- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- browsers@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- browsers@lemmy.ml
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Firefox my beloved.
Saying this about any corporation’s product is guaranteed not to age well.
I’m grateful for FF, but they also annoy me at times. Just little stuff probably not worth bitching about in detail. But also a peek at the potential for problems that you’re talking about.
So of course I’ll bitch about it.
I call it the “stop whatever you think you’d rather do right now and pay attention to our product” type shit.
Imagine you have a combination wrench and whenever you take it out of the toolbox it starts yammering at you about how great of a wrench it is and all if its shiny features. Fucking ridiculous, right?
So why do we tolerate software that does that?
Way too much software does this pushy shit. Just stay outta my face and do your actual job, software.
Because people have the attention span of a goldfish and if you aren’t reminding them every 5 seconds of the features they have available they’ll forget they do in fact use them and then complain to support because they can’t spend 5 seconds on the help page.
I say this, not in defense of mozilla, but in frustration at having to deal daily with these kinds of issues. You can put giant screen-size arrows on where to go / what single “do the thing” button to press and people will still forget 5 seconds later.
Good point. That’s true, there is definitely that side of it. I think what you’re talking about is less obnoxious than the stuff that feels forced and make-the-boss-happy promotional. Push notifcations for no reason, etc. It’s a spectrum from necessary to uneccessary, and there’s too much of the latter IMO.
We’re so fucking used to ads we don’t even always realize we’re getting pushed propaganda
Mmm mmm mmm, Bill Cosby tells me to love my puddin’ pops!
…i feel sleepy…
Firefox is a foundation, not a corporation. And I’m already using Fennec instead of the official release.
No. Firefox is a product. Mozilla is a corporation AND a foundation.
Yeah, it’s strange just how readily the blinders go up wherever Mozilla is concerned. They’re a corp, just like any other; if they had the money and leverage, they’d be just as aggressive as Google. Have people already forgotten that time they laid off 200+ employees and then gave all the execs bonuses?
E: Apparently y’all have forgotten. In 2021, Mozilla laid off a few hundred employees. CEO’s salary doubled that year. Fuck Mozilla, they’re no more your friends than Google or Microsoft; they’re the same evil, just smaller-scaled evil, is all.
But they haven’t threatened to undercut ad blocking yet, so as a comparison they are better.
Absolutely, but Mozilla is pretty much owned by Google anyway, and falling in love with these companies as wide eyed fanboys never looks good when they eventually turn.
It’s okay to like them while they do good and then change your mind when they turn evil.
I wouldn’t say “owned”, but the rest… yeah:-(
Who provides the majority of their funding?
You forgot to also mention that they are a cult where you get attacked if you say anything negative about Mozilla.
Looking around, I don’t think that’s true. Lots of bad things are freely said about Mozilla and the people running it.
You forgot to not shill for an actual corporation
I’m not shilling for anyone. If you want to discuss actual technical details I’m happy to do so. If you’re here just to share your feelings absent facts then I don’t care what you have to say.
“this is way safer for users” may as well be feelings. It’s not backed up by anything but a clear boner for Google
It is literally explained in the first part of the uBOL GitHub page:
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home#description
It’s like you haven’t even done the most basic research that anyone with anything useful to say would do. Why?
Librewolf, my beloved.
This is the first I’ve heard of LibreWolf. Is it compatible with Windows 7? And also, why is it good?
You really shouldn’t connect windows 7 to the internet.
A summary from its site and known technical details:
- no telemetry by default
- includes uBlock Origin
- has sane privacy-respecting defaults
- prepackages arkenfox user.js
- relatively well-maintained fork of Firefox that keeps up with upstream
- No major controversies AFAIK
As for Windows 7, nobody should really need to install Librewolf anyway on such a device. No device running Windows 7 should have access to the internet at this point. If you are asking about compatibility intending this use case, you have bigger problems to worry about than your choice of browser. If you just need to view HTML files graphically, even Internet Explorer or an older firefox ESR will do.
Looks like it should run on Windows.
Edit: sorry, didn’t read far down enough. It’s only built for Windows 10, but they recommend this?
Main features: … Continued support for NPAPI plugins like Silverlight, Adobe Flash and Java
Picture this in your minds eye: a Windows 7 machine running a browser with still working Flash and Java plugins, connected to the internet in 2024.
what do you see?
i see a flourishing ecosystem of worms, viruses and rootkits, all trying to be the one species to get to be the one who does the most damage to the prey species, the common user.
Sounds like an interesting experience to me. Admittedly I hadn’t looked that far into it. If Win 7 is a must I’d say just go with latest Firefox.
❤
You’re overreacting. Firefox knows their users. I am a huge “stan” for Firefox, but I will delete it like a time traveller if they make it impossible to ignore ads. I will salt the earth and poop on Firefox’s grave and actively avoid it everywhere… However. If I’m wrong, there will be a Next Thing…
Yeah I’m using Fennec, which doesn’t have that. But as long as it’s a flick of a switch to disable, I don’t really mind. Still a million times better than manifest v3.
If you use a DNS solutions you can block all the telemetry shit. Frankly FF has been phoning home in a lot of undesirable ways for many years even before this, like most browsers.
Firefox is no longer an adversary to Google for the browser market, if it ever was. FF has become a vassal of Google that with its tyranny is dictating the course of the internet, such as WEI that as far as I know it was abandoned at least for now.
🧐
Not entirely true.
At least link the full article and not just the headline… smh. Here is also the follow-up article with comments from Firefox’s CTO. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Firefox-defends-itself-Everything-done-right-just-poorly-communicated-9802546.html
Anyone else been having issues of not being able to load YouTube videos past the first few seconds on Firefox using ublock? I couldn’t find any recent information online. I don’t know if this is part of the war on ad blockers, or unrelated.
It’s been a side effect of the server side ads apparently, but reloading the page fixes it for me.
I watched several videos today on Firefox with ublock origin and no issues. Haven’t run into issues with ads yet.
Yeah, yesterday. I just kept refreshing. FF + unlock + not signed in, seems to trigger it
Haven’t had that issue, nope
Besides the fact that Mozilla sucks, Firefox is an amazing piece of software. It’s PITA that it’s about to be enshittified.
meanwhile firefox lists it as recommended and also lets you use it on firefox mobile.
Almost as if a browser company that’s not also an advertising company has no reason to fight ad blockers.
It has made mobile browsing usable again for me.
Same. Firefox Mobile had been a laggy mess when I used it a few years ago, but a combination of some really aggressive advertising and the announcement of manifest v3 caused me to give it another shot about a year ago. It’s a dramatic improvement in phone browsing.
Google needs to be broken up by government.
It saddens me to agree with this. Who knew Google would become as oppressive as fucking MICROSOFT?
« Don’t be evil »
😬😬😬😬
They ditched that in 2018. It was long overdue. At least somewhat honest about themselves.
Most smart people who understood capitalism did.
I hear the term ‘broken up’ a lot in media and discourse, but it’s never explained. In your eyes, what actually happens when a government ‘breaks up’ a corporation? I mean, what are the steps, objectives, and outcomes?
Not being adversarial, I’m just curious.
Not the person you’re asking, but my general understanding is that different products would be required to be their own companies, so advertising, Android, and Chrome would all be separate businesses.
I envision it like AT&T’s break-up, where the singular Google is broken up into regional companies that will (hopefully) have to compete with each other.
Adblockers are the largest consumer boycott in history.
Google isn’t just disabling an extension, they’re attacking a boycott comprised of 200,000,000+ people, all around the globe, standing up to forced manipulation of our beliefs and habits by profit-hungry corporations.
If Google presented me with ads for things I might be interested in and in a non-invasive way, wouldn’t mind looking at them at all.
Instead I get ads for the seemingly random shit I have absolutely zero interest in buying. How they are consistently wrong about my spending habits is unbelievable. I have two fucking hobbies! I don’t see ads for anything relating to them. Ever.
Ad blockers block more than just shitty ads. They also block malicious ads.
Also, there’s like 10 per webpage, and then you have the damn pop-ups when you scroll 🤬
Sounds like you need to give Google more private information
I never thought about it that way. Interesting. Thanks!
You’re correct, and now people will boycott Chrome. Firefox and Brave are good / accessible / easy to get for most people so…
a boycott comprising* 200,000,000+ people
IT guys will stop using it…
Which means they’ll stop deploying it as the default browser on some large enterprises, it won’t ship as defaults in pre-baked images going forward.
Average joes and janes will use Safari and Edge depending on OS.
Where is their growth going to come from after this change? Chromebooks? lol.
I hope they do it, it will hurt them in the long run.
You can bet 300 new uBlock replacements to spring up practically overnight, some of them scams, reducing trust in the Google ecostystem.
You can bet 300 new uBlock replacements to spring up practically overnight, some of them scams, reducing trust in the Google ecostystem.
Unfortunately it’s a bigger problem.
Google doesn’t plan to block uBlock Origin itself, but the APIs it uses to integrate into Chrome in order to function. This will effectively disable all adblockers on Chrome. uBlock won’t be removed from the Chrome extension store, it will just have 90% of its functionality removed.
Additionally, this isn’t a Chrome-only change, but a change in the open source Chromium, an upstream browser of Chrome all other Chrome-based browsers use (essentially everything aside from Firefox and Safari themselves).
The change itself is involved in changing the browser’s “Manifest”, a list of allowed API calls for extensions. The current one is called Manifest v2 and the new one was dubbed Manifest v3.
Theorethically Chromium-based browsers could “backport” Manifest v2 due to the open source nature of Chromium. However that is unlikely as it’s projected to take a lot of resources to change, due mostly to security implications of the change.
Vendors of other Chromium-based browsers themselves have little to gain from making the change aside from name recognition for “allowing uBlock”, which most users either wouldn’t care for or already use Firefox, so the loss for Google isn’t projected to be large, just as the gains for other vendors.
TLDR: uBlock won’t be removed from the Chrome extension store, but the mechanisms through which it blocks ads will be blocked. The block isn’t a change in Chrome but in Chromium and affects all Chromium-based brosers (all except Firefox and Safari). Other vendors could change that to allow adblockers but it’s projected to take a lot of time and resources.
There is already a “lite” version of uBlock origin that conforms to the new manifest and will still work.
There are still a few features missing, some can’t be implemented but others will be.
The ‘block element’ picker is the big one that can not be implemented in the lite version.
Also included block lists can’t update unless the extension itself updates.
Those seem like really big hurdles. How can those be worked around?
Is it not possible to trigger a manual block list update?
It’s not something that can be worked around. It’s specifically a design feature of manifest v3 to restrict these types of things.
Your options are to accept this or use a different browser.
Is it by the same author? Nik Rols, iirc?
Raymond Hill (gorhill) is the author of uBlock Origin, uBlock Origin Lite, uMatrix etc.
I remembered… poorly.
IT guys will stop using it…
No, they will not, if they didn’t already. Because convenience it key.
The browser war is over, and humans lost, corporations won. Google and other huge corporations control the biggest websites and most of the access to content on the internet.
They just need to make it inconvenient to use ad-blocking browsers.
They built their business on advertiser gambling, which seem to be flawed concept, because they keep on squeezing that tube for every penny more and more, in a race to the bottom.
But they are still in control of both browers and content so they have options to keep squeezing more.
So you want to use a ad blocker? Well, the browser that supports them might not be white listed (anymore) by the bot detector, and you have to solve captchas on every site you visit, until you come to your senses and use a browser, where ad blocking is no longer possible.
Oh, and all that is ok, because of “security”. Because letting the users be in control of their devices and applications is “in-secure”. They are just doing that to protect you from spam and scams, just trust them! Trust them, because they don’t trust you!
I’m looking into the possibility of moving my organization to FF. Office of about 200 endpoints. The sticky wicket that I don’t fully understand is Auth passthru to 365.
Does this help at all: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/windows-sso
You’re absolutely right.
That said at least I’ll take this as my cue to peace out of the mainstream web and only use Links2.
“IT guys”? Chrome has a 66% market share globally.
Its not the IT guys themselves, its the aggregate influence. One large school campus flips the switch to Firefox on their next image deployment its a drop in a bucket, but when 1000 schools, 2000 government agencies and 5000 businesses all suddenly stop using Chrome the graph starts to move, because laypeople just accept the default.
IT guys are like browser-influencers, they tell their parents what to use, friends, and so on. We all used to recommend Chrome, I don’t anymore.
Thank you Google I hope shitty moves like this drives enough people away to better browsers like Firefox. It desperately needs a bigger market share.
Not only a bigger market share. What’s keeping Firefox alive is the financial support they get from Google. If enough people move from Chrome to Firefox without Firefox also securing finances from elsewhere, Google could easily kill Firefox by just not giving them money and we’d all be left with just Chromium.
I think the real reason Google is funding Firefox is because they’re afraid of being targeted in antitrust lawsuits. As long as Firefox is around, they have someone they can point to, to say they’re not a monopoly.
This 100%. You could maybe argue that Safari exists, but that is Apple exclusive I think, so it would probably not work as an argument.
So, what they’re saying is: Chrome will have severely decreased functionality and users will no longer be able to protect themselves from sketchy ads that contain scams, malware, and other nefarious bullshit (often hosted on Google’s own ad networks)?
What are you expecting, a corp to… ah… uh… not be evil, or something? :-P
Thank you very much for summoning Jeff Goldblum’s voice into my head.
I… uh, found a way:-D.
Google is primarily an ad company
It did not always used to be this way, though it was always headed here.
Users can still use ad blockers. Users will be safer from malicious extensions sending all your web traffic to an untrusted party.
Whew, kinda weird to find a Google employee on lemmy. I would have thought there were rules against that in the would employee handbook.
I don’t work for Google. Are you in a cult or an anti-opensource PR firm? Why would that be your first instinct in response to facts? Go read the beginners guide to MV3. Maybe you could learn a thing or two before talking about feelings.
You gave no facts, just opinions.
And if you aren’t aware, astroturfing is a thing.
Of course they’re aware, they’re doing it right now.
I gave you facts about MV3. It is also explained at the beginning of the uBOL GitHub page which even acknowledges MV3 adds protections to users with some filtering tradeoffs. Those tradeoffs can be implemented in other ways but it is more work and would require other software. I am not here saying Google is perfect or that MV3 is perfect, but it does make installing extensions more secure for the average user. If you don’t agree then be specific. This vagueness that you keep utilizing without providing any details at all to try to make a point is a clear sign that you honestly have no clue what you’re talking about.
Yeah, that’s not even how Ublock Origin fucking works, what a hilariously ignorant take.
Did I say that the author of uBlock Origin actually reads your traffic? No I didn’t, so stop the bad faith arguments. I said that MV2 exposed users to malicious extensions that were able to do that. Most features of uBO work fine with uBOL. Not everything does though, and I do acknowledge that. I’m just saying MV3 does make a majority of users safer overall.
Nope
Yep. Facts.
You seem to be struggling with the term “facts”
Is your feelings facts to you? Which fact specifically am I struggling with? Do you have anything concrete to say at all or are you just going to keep being vague because of feelings?
Seeing all your traffic is required for an ad blocker to function correctly.
An ad blocker doesn’t need to see your traffic to function. That is the point of the declarative APIs. It is supposed to help protect users from malicious extensions and some forms of malicious software.
Yes, it absolutely does.
An adblocker has unconditional complete control of my browser because I want it to have unconditional complete control of my browser, because it cannot do what I want it to any other way. Taking that control away from me is malicious by definition. It’s more malicious when every single person on the planet with a shred of tech knowledge knows with certainty that it’s for the sole purpose of boosting Google’s ad revenue at the expense of their users.
Sadly I’m far more attached to ad blocking than I am to a browser.
Frankly, at this point I might even be more attached to blocking ads than browsing.
I guess you want the internet to be a place for finding useful information, and/or the entertainment you choose to access, over it being a long uninteruptable stream of infomercials for crap products you have no interest in? Then groogle is not for you. In fact groogle is not for humanity.
Yeah, we saw this coming. When Manifest v3 first talked about.
Google an ad company are killing ad blockers. Yeah, that sounds right.
Google an ad company are killing
ab blockersChrome browsers. Yeah, that sounds right.FTFY
I wish, but I don’t see it happening. Most people are just content with seeing ads absolutely everywhere, I just don’t get it.
I wouldn’t mind the basic shit like a banner here or a side bar there. But the fucking obnoxious mid page ads, auto playing videos, scam link shit can go die in a hole.
I used to not mind them, now I do. They over did it and I can’t go back. I will block ads untill I can’t and then I’ll probably climb a clock tower with an Uzi.
I won’t really climb a clock tower with an Uzi.
I wouldn’t mind the basic shit like a banner here or a side bar there.
Since those are semi-regularly vectors for malware now, even those are not safe to allow.
It’s things like this that keep me using an ad blocker. I was researching when sunflowers develop their seeds, for crying out loud.
Edit: this was on Opera. It’s… fine.
killing ab blockers
I might finally get a six-pack!
MV3 doesn’t kill ad blockers. uBOL (uBlock Origin Lite) blocks ads, is by the same author and uses MV3. The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.
Some of these “features” that classic uBO used are available in MV3 but requires different permissions. Some of them could also be implemented with native messaging. The main uBO author though feels slighted by Google and went on a trash talking campaign against Google, and to be fair had a few good points. Anyway, most people on social media now care more about how Chromium and Firefox makes them feel now irregardless of facts. They think their emotions somehow are the same as facts.
The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.
Then allow a savvy user to choose to keep MV2 mode via an opt-in control instead of depreciating years of hard work by non-malicious extension authors. uBlock Origin is, in fact, the ONLY browser extension I use in Chrome, as Firefox is my main browser.
I agree they should have tried to find more ways to keep the old behavior. MV3 rollout has already been delayed for a long time, and now users merely get a message. I’m not sure that the community (mostly Google contributors) won’t give in or try to find a way to keep MV2. However, what was done with MV2 can now be done with MV3 with native messaging or other network tools… I think the concern is that allowing an exception makes it much easier for a malicious extension or software to get users to agree not realizing what they’re agreeing to. Furthermore, the declarative approach is actually preferable by many. You get most of the same features without exposing all your traffic to an extension.
From my understanding, MV3 kills vital features of ad-blockers in that
- Some filtering rules do rely on the ability to read the content of the webpage, which can’t be migrated, per the FAQ linked in the article
- The declarative API means an update to the rules requires an update to the plugin itself, which might get delayed by the reviewing process, causing the blocker to lag behind the tracker. It might not be able to recover as quickly as uBO in the recent YouTube catch-up round.
-
uBOL GitHub does a pretty good job of explaining some challenges, and some of them are better tracked in the issues.
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Your second point isn’t accurate though and MV3 does support dynamic rules.
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And yet the likelihood of Google publishing a malicious extension is quite low. Not sure why you’re so adamant about defending their shitty anti-adblock actions, making excuses for a mega corporation.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Steam, Arch Linux, NixOS, Flathub, etc. all end up publishing malicious software in their stores and package managers. It is inevitable. If you’re not worried about sandboxing then you might as well proxy all your traffic using third party software.
The fact that something is possible does not make it frequent or likely.
. Some of them could also be implemented with native messaging.
Some? Or all?
uBlockOrigin would still loose some of its features and capabilities nonetheless, even if a sub-set of them could be implemented in other ways. Not?
The modern Internet is completely unusable without an ad blocker. Way to remake ie6, Google!
Even with an ad blocker, it gets more unusable every year that goes by
DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT OUR COOKIES OR CUSTOMIZE THESE BULLSHIT OPTIONS???
The only options I want are Girl Scout thin mints or peanut butter cookies
Missing Samoas, those are delicious.
I already know a few people who were just marginally digitally literate, and now they can’t read things like news articles and access several kinds of services anymore, unless someone helps them, because they don’t property know how to close invasive popups and solve captchas.
The internet is literally becoming unusable for some people.
I’m in my mid 60s and know a few people that never even heard the term “browser extension” before. How they tolerate using the web with no ad blocking is beyond me.
Every time I turn off uBlock and reload a webpage I’m like “JFC this is eye cancer”.
Got my boomer mom to finally install an ad blocker. She was tired of looking at a webpage, having an ad give some kind of script run error, and then it reloads back at the top. It’s a big problem on the cooking websites she goes to.
I would rather go back to the days of shitty pop-ups you can just close. These ads are far worse, and none of them even make sense.
the cooking websites she goes to.
https://based.cooking/ doesn’t have everything, but it’s growing and the site is very clean.
What a really interesting initiative. I will try to contribute some things in their repo.
This is amazing and thank you.
…Oh, no! Anyway. Just giving people one more reason to finally make the switch to Firefox or something different.
Google Chrome warns about disabling uBlock Origin. I warn Google Chrome that they’re being a little bitch & they’re going to lose users.
Sounds like another reason not to use Chrome.
Could turn out to be a good thing. All power users will dump Chrome practically overnight, a huge boon to the alternatives, that could actually give them enough momentum to compete with Google for a change. I’m sure they’ve considered this, probably an empty treat.
Every browser is either chromium (open source captured by Google) or exists because of a Google search contract (this represents 80% of Mozilla’s revenue), Google can’t lose
That’s pretty optimistic, as tons of power users are still eating that Windows crap, too.
Thanks for reaffirming why I refuse to use Chrome.
I’m using Firefox or forks.
With the direction FF is taking it’s gonna be forks for now.
The only thing that held me back from using LibreWolf over Firefox was that it disabled (automatic) dark mode on websites. I understand this is part of the “resist fingerprinting” configuration. There’s a workaround now ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1732114).
In about:config update these 3 preferences:
- privacy.resistFingerprinting = false
- privacy.fingerprintingProtection = true
- privacy.fingerprintingProtection.overrides = +AllTargets,-CSSPrefersColorScheme
Dark Reader
