I've tried switching so many times, most recently yesterday.
Every time something just doesnt work or is missing. Yesterday it was stremios web client that refused to show the video that I was simultaneously watching in chrome.
And the fact that Firefox doesnt do tab groups. Such a convenient feature for me, and I couldnt find an extension that did the job. Maybe some of you can help?
How long until Google starts paying sites to require chrome? The already tried rolling that concept out a few months ago. They only stopped because of the backlash that was publicly associated with it. They already pay major phone manufacturers to have google as their default or only search option.
So who's going to stop them when we start finding that major popular sites suddenly don't work on firefox?
People could start configuring their sites to ban Google Chrome. Give a scary message that says something like "Google Chrome is not allowed on this site for your protection. Google Chrome has severe vulnerabilities that allow for easy infection. An autistic teenager was falsely convicted of selling CP after being infected and now must register for life."
People would switch away from Google Chrome incredibly fast if website owners started posting that.
They won't pay them it will be smarter than that. Possibly with proprietary APIs that only work on chrome etc. some sites already don't work on Firefox.
They'll also further enshitifiy their own services on non chrome browsers.
I just can't get used to Firefox. Last time I tried it (earlier this year), I tried for 2 months. Can't remember all the reasons, but using the adresbar as calculator and see the results without pressing enter is so ingrained in my way of working. Just alt+d, 2+2 shows the result. Give me something better than that and I'll give Firefox an other shot.
Edit: lol at my downvotes. That's what I get for asking a genuine question I guess. People really looove their Firefox here. (me too, but I'm missing some features)
I would love to see this happen but I suspect that the number of users who actually install ad blocker extensions and are willing to switch to a new browser once they stop working is fairly insignificant compared to the total numbers of people browsing in Chrome.
Agree, i have rarely seen people who actually use adblock outside my work. I had to practically tie up my entire family, in-laws included to get ublock installed on all their computers.
Eh, when Chrome first came out, Firefox was incredibly clunky and slow in comparison.
At least it was for me, which was why I switched back then.
Google's YouTube shenanigans earlier this year got me back to Firefox though, and the more Google does crap like this the more I'm thinking my next phone may take me back to the Appleverse.
People keep saying (and corpos keep believing) that normies will just "get used to the ads or pay a premium"
But everybody has a breaking point. People who already dislike it have left chrome or are in the rush to leave. Once people reach this point, they will start asking their more tech savvy friends or the Internet for a better way.
I honestly hope Google will not change its trajectory because sooner or later, people will get fed up with their bullshit.
I paid for YouTube premium for quite a while but cancelled because it wouldn't stop recommending the same video I've "not interested" for too many times, and also for pushing far right propaganda and pseudo science when all I watch is gaming related content and some space and engineering content.
Browsing the Internet without add blockers literally breaks the pages and makes one vulnerable to malware.
Would you like to rewatch this video you already watched? i even removed the fact it has been previously played?
No? How about now? Or now?
Sometimes youtube's recommendations are excellent, serving interesting woodworking or tech videos, other time it just shovels me the same drivel over and over.
Never thought this would be the thing that drove me to degoogled myself, but here we are. I put myself back in an apple silo purely out of spite. Converted all my gmails to other services, like hey.com and tutanota, I PAY a search engine now Kagi.com.
At least Android actually gives you freedom. What other alternatives (that actually work) are there? I'd rather have a phone with an OS made by an evil corp that I can actually control, than an OS that doesn't even let me install apps not approved by the manufacturer.
Using a degoogled LineageOS was great. It’s just that the world around it has changed so much that doing certain things wasn’t really viable any more. Having a phone like that in 2010 would have been awesome, but nowadays it’s really inconvenient. Nowadays, there are some highly unfortunate software needs that don’t quite fit with this philosophy any more.
I didn’t come up with the idea that my bank requires an app, and that the app absolutely requires an OEM phone with a normal Android and GAPPS. They started requiring that nonsense, which put me in a tight spot. Do I decide to live without money or will I switch to an inferior OS.
There are also some nice to have apps that came up with similar stupid decisions. Living without them means living in the past, and I would be ok with that too. Getting a minor inconvenience in return of having more privacy is ok with me. Suffering significant inconveniences is not OK. I had to draw the line somewhere, which unfortunately meant switching away from LineageOS.
I went with iOS, because IMO it’s the least bad option out there. I made some horrible compromises, but at least I can live in 2023 like everyone else. I’m not at all happy with this decision, but at least iOS isn’t half as infuriating as it used to be 10 years ago.
Well.. for now at least. Who’s to say that won’t be the next thing on their list. They do make a pretty penny on the play store as is, and could improve that if they banned side-loading.
And let’s be honest, side-loading is probably a niche thing still.
They make fantastic services that are far more functional than their oss competitors and it's far far less effort than hosting and dealing with that bullshit.
Cannot disagree more. I’ve found Google services to be terrible in comparison to their competitors. Don’t get me started on privacy. Ironically, you’re saying they’re better in the same article that says they’re removing adblockers. Which is clearly not better.
It didn't start that way, it wasn't until they had dominance in multiple areas that they started fucking their customers, but the difference here is that it's stupid easy to change to Firefox, Safari, or gasp Edge.
Edge is chromium. And safari is still apple only. So you're last sentence is wrong, but it is indeed super easy to switch to Firefox, or another non-chromium based browser.
I use it for some tasks at work that don't function correctly on Firefox (for whatever reason our local intranet doesn't play nice with FF) but other than that, I am almost exclusively using Firefox.
Now if someone can come up with a better search engine than Google....
That's the only reason why I have a Chrome install, sometimes some pages (it's always store pages) don't work correctly on Firefox, but that's becoming more rare.
I use it for a couple things, although my primary browser is Firefox. I use Google Workspace for my business so I have a Chrome profile set up for that. Another business I’m involved with uses M365. It’s easy to set up another Chrome profile for that. I like to keep work separate from my personal stuff and this setup works well for me.
I use Chrome, but Firefox on my android phone. I have had ublock origin installed since the beginning. I only really use it because I manage my YouTube and Google accounts through it, and its handy for sending tabs between my macbook and PC, as well as the various other workflow features I've come to rely on over the last decade or so.
Though I recently heard this was a feature on Firefox now. I used to use Firefox prior to chrome, about 15 or so years ago. I've been intending to switch back recently but haven't got round to it yet.
I have Chrome configured as my default browser, armed to the teeth against any possible misbehaviour such as no Javascript. Anything that tries to open a website automatically goes there, and if it wants to work properly has to get onto my whitelist or gets its URL copypasted into Firefox.
I use Firefox as my main browser. It doesn't seem to like not being my default browser and complains regularly about it, but there's no way to explain my setup to it so I have to keep saying "no" to the prompt (to be fair it's only at update time when this happens, and even then it's occasional so no big deal). JS is on by default but I still have uBO, Enhancer for YT, I don't care about cookies, and a few other extensions.
A year later, Google is restarting the phase-out schedule, and while it has changed some things, Chrome will eventually be home to inferior filtering extensions.
Google's blog post says the plan to kill Manifest V2, the current format for Chrome extensions, is back on starting June 2024.
The company says: "We expect it will take at least a month to observe and stabilize the changes in pre-stable before expanding the rollout to stable channel Chrome, where it will also gradually roll out over time.
On the high end now for me, Slack is drinking 500MB, while a single Google Chat tab, created by this company that is so concerned about performance, is at 1.5GB of memory usage.
Google is adding a completely arbitrary limit on how many "rules" content filtering add-ons can include, which are needed to keep up with the nearly infinite ad-serving sites that are out there (by the way, Ars Technica subscriptions give you an ad-free reading experience and make a great holiday gift!).
Mozilla's blog post on the subject promises "Firefox’s implementation of Manifest V3 ensures users can access the most effective privacy tools available like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions."
The original article contains 714 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Ok, I get all the hate towards google chrome. But pragmatically speaking, will this boost firefox? I feel like even nowadays a ton of people don't even know about adblockers, I'm not sure if they will do the switch to a whole different browser...
DON'T USE ADBLOCKERS!!! Don't know what they are? Good! They're super dangerous and will give you cancer. Don't research adblockers. Whatever you do don't install them. It's impossible to block ads anyway!
Thank you for the info!! Still, given the current status of the web, 42% seems like too little. I guess it's just a matter of waiting for the word to spread even more
Talk about misunderstanding your user base... The backlash will be tremendous. I'm considering banning Chrome at work because of the security risk of letting business people use the Internet without the protection of an ad blocker.