on my phone. My phone is pretty old now, I use opera. I know, no one likes opera, but I’ve used it that long now I find it difficult to jump across. I tried again recently, but it’s still too slow.
Isn’t Opera Chromium now too?
Yep it has been for a while.
Was it previously not Chromium?
It used to use a browser engine called Presto, but they dropped it in 2013.
I learned something today, thanks
I think firefox should ship with ublock origin installed. (Perhaps also containers).
Hopefully then more people will migrate faster
At least tracking protection should be set to strict, iirc on default setting it barely blocks any ads.
Strict tracking protection makes Firefox on Android a ton faster, especially on any website owned by Google or any link that has a Google wrapper (e.g. clicking a link on the Gmail app)
Strict protection on iOS was literally the difference between “I can use this phone” and “brick”. I had an old iPhone, 6 Plus, and Safari lagged to death because it tried to load ads. Firefox didn’t.
Try Orion for iOS, it has better ad blocking
Thanks for recommendation, YT adblock is interesting.
Does that make a difference if you already have the PrivacyBadger extension?
According to this GitHub discussion PrivacyBadger is pretty much redundant if you use uBlock Origin, can even hinder performance and cause opposite effect than expected.
That would be awesome!
What’s the advantage for google of doing this move? People “savy” enough to install an adblock (or even know that it exists) is most likely to switch to a competitor that allows for adblocking
Majority will keep using, for a while, until years later more see what has happened and move.
Mean while profits on marketing go up.
Mhm, I see that point, although I find it concerning given that the quality of the UX platforms like youtube has kept a consistent decline over the past decade. It feels like google keeps amassing more and more reasons for people to enable adblockers but I also understand youtube needs to be a profitable business and at some point you need to show ads
True, these are the challenges of freeware, ads are required unless you pay or become a pirate.
Youtubers/social media now mostly have promotions within videos, so we went back to how cable functions.
Thoughts on Social media/Rumble/twitter and other video platforms will evolve over time?
I think Alphabet (Google) will keep doing things that make people leave there other platforms, youtube will take a while so changes will be more gradual.
As a small note, in an unexpected turn of events, that “sponsor block” extension popped up also blocking promotions, I find it incredibly amazing that blocking ads can even go that further
I can’t put my finger on it, but somehow I feel like youtube is irreplaceable, I don’t say this out of some internet patriotism, I just think the initial momentum of inertia really has to be massive to make it budge, while with fediverse-stuff you can gradually generate content and maybe some people will be attracted (?)
And twitter’s trajectory is to fucking weird and unpredictable right now that I just have no clue 🙃🙃🙃
Everything is replaceable. Nothing should live forever.
Awesome, I did not know blocking sponsers was a thing, wow.
Yes, you are right, youtube will be harder to leave for people, but Tiktok/twitter/etc. are grabbing the attention away from yt.
They all are trying to keep you on their platform as much as possible, for ads and data collection.
The new big thing may be bettet at that…?
Thanks for your input!
Oh yes, you’re right, tiktok is really eating youtube’s meal… and about the new big thing, hums, I’m not sure how it would look like 🤔
Thank you for your input as well!! 🙌🏻✨
TikTok is definitely hitting for certain demographics, but YouTube is still king in the long form department and I don’t see that changing unless they completely alienate their watchers and creators or someone comes along and offers significantly more money (to creators).
Google has gone to absolute shit. Unless you let them stick their hand down your pants and fondle you, you can’t even use their search engine with out getting hit with a captcha so they can use browser fingerprinting to track you. We were all hearded into the slaughter house and they are just now starting up the kill machines.
I believe it’s a two-pronged attack.
They have the Trust API changes they are trying to push, which I believe they may try to make websites only support browsers using that API. They have a largest user base already so they have some sway, if Chrome won’t load your webpage, you business might be dead.
Couple that with their anti ad blocking extension, users have to use Chrome to access webpages and can’t block ads on those pages.
Mildly tinfoil-hatty, but I think within the realm of possibility.
In the old days I used Firefox exclusively, until my work started only supporting chrome so I kinda went with it and switched. Out of habit I continued until a couple of years ago, that I went full Firefox again and I remembered why I loved it.
Google: Not this time
unleashes web integrity API
people when they learn about unlock origin works better with firefox
I bet most people saying chrome is faster don’t even know about adblockers or are using Google’s websites
When I made the switch I was shocked at well it blocks ads. It still surprises me to this day. Yeah, it takes a little longer to load, but I couldn’t care less.
First time? :)
I wish, it keeps happening on everything from politics to electronics to IRL.
I started using Firefox as my browser at work because I hate trying to use profiles and I’m a convert! It’s really great!
Nice!
