- cross-posted to:
- google@lemmy.world
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- google@lemmy.world
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.world
Clearly, Google is serious about trying to oust ad blockers from its browser, or at least those extensions with fuller (V2) levels of functionality. One of the crucial twists with V3 is that it prevents the use of remotely hosted code – as a security measure – but this also means ad blockers can’t update their filter lists without going through Google’s review process. What does that mean? Way slower updates for said filters, which hampers the ability of the ad-blocking extension to keep up with the necessary changes to stay effective.
(This isn’t just about browsers, either, as the war on advert dodgers extends to YouTube, too, as we’ve seen in recent months).
At any rate, Google is playing with fire here somewhat – or Firefox, perhaps we should say – as this may be the shove some folks need to get them considering another of the best web browsers out there aside from Chrome. Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has vowed to maintain support for V2 extensions, while introducing support for V3 alongside to give folks a choice (now there’s a radical idea).
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I’m wondering how Apple will handle this in Safari.
Waiting for Mozilla to shoot their own foot again
Make sure to shit on them every fucking time anyone says the name “Mozilla”, that’ll help us not have anything except Chrome in a couple years.
It’s fine, there are open source projects underway. If any one of them gains traction, it could happen to Mozilla what happened to Unity with Godot. Here’s to hoping they get their act straight sooner tan later.
Oh, bullshit. There is nothing that has 1/100th of the effort that goes into gecko, because maintaining a web browser is ridiculously difficult. You’re living in a dreamworld if you think any other project is within a lightyear of Firefox.
idk why people think that these foss projects will be fully finished super quickly every time mozilla or google does some stupid shit. firefox exists solely because of googles funding due to web browsers being expensive/difficult to maintain. the effort being made for ladybird is amazing, but holy shit we are NOT gonna be at the ‘firefox and chrome alternative’ level unless they gain massive funding.
maybe i should get back into gemini
👍
Didn’t they just announce recently that they were going to work more with advertisers? https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-advertising/
How to improve online advertising: Step 1: remove all online advertising
People completely misunderstand this feature (which is only a temporary prototype anyways), and I think that’s entirely Mozilla’s fault. They do a really poor job explaining it.
Usually ad networks implement sophisticated tracking, which works in a highly invasive way. They need the telemetry to watch their campaigns. Firefox now offers the option to collect a minimal amount of data for them and inform the network indirectly.
This is a good thing for the end user. The trackers are not needed, you gain privacy. Disabling the option makes it so you’re instantly tracked MORE.
Mozilla shouldn’t have staged this as an opt-out of the new system. You actually OPT-IN to networks running their old scripts on your machine to collect your telemetry:
[ ] Allow ad networks to run their own telemetry
(Beta functionality, some advertisers may still run their own trackers, even when this option is disabled.)
That would be the same thing, but communicate what it’s doing.
The fact that advertisers like Meta might be on board with this should be exciting to people. That they are even considering giving up so much data and now only receive a single number of impressions per campaign is very unexpected.
Also, none of this matters if you block ads anyways. If you don’t load the ad, neither the networks script runs its telemetry, nor does Firefox increase the counter for the campaign id.
If you’re wondering what’s every involved party’s gain in this, an interesting read is the IPA white paper, where the overall design targets for the system are stated: Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA), 2022
In particular:
In designing IPA, we set out to find a win-win-win solution for cross platform attribution measurement that met our goals across privacy, utility, and competition.
• Privacy: data collected about the user is minimized, protecting the end-users privacy. • Utility: the telemetry process is unified and simplified across all platforms, reducing the costs • Competition: it will be an open, standardized system, accessible to everyone
Just to be clear, I dislike the way Mozilla rolled this out. They already have a “Studies” checkmark that people can enable if they wish to participate in stuff like this. That Mozilla treats this prototype differently is actually not ok, and breaks trust with their users. But as far as I’m concerned, this is a completely separate topic from the update content, which I wish to be successful.
Firefox now offers the option to collect a minimal amount of data for them and inform the network indirectly.
This is a good thing for the end user.
I’m not sure that collecting data is actually a good thing for the end user, but to each their own I suppose.
Yeah, the reason they could be collecting data, is to feed it to an AI.
i think the key word is option
It’s an improvement over the current systems. Incremental improvements to the state of things can be a good thing too.
again?
Before chrome became massively popular, Firefox was very popular. ie was still the most used browser back then
What about waiting for Google to shoot their own foot again, even though that already has happened numerous times?
They just did, they are gonna work more with advertisers.
When is this happening? I’ve been telling my wife and kid that they need to stop using chrome for a year, but ublock is still working for them and blocking YouTube ads. They are the type that won’t switch until it becomes a problem for them.
I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.
Why did they let an extension that blatantly undermines their goals onto the chrome store in the first place?
It sorta protected Chrome’s monopoly in the browser world for years. Now that they’ve established that monopoly firmly, it’s time to crack down on things that diminish monetisation.
aka the “extinguish” phase I believe
We need to add a fourth E:
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Enshittify.
Embrace
Extend
Extinguish <-- you are here
One of the reasons why I left chomium based browsers even ungoogled chromium (I use chromium alongside firefox but mainly firefox)
Browsers with in built adblocker or system wide AdGuard.
DNS ad blockers are not sufficient to block all ads and often overly broad. So they have much higher rate of false positives and negatives compared to in-browser ad blockers. Differentiating between ads and useful content based on domain names will become more and more difficult. Both might use some url from the same cloud provider, and blocking those breaks a lot of stuff.
AdGuard is not a DNS blocker
Maybe you are looking for SpamGuard, TrojanGuard, VirusGuard, MalwareGuard, SpywareGuard, RansomWareGuard, etc. instead.
It’s both a browser extension and a DNS filter.
https://adguard-dns.io/kb/general/dns-filtering/#how-does-dns-filtering-work
Edit: It seems the apps can act as a VPN to filter traffic.
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You where talking about “system wide AdGuard”, which is not the browser addon, but an app that uses DNS blocking, be it by either letting people set DNS servers manually, or automatically through VPN. Their VPN does not break TLS connection by inserting custom certificates and MITM proxies, so they cannot read/modifiy content.
It might be possible to use TLS breaking proxies for systemwide ad blocking, but even that wouldn’t help, because nowadays a lot of content and ads are loaded dynamically via javascript. So a browser is required to filter ads.
Or Firefox?
porque no los dos? I use both and there are things uBlock can catch/block that AdGuard Home doesn’t seem to be able to. That said AdGuard makes mobile pages readable, when most these days are a complete nightmare of ads
I was talking about AdGuard, not AdGuard Home.
I misread system wide as network wide. My mistake. FWIW, I still prefer a network wide and browser plugin (ublock and privacy badger) combo.
Those are trash and DNS adblocking does not work on YT either. Garbage advice 0/10
No, you’re wrong.
The lack of HVEC/h.265 support is kind of a deal breaker in firefox (windows nightly builds don’t count as done). I need it to view h.265 security cameras and the occasional movie streamed via browser.
Edit: For those suggesting multiple browsers I could just use Edge if I wanted to… still better compatibility as it is essentially chromium.
I have a list of other things that don’t work reliably in Firefox such as various video conferencing tools so no, I am not going to switch to Firefox as my primary browser again anytime soon.
I was a Firefox user for many years but there are too many daily things I use now that prevent me from using it as a primary browser for work and causal use.
Use Chromium for the security cameras, and use something sensible for all your normal browsing usage?
I guess, but the comment is a direct assertion against Firefox growing from this change. You sort of prove my point by suggestion another sub variant of the chrome ecosystem.
Well I’m guessing you want that codec for a reason, but I would just use something I can actually use in Firefox.
guessing you want that codec for a reason
It is the default most widely used codec for devices and video 4K and higher resolution. It is just what nearly all new / modern cameras come with. You don’t really get a choice.
Cool thing is you can run multiple browsers. So just use Chrome for your cameras and Firefox for everything else.
Why would I use multiple browsers if I can achieve nearly everything in one? I would much rather use Edge or Safari for everything than Firefox plus another browser.
Because Edge has also moved to Manifest V3 and Safari uses WebKit which doesn’t have the same degree of blocking. I mean, you do you, enjoy your ads.
True, but the other argument is just try adblock lite, it works fine… It isn’t as powerful but I would rather have a fully functional daily browser than one with lesser video playback and conferencing functions.
I guess when edge stops supporting v2 you’ll just look at ads then
I won’t
Ad block lite does a good enough job without me changing to be honest, again the point being is that there are more problems with me using Firefox as a primary browser than ad blocking benefits.
Nice try, Satya
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Doesn’t uBlock Origin already have a Manifest V3 version of the extension?
That’s uBlock Origin Lite, which the developer already stated is grossly inadequate for ad blocking.
thr manifest v3 version is basically ublock origin lite, whoch has extremely limited control of what you can and cant do.
uBO Lite.
Not my jam, lacks the power of the original.
Yes, though the devs don’t even like it
Yeah, but it sucks, because of the heavy constraints of MV3
Yes, but capabilities are reduced.
suddenly 20 new chromium forks appear
Huh, where’d those come from, I wonder. 🤔
I just installed Postmarket OS on my Arm based Chromebook, to be able to switch to Firefox.
I downloaded Librewolf today - the privacy oriented fork of Firefox!
Good to see there are browser variants that aren’t just Chrome.
yep firefox with arkenfox for me, same deal as librewolf. And Mull on mobile.
Switched about 2-3 months ago thinking it might be difficult or impact me negatively or something but its been easy and great.
You know the problem I have with Librewolf? – Fuckall nobody knows how to spell it.
The beauty of Firefox is that even the densest idiot knows how to spell those two words. And with attention spans the equivalent of a gnat, people need to have things simplified for them as much as humanly possible.
Fortunately enough, Firefox is about the only one with a renderer that isn’t controlled by Google, but - even now they’re shifting to a pro-advertising stance and backing off of the privacy orientation that they took just a year or two ago.
Yes, and we will drop Mozilla when it drops uBlock as well. We will all get behind whatever open-source browser stops ads, and it will very quickly become the most widely used browser. Why? Because everybody despises fucking ads and you can’t curb-stomp them into liking ads, that’s why.
Google can spend all the money it likes trying to piss on users and tell them it’s raining but at the end of the day, a new king will be crowned and if it isn’t Chrome and it isn’t Firefox, then it will be something else.
And no, FOSS doesn’t need money behind it. FOSS needs a dedicated community behind it. Assertions to the contrary are FUD constantly being seeded by Google, Microsoft and their ilk to destroy competition. This is an existential necessity for Google, you can bet they are doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo.
And no, FOSS doesn’t need money behind it. FOSS needs a dedicated community behind it
how do you imagine a Linux-sized community getting built around firefox in a few days? and even that is a bad example, because a lot of linux devs are paid by their employer from a company anywhere on the world
Nice straw man. Nobody said the community was going to “Linux-sized” nor that it was going to be built in a “few days,” nor that it was going to have paid devs. It’s like you’re being intentionally obtuse.
There are already multiple supported forks of Firefox and while it doesn’t take much to maintain such forks when they are being fed a large part of the codebase by Mozilla, if you think such a project would not pick right the fuck up where Mozilla left off if Mozilla tried to pull a Google and get behind Manifest V3, you are, I believe, mistaken.
Mozilla itself owes its existence to Netscape’s failure in the face of unfair competition by Microsoft’s Explorer. Netscape released its source code, Mozilla was founded and the power of open-source created Firefox. Chrome’s halfhearted support of Mozilla is itself owed to the fact that they don’t want to get spanked over Chrome like Microsoft was over IE.
Until you actually need a chromium based browser. I get so annoyed when this happens.
Almost 20 years and I’ve never needed a Chromium browser for anything. I’m sorry you were forced to use such garbage ass software.
I have chromium installed for the sole reason to cast some streams to my remote TVs. Otherwise it stays closed. I tried some work around with FF, but I couldn’t get it to work. It’s only once or twice a week for live sporting events, so I can stomach it.
I understand where you’re coming from. It’s never happened to me, but if a website didn’t work with Firefox, I would just assume it’s a shit site ran by rookies who know nothing, and move on to a different site. I understand most people don’t have that kind of principle though.
It’s not that the site doesn’t work in FF, it’s that casting the stream from that site to a remote TV in the house is only possible in chromium, at least with my current device setup. If I just watch on my computer, I watch in FF.
Ah, you did say that. I’m sorry for my misunderstanding. I’ve never tried that, and you’re the first I’ve seen to mention it. I concede to your argument.
I’m in the slow process of replacing devices with HTPCs then I won’t need to cast anything. Unfortunately computers and time don’t grow on trees.
As if installing and using something else means you can’t have Chrome lying around for that one stupid website.
And I do. Sometimes I’ll just fire up Edge if Chrome isn’t installed since it’s chromium based.
In what situation do you need one?
I’ve been using Firefox for over a decade and have literally never once needed to open a different web browser. For anything, ever. This is a very common complaint that tons of people seem to have that I have never seen happen even once out in the wild.
I also use Firefox on my work computer, I need to quickly authorize a login in the browser before the local “app” opens (“app” because it’s just a webpage pretending to be an app) and I just recently got a notification that slack won’t support Firefox anymore so please switch to chrome. The fucking animals.
Sounds like Salesforce acting like Salesforce.
Probably slack is going to have to be ditched on the grounds they have decided to ditch Firefox.
Several government websites for the state of Pennsylvania complain and refuse to work if they detect that you aren’t using chrome/edge/safari.
Do the sites work if you use an extension that lies to them about what browser you are using?
You can spoof your useragent to appear as chrome. And you should as it makes your browser less “unique”
While you can do this, it’s not clear to me that you should. There are a number of additional laws having to do with perjury and misusing goverment sites and while I would undoubtedly agree with you, were you to assert the application of those laws to the utilization of a user agent switcher is a ridiculous overreach, I am just as certain I have no desire to be in the hot-seat on the day we all find out.
Oh wow I didn’t know that. I’ll have to double check for the states that are relevant for me.
I imagine many people naively install a privacy extension and unknowingly have altered useragents
Imagine the government coming after someone, demanding they give Google their fair share
Flashing ESPhome devices. I just had to re-flash one via serial the other day and it requires chrome AFAIK.
I use Librewolf on desktop and Mull on mobile. I have a few extensions on both, which could definitely contribute to issues. When I have issues (usually government sites or financial stuff, sometimes DRM-related stuff for media) it’s easier to just use a Chromium-based browser with no extensions than try to troubleshoot specifically what’s causing the issues. I keep Falkon (desktop) and Vanadium (mobile) installed for this purpose.
I get the feeling a lot of issues people are having in Firefox might be due to extensions or settings, which gets “fixed” by using another browser (which happens to be Chromium-based because most browsers are) and they blame the issue on Firefox itself.
Firefox is getting so small it’s starting to disappear out of the testing matrix. Confluence has issues with it, you can’t always log into Vanguard on Firefox, many news website layouts have overlapping elements on Firefox, quite a few shopping websites too (H&M in Europe has a long-standing but with putting stuff in the shopping basket until they revamped their website a couple of months ago). Etc etc. I see it ALL the time.
Chromium isn’t as problematic as Chrome.
There’s still Vivali which is Chromium based and still supporting V2 extension (like uBlock) until June 2025. Its not a full fix, but its a stay of execution. That said, I’m a FF primary user.
I see Vivaldi, I upvote.
I’m already mad about having to potentially abandon my highly customized Vivaldi should ublock lite not work up to my standards
I have no idea why people are downvoting it.
Vivaldi isn’t entirely open source, if that matters to you.
Brave would be my recommendation, I just disable the crypto stuff.
Brave’s CEO is so anti-gay, he dished out 4-figure checks to fight gayness.
I’m not a fan of that, and Brave has issues with being Chromium-based, like Vivaldi.
I’m sorry, but that is an instance of separating the art from the artist, I really don’t care.
this reads like a yo mama joke
Roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open source coming from Chromium, 3% is open source coming from us, which leaves only 5% for our UI closed-source code.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/
Only the UI part is not open source.
Brave is a series scam company.
If people used other browsers, then the market share would change and this would become less and less of a problem.
I already use Firefox full time and recommend others do as well.
constantly, to be honest
I’ve been using librewolf for a several months. Be careful because streaming doesn’t always work on it due to DRM features, and YouTube has been spotty AF. With YouTube it might start the video a couple seconds into it, buffer for no discernable reason, or just skip a few random seconds.
Yeah, I have noticed it too. I sometimes just use mpv instead to play YouTube videos instead, but that also has its limitations
I use firefox but I have to change my useragent string to chrome with an extension to get YouTube working.
Might be worth having a look to see if it fixes your issues
Oh? I noticed that issue last couple of days using invidious on librewolf, and thought it was YT doing invidious shenanigans again.
We’re going to have a serious problem on our hands soon with compatibility. I’m a software dev and I’m already seeing a few issues here and there where Chrome is being treated as the default expected browser and features don’t work on Firefox.
Firefox doesn’t support a fair few Chrome features because of security and privacy reasons, such as WebHID, WebUSB, etc.
Devs, please stop using those features. I know it’s tempting, but they’re basically bribes to encourage you to sell out to Google. Don’t do it.
I just don’t use services that don’t work with Firefox. Easy.
Yep. There are plenty of other ways to do something that don’t require selling out.
What about ad blocking services where you would need them, such as browsing into an ad farm of a website?
I’m using Firefox as my only browser. If everything works in Firefox that’s fine for me.
That’s the best advantage of only making websites / web applications for fun (for friend groups, video games, family etc)
Yeah, but that’s my point, not everything works in Firefox now - even though admittedly it’s relatively niche stuff - and my prediction is that if we continue on our current course Firefox will either have to compromise their commitment to privacy and security or will become more and more unusable.
I saw this quote a while back “if you only make code that works in chrome you aren’t a web developer, you are a google developer.”
We’re going to have a serious problem on our hands soon with compatibility. I’m a software dev and I’m already seeing a few issues here and there where Chrome is being treated as the default expected browser and features don’t work on Firefox.
It’s basically IE6 and ActiveX all over again.
Most “Chrome-only” web applications I have to use I can get around just by changing my user agent string and everything works fine. I try not to use that stuff when I can, though.
This is my experience. They are just taking your default agent and throwing up a message because they can’t be assed to do minimal testing in FF.
Some of the older stuff is indeed that way, but there are more and more features which Firefox can’t support. Web-based custom keyboard configuration tools, tools to flash phone firmware, and one niche MiniDisc tool all are chrome-only things I’ve had to open Chrome to use
we are really really better off without features that grant any website such deep access to our systems just by a single click, trust me. this is a security nightmare, especially looking at people who don’t understand computers and those who instant allow permissions by reflex.
tools to flash phone firmware
Yep. Forgot I had to use Chrome on Windows to flash GrapheneOS.
you don’t have to, there’s no need for that. they have a normal flashing tool too
Wait is this real? That’s hilarious
https://grapheneos.org/install/web#prerequisites
Technically it works on Linux, but I didn’t feel like installing a Chromium browser to do it at the time.
Teams calls for example :( I have chromium on my Debian only for teams.
Teams works in Firefox, I sadly have to use it almost every day interacting with clients who use teams for comms.
One of my company’s customers is a DoD contractor that uses the government version of Teams, which does require Chromium, unfortunately. Or at least, I haven’t found a way to make it work on Firefox yet.
idk what to tell you, calls have no sound.
I’ll try again, though.
But you can’t turn on camera with Teams on Firefox iirc
I’ve not had either of those issues on my laptop, using teams through Firefox. I wonder if there is something else going on there.
Firefox doesn’t support a fair few Chrome features because of security and privacy reasons, such as WebHID, WebUSB
I’m very serious about my opinion that we are better off without them. If the feature does not exist, it cannot be activated by a bug in the permission system, and also the lesser technically inclined people won’t allow them by reflex/accident
Google’s working on fixing that for you right now. That’s more people switch to Firefox and there’s futures don’t work they’ll start complaining to the developers and then to Firefox. Microsoft road the it only works in IE train for a long time and it eventually buried them
There’s no need to wait. Just switch to Firefox now. All the cool kids have already done it.
Some of us never left.
people who used Firefox since high school😎😎
Some of us switched to Chrome when it was legitimately better, but are back now.
i switched to chrome when I was too young to understand anything, and I’m not even sure if it was better for any extent. have switched back 5+ years ago
I was pretty sure manifest v3 had already happened - but when I knew it was coming, I went ahead and switched ahead of time. Came with the extra bonus that now I’m ad free on mobile too! Mobile websites are absolutely filthy with popovers and 2 sentence paragraphs with an ad between every paragraph. I’m sick of it. And unfortunately I spend so much more time browsing the web from my phone these days than my desktop - so when I swapped on pc to Firefox, it was such a relief to have browser extensions on my phone now too.
The cool kids are switching to Librewolf because whatever is happening at Mozilla is increasingly concerning by the day.
Uh-huh. Which uses Mozilla’s renderer. So, all those upstream commits in Libewolf’s code base are coming from where, exactly?
bad changes aren’t really happening in the renderer, are they?
No, but Librewolf and Iceweasel and all the other forks are ultimately wholly dependent on Mozilla and Firefox continuing to exist. If Mozilla techbros themselves into imploding entirely and goes bankrupt, for instance, all of those other fork projects are also by association toast.
I remember the internet before Google, and how game changing it was to have all of the internet indexed in one place (even if that wasn’t actually quite true back then). If you had asked me 15, 10, even 5 years ago if I would be cheering its downfall and yearning for a return to a simpler, far less centralized internet, I would have called you crazy. And yet here we are.
It wasn’t hard to foresee. We knew these kind of things could happen. The internet used to be very out spoken about it. That ethos is long gone. What’s equally disappointing is tech nerds selling out for bigger paychecks.
That’s because the OG visionaries of tech are gone, and have been replaced by MBAs and techbros.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not Google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
