With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
The best time to switch to Firefox was 5 years ago. The second best is today.
Oops, I switched 15 years ago,
I switch when it was Phoenix, then switch again when it was Firebird, and finally switch when it become Firefox
you win Firefox!
I went straight from Mozilla Navigator to Firefox 1.0.
Tabs were such a crazy new thing back then. You would show tabbed browsing to someone (rather than opening new windows) and they thought you were a wizard. IE5 didn’t have tabs, so nerds moved to Mozilla/Firefox. Then IE6 came out but still didn’t have tabs. By the time IE7 came out, I’d had tabbed browsing for 5+ years.
Hat trick!
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Noob. I switched in 2006 - 17 years ago.
What took you so long?!?
I had to pee!
I cannot be 100% certain but I’m confident I was using it not long after the 1.0 release. That’d put me at 2004. 19 years!
Although I did briefly switch over to Chrome when it was new and fast. Then switched back when Firefox had a major optimization pass.
The early Chrome was crazy fast when it had none of the bloat.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/nCgQDjiotG0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Google has a web-browser?
10 to 15 years ago, myself. Don’t remember exactly.
Sorry, that’s 3rd best at most, according to the data above. Sorry, I don’t make the rules!
I use Firefox since it’s release. It was never bad. I don’t get all the Chrome users.
I had the crappiest of PCs in 2006 or 2007 with 768MBs of RAM running Windows XP. Funnily enough the reason I switched to Chrome back then was the immense RAM usage of Firefox compared to Chrome back then. With the big rebranding an rerelease of Firefox in 2017? 2018? I came back and haven’t looked back since.
It has a pretty severe memory leak issue during the period where Chrome siphoned off most of its users.
I used it since netscape navigator XD
Funnily enough - this article is 3 years old
Does it have native dark pages. Why I use brave. Would use Firefox but it’s glaring white
Firefox has dark mode.
Most people aren’t concerned about privacy outside of places like here and Reddit.
With Chrome killing ad blocking, they’ll quickly care
Except most people don’t use adblock. I don’t even know how they live
I’m conviced those people aren’t real and everyone is in fact secretly using an ad blocker.
I mean, how do you not get annoyed with so much ads? People are probabaly lying in surveys to trick youtube to not blocking adblockers.
You are mostly right. Think about how many people use chrome on corporate office computers that they do not have permission to install anything on or modify. It’s part of the reason Windows is so dominant. Businesses run windows and chrome a shit ton. I work for a Fortune 100 company. It’s Windows and Chrome across the whole company.
I work for a large company and its the same. They even force-install Chrome despite Edge already being there! Yes, some people will make the privacy argument that Microsoft takes your data, but so will Google, and it’s not as if the business cared either way, because if they did they’d install an adblocker or Firefox, which they don’t.
Because It’s baked into the network
Permissions, you say? Lemme introduce you to Portable Apps.
Yeah the second anything gets stuck into a USB port, IT is on WebEx like “Get what’s that asshole in pod H-12 doing???”
Why use usb when you can download from Google Drive? Or is that not allowed too?
Hate to say it, but I think you’re giving the average person way too much credit. Most people are just not that smart.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin
Average and below internet users are not the kind of people you meet on Lemmy. They are people like the aging Gen-Xer who doesn’t know the difference between “the internet” and a web browser, or the kid whose parents shoved a tablet in their face to get them to be quiet for an hour.
Most people want computers to be an appliance like a washing machine - the thought that they can shape their own experience on their phone or computer never even occurs to them.
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I forget that these people exist sometimes. I can’t ever go back to the internet with no ad blockers.
You realize the Internet costs money. Those sites don’t charge due to advertising. If everyone used ad blocker. There wouldn’t be internet.
But blind there
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And it exploded because of that. Stuff costs money. You either pay for it or ads though.
I’d prefer having the internet of now than what was before.
You can use ad blocker but I’m pointing out the your theory. Without ads the Internet doesn’t exist in its current form. As long as 90% don’t use ad blocker it’s all good.
I suspect they spend most of their time in apps and not surfing the internet. Just a guess really since I saw the mobile traffic exceeded desktop. A lot of people don’t spend hours on the “internet” surfing. Tic Tok sure. Hell I’m getting more and more like that. Even when I use chrome I still only go the the same sites for the most part. lol
It could be a good thing. Maybe they won’t bother about people blocking ads because they become even less than before.
So maybe you need to pause the ad block a lot less.
Ah, you met my parents.
I had to install ublock origin on my mother’s Chrome because she never would otherwise. Doesn’t even know how.
They don’t!
Google’s doing a pretty shitty job on that front since uBlock is already prepared with a new version that will work largely the same after the changeover.
Do you have a post clarifying how uBlock got prepared? I can’t seem to find anything
I don’t think it’s just one post, but before last month Gorhill would regularly post to Reddit about it. The MV3 extension is already live in the extension store as well.
Honestly, it seems like people have basically created internal adblockers where they seem to not notice ads.
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They won’t. The vast majority aren’t using any kind of ad-blockers in the first place or Google would go out of business.
I’m going to use Chrome as long as I can. If they update and break my Adblock extensions (and there isn’t a fix in a day or two from devs), I switch browsers or find some other workaround.
I’m glad people with more ability to avoid the problem are trying to do so proactively (via ad-on updates, alternative browsers, etc)… so I don’t need to worry about an ‘escape route’… because I know there will be one.
The plan to deprecate Chrome V2 extensions has been constantly postponed again and again for years now. There is NO SCHEDULED DATE for this to happen currently, and when it is announced it will be more than 6 months out.
Source: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/zQ77HkGmK9E/m/HjaaCIG-BQAJ?pli=1
If Google really wanted to kill ad blockers, they would have done this years ago.
They don’t. They want to force ad blockers and other similar extensions to use more efficient APIs that don’t slow down the web. Extension developers overall (not just ad blockers) aren’t happy with the changes, so they’re still working on the APIs.
IIRC the original cutoff date was supposed to be this summer (or possibly winter).
Not surprised you’re being downvoted but definitely disappointed seeing it.
Hmmm, on the bright side, with lemmy going mainstream maybe some of this culture (including privacy and FOSS) becomes more and more openly discussed.
As much as I love Lemmy I don’t see it going mainstream :/
It’s too weird for the general userYeah I agree. Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream, and it is exponentially larger than Lemmy now and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I’m really loving Lemmy, but it is not even remotely a factor if we are having a conversation about things that are mainstream enough to reflect popular opinion.
Reddit was too weird for most people until they ended up being in their Google search results for most topics. It will take a while but the Fediverse will eventually reach a level of popularity and mainstream utility.
We could have it both, where big instances like LemmyWorld or BeeHaw becomes the well known public interface, while they maintain federation with smaller instances.
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But your content would go over so much better in those places. Pretty sure you’ve already found that your Musk-loving, antisemitic, anti-lgbtq+, misogynistic, garbage is not going to make it very far here. “cancel culture” back at it again. Guess Musk isn’t the big brain you think he is. I’m sure you’ll be back with your braindead zombie tribe in no time.
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Then why are you here “Generic User 1234”?
I’m sorry, I don’t know if “general user” means what I think it means. English is not my first language.
What I meant was that most people who use the internet and social media on a regular basis aren’t exactly nerdy/tech-savvy. So as soon as you start talking to them about federated instances and whatnot, they lose interest.
I mean I love Lemmy but I don’t see it going mainstream :/
It’s too weird for the general userThe irony of this comment duplicating 😅 but yeah you’re right, there needs to be a lot of streamlining first
I’ve seen this issue hundreds of times on red dot
jsjajsj yeah, Jerboa froze on me so I had to retype the comment. I didn’t realise it had already gone through.
I had that issue with Jerboa a lot so I switched to Liftoff, it’s much smoother!
I dunno. Lemmy isn’t all that weird outside the first little bit of choosing an instance and signing up for communities. Everything since that has felt extremely normal to me. Some more thought about that and a good instance onboarding workflow can be implemented, that seems like a solvable problem.
I completely agree, I don’t find it difficult at all. But I have already tried to recommend it to a couple of friends and just having to go through those first steps was enough for them not to want to use Lemmy.
Not sure why it’s weird, it’s just reddit but open source?
Whole idea is weird and as of now its lacking features. Like no ability to look on the other instance local feed without registrating there (at least not in apps i use). Also needing to type whole adress with instance name if you want some community from other instance is unhandy.
Also, as far as i understand, there can be the same communities on different instances, so you could subscribe to, idk, cat community on lemmy.ml, but not see anything from cat community on lemmy.world. If its true its kinda stupid, i think there should be a way to associate comunities across fedarated instances.
Hell, even registration is kinda messed up. As lemmy.world shown, you easilly can sign up on overpopulated instances which would drop several times a day. Not sure, it probably fixed for now, but that was a problem when i started.
So far i like the idea and want it to succeed and become popular. But with how elitist people here are usually towards users from other platforms and with overall roughness it kinda seems unlikelly. Maybe it will change when current apps get better, or reddit app developers make versions for lemmy, idk.
If you click the All, you can see that I am able to see posts from lemmy.ml even though I’m on lemmy.world
Yes, but you would be seeing ALL posts from everywhere your instance knows about.
I kind of like the idea of being on lemmy.world, filtering to say aussie.zone and getting it to show me local.
Or being able to simply get a list of every community on another instance.These are cool ideas.
But it does show feeds from other instances. Tick all rather than local
No, i mean not all, but local from other instances. I dont remember why i needed it, probably discussion of more specialised instances out there. Most down to earth example i can imagine now would probably be trying to find instance on your local language (other than english, ofc).
There are instances dedicated to other languages, but because they are new, and has not a lot of people, they won’t push at the top of your feed. The best thing for now is to help those instances grow by contributing to the instance and communities. As more activity sprouts, more and more specialized communities and instances will get pushed to the top.
As a start, you can select Hot or New rather than active and see if there are specialized regional instances. Or try directly searching for it.
If not start your own community in the language you desire. Bear in mind that lemmy only has 200k users. And most are probably from the US. So you’ll likely see more mainstream communities and in English.
If that’s still not enough, the best I can advise is to wait until it matures. The more mainstream it gets the more lesser known communities and regional instances can develop or start.
I think what would help would be a way to create a multilemmy feature like the multireddit one where you can include communities together.
So long as they are all Federated with each other you could have a multilemmy feed for “cat”
Agreeing that it’s not a seamless transition in user experience from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin. But one thing that at least the instance that I’m on (kbin.social) makes easy is subscribing to various communities (or magazines, which is what they are called on kbin):
I go to the Magazines screen in kbin.social, type.in the general topic I’m interested in (in your example, cats). The search results in kbin.social bring me all of the magazines and communities that have cat in the name, and I subscribe to them all. (Meaning, I don’t have to type out the full community address.)
Yes, a lot of it will be redundant and if I don’t subscribe to specific communities I may miss some stuff. But I can say that now I have a ton pf.contwct that I’m interested in my “Subscribed” feed (similar to the home feed on Reddit).
Lemmy isn’t weird at all. Now P2P platforms like secure scuttlebutt and aether, that’s some weird stuff. I couldn’t get them working at all (or maybe nobody is using these anymore). P2P is very confusing for me. I assume that a federated network is as confusing for many people as p2p social networks are confusing for me. I guess there will be someone out there who reads my comment and be like: “What? P2P networks are so simple, what don’t you understand?” I guess people just have different amount of tolorance to being confused by complexity of something before they just give up. I couldn’t figure out those P2P systems so I just give up.
Keep Lemmy Weird
I wish that was the case. Privacy is barely a thing in the general public’s eye. FOSS is a spec in the wind in comparison.
I think lots of boomers and gen-x do care. (At least the ones I know). They just aren’t tech literate enough to do anything about it.
I think we need more privacy oriented devices and software with simple ux, and advertising that isn’t targetted at the tech community.
Run some TV ads for a privacy enabled smartphone, and play up how it works just the same as your current phone but doesn’t spy on you. Shit like that.
Firefox + Ublock Origin blows Google Chrome out of water.
In adittion to this make sure to disable the telemetry that’s on by default. If you want even better protection from fingerprinting etc, use arkenfox/librewolf (librewolf being preconfigured fork of firefox)
I’d also recommend disabling Normandy in Firefox.
Thanks for this!
Firefox is a weird buggy mess that constantly freezes.
This is definitely not normal, Firefox never freezes for me. May be worth checking that out, especially your extensions.
Especially your security programs, like third-party antivirus or firewalls. They can install system-level plugins in your browsers, and sometimes those don’t work well. Windows defender and the built in firewall are good enough and play nice with other programs.
IMO the thing is that people don’t care about their privacy. Sure, some people around here do, but your average person owns an Alexa, has a FB/Instagram account and constantly posts their location, uses the same password on many sites, uses TikTok, doesn’t block cookies, etc etc etc.
Most people don’t actually care. Some claim they do, but then can’t even be bothered to stop using Instagram etc because of the “inconvenience”… So do they really care?
Some companies (Apple, etc) push their products under a narrative around safety and security, and people will repeat that point as a way to justify a decision they already made, but if they actually cared, they would be doing other things too. But they don’t.
The number of us who do actually care about privacy and security is actually very small.
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder how privacy is still a word in the dictionary
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
It’s no wonder. It’s because people aren’t actually concerned about privacy.
If you ask someone if they’re “concerned about privacy” many people will of course say yes. If you follow up that question with “what are you willing to do about it”, you’ll find that the answer is a resounding “not a God damn thing”. If they were they would spend 3 minutes on Google looking for an alternative browser that works even better than Chrome but without the privacy invasions.
A browser is the low-hanging fruit on the “do-you-care-about-privacy meter”. It’s the one step with no sacrifices and the highest increase in privacy.
With the number of people concerned about privacy
That number appears to be very small, all things considered. Out of everyone I know, literally one person cares about privacy. My mother. She will even go as far as to only use her first initial online instead of her name if she can get away with it. However, she uses Chrome all the time because she doesn’t understand that your browser also tracks you.
I think that’s what it comes down to. A mixture of lack of public interest, and lack of public awareness about tracking/privacy in general. If people can’t immediately see how having their data harvested will inconvenience/hurt them, they simply don’t care.
The whole Reddit debacle has really made me rethink all my services. I recently installed duck duck go and still getting used to it, so not quite sure if I’m ready to make another drastic change.
I used to love Firefox in 2006 or so, but got Chrome when it was released and forgot about Firefox. I think I’ll open a tab in my chrome browser for the Firefox page now…this is how I remind myself to delve deeper into stuff later. Thanks for the inspiration, everyone. Google has irked me ever since removing the Don’t Be Evil mantra.
Firefox has a super simple way to import everything from your Chrome install. And from what I can tell it has every feature plus more. Was very easy for me to switch. I was actually inspired to try it as my daily driver since Chrome hogs an uncomfortable amount of RAM on my laptop
There was one extension I used in Chrome that I haven’t found a Firefox replacement for, but I stopped trying to look a while ago and just live without it.
Was a specific kind of cookie manager: you could whitelist a set of websites to keep their cookies. Everything else would be deleted when you told the extension to do so.
Too many websites need cookies that stick around indefinitely. But I also don’t want to delete everything everytime I close Firefox, because I may want to keep a website around for a few days without wanting to bother adding it to a whitelist.
Most Chrome extensions can easily be run in Firefox. Simply download the CRX and upload an copy to addons.mozilla.org as an unlisted extension and within a few hours the extension should be approved and ready to install in Firefox.
Firefox has strong support for the extension cookie management APIs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/cookies
Reddit being enshittified is what motivated me to switch back to Android. I don’t want to continue using a a locked ecosystem only for apple to one day say: “Welp, no more adblocks 😜 Oh you use VLC? Dude that’s for pirates only. Signal? That’s for terrorists. Standard Notes? What evil plans are you hiding? Banned Banned and Banned.”
I used iPhones because everyone else was using them so I kinds fell for the peer pressure thinking “Hmm… what are the odds that Apple become evil? Probably don’t have to worry about it.” The Reddit shitshow just triggered a fear in me that made me rethink about my life decisions. Apple’s locked ecosystem suddenly looked terrifying to me, and I just wanna nope out. So I got an Android phone and gave the iPhone to someone. I love my apks and don’t need to worry about Google-Play shennanigans.
The difference between ddg and Firefox for me is that Firefox is a genuinely good product, whereas ddg is noticeably worse than Google. Still trying to find a good search alternative.
True. It takes a big chance to switch browsers for some. And there may be learning curves, but being intentional about our internet and app use goes a long way to saving headaches in the future. The early investment (ie learning a more open source and free, even FOSS software) will help mitigate loss in case a profit driven company changes or “pivots” to a new direction.
I do all my personal browsing on Firefox now. I’m still using chrome, but strictly for work stuff. It’s nice to keep those activities separate, especially since many apps I use for work still discriminate against Firefox.
If you like the chrome feel, you should check out a browser called brave. It’s built off of chromium (read as: looks like chrome) and can run all the extensions you like, but is built to be privacy minded.
With the number of people concerned about privacy
Generous estimate there. “People” don’t care. Who cares if your browser tracks your online presence when everything is connected back to your facebook profile or whatever is trending.
Most individuals embrace convenience above all; literally putting all their private stuff on any online service that tout “shiny feature that you won’t even use”. Even some privacy-focused people don’t see putting all your emails/photo/video/agenda/chat/text messages in one third party opaque service as an issue.
Tons of business do the same, outsourcing the most basic stuff like private discussions and storage to anything “convenient” to not pay for two sysadmin to manage it (leading to most major leaks). I have direct experience of business coming to us, asking “yeah, privacy is good, data ownership and control is mandatory, so we won’t host anything and you’ll keep all our data, deal?”. They prefer have us, a third party, bill them for hosting rather than have some control over it.
My take on this is that while pointing that browsers can be an issue is not a bad thing, the first step would be to get people and business interested in their privacy. Without that, it remains a niche. Sadly.
The biggest issue for a lot of people is going to be Microsoft forcing all Office 365 users to use Edge all the time. Our sysadmin recently forced me to uninstall Firefox and Chrome from all workstations unless they had an approved use for it. Everything must be through Edge.
Why? “Security” of course. It’s always “security”. Curious
Edit: the point is Microsoft could have worked to provide enterprise customers with ways to manage third party browsers going forward. They could have worked with Google and Mozilla to make that happen. They didn’t. Not really.
It’s that Microsoft continues to make decisions that create rationale for only using them, because that’s their business. “Security” gives them an extremely convenient cover for anticompetitive behavior. Anyone that thinks their C-Suite hasn’t pulled the defender/365 team into a meeting or two to discuss business strategy has far too much faith in a corporation that deserves very little.
Curious
Not really, it means less work and less risk for them if they have to support fewer software.
Back when Internet Explorer was still a thing you could configure it with group policies domain wide. If Microsoft implemented similar features for Edge in an active directory environment I can definitely see the appeal. Not to say similar isn’t possible with Chrome or Firefox, but first party integrations in a corporate environment tends to be the path of least resistance.
Firefox does support GPO amongst other policy mgmt solutions, and so do Chrome and Edge. But yeah it’s easier to only support Edge, apply policies recommended by the company which also supplies the OS and productivity suite, and call it a day.
It’s curious because Microsoft owns the operating system and was more than capable of designing in such a way that would allow sysadmins more control over third party browsers and software. Firefox would have been willing to work with them to provide the necessary levers. They already do with group policy.
“Security” is a term that shuts down arguments and silences all accusation of anticompetitive behavior. And they absolutely abuse that. You don’t think the bean counters are ecstatic about the fact that they have effectively been able to turn every IT department in the country into Edge salesmen? You don’t think there was a board meeting where the benefits of that were discussed?
Of course. I hate MS as much as the next linux user, but unfortunately from the IT team’s pov it makes a lot of sense now that MS’ browser isn’t a broken pile of shit anymore.
Microsoft has been on a shameless crusade recently to make people adopt Edge. Upon launch, thier Bing AI had a rather absurd requirement to use Edge to access it.
At least it runs decently enough. Better than chrome
It’s literally the same engine
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There can be other reasons, and while it saddens me to say, we were forced to keep IE for specific web-panels, which hadn’t been updated since the 90s.
Edge does, after all, allow for compability with such sites, which is a good thing.
Please note that this is work work-related machines only. I dont see how it’s an issue when it has to do with your work account. You shouldn’t be using this for other things than work.
Edge nowadays is just a wrapper for Chromium. So it will only handle whatever Chrome handles.
Not true on Windows. They have an IE mode specifically for enterprise apps.
I wouldn’t count on Microsoft’s security:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/12/1187208383/china-hack-us-government-microsoft
If this can happen to governments using microsoft, it can happen to little guys using microsoft.
that doesn’t mean security is bad across the board. As invasive and terrible as Edge is, it’s actually the most secure browser out there.
That’s just because Edge is integrated with O365 and can pass device compliance information. There’s actually a plugin to enable Chrome to do the same thing, but nothing yet for Firefox.
What if you run the portable version of Firefox? How would they know?
There’s definitely ways to know if they really wanted to stop that, but those employees aren’t going to pull something like that. They weren’t just told they can’t use Mozilla, they were told they must use Edge. Using anything else is noncompliance (which I absolutely support as a person but as an employee I have no say in the policy)
Besides, with the upcoming changes to 365, you’ll never get links to open in anything but Edge without admin credentials at the very least, but realistically even that won’t stop it. You could use a portable version I suppose, if just to have at least one browser with proper uBlock support.
Google has a vested interest in showing you ads and selling your data.
Firefox does not.
Seems like a pretty clear choice to me.
There’s no reason you should be using Chrome. Using Chrome:
- Means you consent to spyware (along with everyone else you interact with)
- Allows Google to continue dictating web standards
- Is a resource hog
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading this comic about the dangers of Chrome: https://contrachrome.com/
If you need to absolutely use a Chromium-based browser, at least use Brave (just for that site).
Not-so-fun fact from the comic Contra Chrome: Google Chrome’s URL bar is called the “omnibox.” The name is derived from the Latin word “omnis,” meaning “everything.”
When you type into the omnibox, it’s sent to Google’s servers and added to your profile forever.
Even if you deleted it or didn’t hit enter.
This is the problem! :( Monopoly is never good, in this case in particular since it’s in the hand of a corporation they make money on people data.
It’s ironic that there are over 60 blockable elements and such over Privacy Badger and Ublock origin on that page.
