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A great video about the Manifest v3 and how Google is trying to make you view ads.

  • nicetriangle@kbin.social
    1651·
    5 months ago

    Everyone losing their minds over this like Firefox doesn’t exist.

    Stop using Chrome.

    The reason this is even a big problem is because everyone piled on Google’s browser despite all the obvious reasons that wasn’t gonna be a good idea on the long term.

    I never understood why anybody thought a company – whose principal business is advertising and data mining – wouldn’t eventually rug pull everyone like this with their browser as soon as it hit critical mass for market share.

    • wahming@monyet.ccEnglish
      211·
      5 months ago

      Because there weren’t any great options at the time. Firefox has gotten better, but at that time Chrome was just super fast and lightweight in comparison to all the competitors.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
      743·
      5 months ago

      Firefox exists, but it has its issues, it’s def not so great at memory optimization. It will regularly crash on me once I go beyond around 100 tabs regardless of how much system resources I throw at it (Seriously, it did the same thing on a 4 socket server with 512GBs RAM)

      And starts getting sluggish when I even start approaching it. Chrome otoh, reserves a lot of RAM for itself, but at least it can manage it well into the hundreds of tabs I throw at it

      • shmanio@lemmy.worldEnglish
        101·
        5 months ago

        Since you are sharing anecdotes, let me join.

        For me FF has always been extremely stable, and I too regularly keep 100+ tabs open, on much more limited system resources. It is so stable that I’ve completely disabled history saving, and if there is something I want to read later I just keep the tab open. Never had an issue.

        Tree Style Tabs also pushed me to have many tabs, because now I can actually organize those that I’ve opened and find them later.

      • stratosfear@lemmy.sdf.org
        82·
        5 months ago

        I have the opposite experience. I easily can have as many tabs at times and I’ve seen chrome use over 10gb of ram and fully lock at times. I switched to Firefox for that reason and others and it performs much better with that many tabs open. Most ram I’ve seen it using is about 6gb. Minimal and equivalent plugins in both. I’ve never had firefox crash. This across multiple computers. I now have uninstalled chrome everywhere…

      • darkstar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        47·
        5 months ago

        Please leave this conversation, because you’re probably the only user who goes over 100 tabs. Normal people have about 10 open just for your reference

        • Aria@lemmygrad.ml
          4·
          5 months ago

          I routinely have more than 100 tabs open. Firefox doesn’t crash for me or use much RAM. Many tabs is a normal use-case and Firefox working worse than alternatives in such scenarios is a failing of Firefox.

          But again, mine handles it fine. So potentially OP should try again with an up to date Firefox.

  • umbrella
    1281·
    5 months ago

    get firefox and ublock origin.

    its so fucking simple, why do people have such weird attachment to chrome??

    • lemmyreader
      235·
      5 months ago

      Agreed on using Firefox/LibreWolf and uBlock Origin, I love that combination. I think the thing is that Google Chrome is much faster than Firefox on Android phones (I don’t mind, I hardly ever use mobile to browse), and long time habits can be hard to break for some people.

      • Ziixe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        7·
        5 months ago

        Yup, can say that firefox is quite a bit slower on android (but honestly it’s still quite ok, unless it decides to loop loading the page, or it bugs out in another way, at least on my phone it’s quite prone to breaking, for comparison brave is really a bit faster than Firefox

        • admiralteal@kbin.social
          141·
          5 months ago

          Way faster when you consider time spent loading and navigating around all the fucking ads. The mobile web without adblock is a dumpster fire of the highest order.

          • Ziixe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            5 months ago

            Well of course, that’s why I compared brave and not chrome, although the brave adblock sucks sometimes

            But yeah, the firefox on android is good enough to set it as a default browser (never actually noticed that the Google discover page just opens in chrome and ignores your default browser before doing this, interesting how some apps do this too)

            • admiralteal@kbin.social
              2·
              5 months ago

              Yeah the Google News app too. It’s fucking useless – any time you click something on it you get served up a page of nothing but ads, modals, autoplays, and other unusable crap. Bouncing around as it loads. I had to finally uninstall it and switch to just a bookmark on the homescreen instead.

        • umbrella
          4·
          5 months ago

          Yeah, it IS slower on android, but adblocking more than makes up for it IMO.

          • Ziixe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            5 months ago

            Also not only that, but the ability to let me choose if I want to open a link in an app or not, happens countless times with stuff like GitHub automatically wanting to redirect to the app (which sucks)

            • umbrella
              2·
              5 months ago

              oh there was a bug a few versions back that did this, but it seems they fixed it now

      • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
        41·
        5 months ago

        Google Chrome is much faster than Firefox on Android phones

        Not with the ads (Firefox Android has uBlock).

    • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
      81·
      5 months ago

      Not so much chrome, but many browsers (like my favorite Vivaldi) are chromium based. I wish they’d just keep uBlock going in the chromium rebuilds, but IDK if that’s possible. Seems like it should be to me though.

      Also, we switched at work from Firefox because somehow they broke system level updates a few years ago, and nothing I could do was able to figure out why their installer stopped working without first having someone run the uninstall graphically to update to the new version. It would just say Firefox wasn’t a valid windows exe till I manually removed it. And even the Mozilla Enterprise list seemed flummoxed. Honestly, I think they should have reverted the installer change, or even just use a standard installer that doesn’t have this problem, but hey.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
        152·
        5 months ago

        This is precisely why I’ve never found Chromium based browsers to be of much relevance. These are just skins on top of the rendering engine which is the core of the browser and that’s entirely controlled by Google. People kept ignoring this and now we’re in a situation where Chrome and its derivatives dominate the market to the point where sites no longer care whether they follow W3C specs as long as Chrome renders them. We’re now back in pretty much the same situation we were in the days of IE.

        It’s depressing that people were unable to understand where things were going until Google started doing blatantly evil things. The only thing that was keeping Google in check before was the fact that it was lack of market dominance. Google is an ads company, and there is a huge conflict of interest with them being the gatekeepers to the internet.

    • Charger8232
      2·
      4 months ago

      Fun fact: This is my favorite comment in all of Lemmy, and I’ve been monitoring Lemmy for months. This is my favorite simply for the one question of “Why do people have such a weird attachment to Chrome?”

      I will find an answer one day.

    • Concave1142@lemmy.world
      1112·
      5 months ago

      We are in the middle of rolling out a new SaaS solution at work that just works better in Edge. The amount of outrageous levels of anger and disgust we get from telling them to use Edge is stupid. Even telling users it is built on Chromium, just like Chrome, does nothing to dissuade their unfounded anger.

      With some people it actually comes down to telling them, “if you don’t use Edge, then I guess you need to start looking for another job that only uses Chrome”.

      I just don’t get it.

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
        242·
        5 months ago

        Edge can go fucking die, MS has lost all trust with me when it comes to them and Internet Browsers, I rip edge out of all my systems no matter what it might “break”.

        Maybe you should deploy solutions that are browser agnostic. That kind of shit is how we ended up with IE and its proprietary BS like ActiveX years ago. Clearly, people are forgetting history

        • meat_popsicle@sh.itjust.works
          5·
          5 months ago

          lol like management gives two shits about how browser agnostic a product is. business solutions look to address the perceived gap or need, not tailor to IT personnel feelings.

          • cm0002@lemmy.world
            6·
            5 months ago

            That’s easy, just find [Some important person] who can’t live without [Chrome/Firefox/Whatever] and bring them to your side lmao

            Either way, it didn’t sound like he was saying “I tried to push for better, but management shut me down” it sounded like he was happy to move to edge and “couldn’t understand why people were angry”

      • driveway@lemmy.zip
        162·
        5 months ago

        Why would you target a browser with 5% market share instead 65? How do you even manage to make an application that’s performing vastly different on different UIs but the same engine? Sounds like you need to go looking for real engineers to build your thing.

      • Heavybell@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        For better and worse, most people don’t care what’s under the hood. They care about the surface features. I.e. Chrome already has their bookmarks, the buttons are all in the same place, etc.

        You and I know there’s little difference but end users don’t want to change, even if it’s to something that would benefit them in the long run (i.e. Firefox)

  • sweet
    22·
    5 months ago

    I wish firefox would just add tab-groups back like chrome has or literally any chrome based browser… Ive tried literally every tab extension in the store and w/e I could find on Github but they all aren’t to my liking. They basically all use a side bar. I just want to slide my 100 tabs of manga and obscure programming blogs out of sight lol other than that, firefox is pretty much better in most ways.

        • PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyz
          4·
          5 months ago

          Yeah and it’s kinda hard to get off from that. I’m in the process of switching my 2 gmail accounts to 2 proton ones and it seems that the ProtonMail app’s free plan doesn’t support multiple emails. Understandable but sad.

      • Ziixe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        10·
        5 months ago

        You wouldn’t believe how many people are actually incompetent using a pc beyond using default values and browsing the web, for example in school one day I had to help classmates save their project documents to the school’s server, because they didn’t know how to browse the select folder dialogue box (or whatever it’s called), and another dude in my class didn’t know how to use the shortcut bar at the bottom of the window in PowerPoint so he literally scrolled through the ribbon for like 2 minutes before he managed to launch the presentation (and this guy is a straight A student to note), I also heard stories about coworkers which didn’t know how to open a zip file or how to forward an email

        The oversimplification of software is really problematic, since everything is made to be as straightforward as it can be people just go with it and then have a problem when they need to do something a different way

    • Tak
      6·
      5 months ago

      The person in the video talks so slowly I can listen to it at 1.5x speed. I feel like a jerk because it’s clearly not their first language and I can only imagine how difficult that can be but at 1x speed it’s a seriously slow video.

      To my understanding this is a more in-depth breakdown of how and why browser extensions will not be able to intercept the webpage before the browser displays it and instead it will be executed via scripts on the browser itself. Google claims this is to speed up the process, improve security, and reduce computational power and it does seem to do that but at the expense of the freedom of the browser extensions to alter the web pages being displayed.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
        2·
        5 months ago

        Thank you. Sounds like the typical reasons to remove freedom from the users. :)

  • Zerush
    124·
    5 months ago

    No problems with the inbuild adblocker in Vivaldi, not even in YouTube (without any ads for me), problems only for Chromiums in which are remaining control and tracking APIs from Google and which are only can use “descaffeinated” Adblockers from the Chrome Store. I can use even direct userscripts in Vivaldi if needed, without the need of Tamper-, Greasy- or Violentmonkey extensions. Vivaldi is a Chromium browser, but Google for the past 9 years has hit its teeth on a rock in attempts to control it.

      • Zerush
        4·
        5 months ago

        Floorp is a nice Browser. Apart of Vivaldi, I use also the Mullvad Browser and the SSuite Netsurf for some tasks, before I also had the Midory Browser (almost identical to Floorp) and almost all others which are exist or existed in the past. But Vivaldi remain my main browser since 8 years.

    • driveway@lemmy.zip
      554·
      5 months ago

      Give me some of that closed source browser goodness, yes. Vivaldi and Chrome are the same thing from a privacy perspective precisely because you cannot verify that they’re not.

      • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        5 months ago

        Although you could take into account what the makers are telling you. You have to trust someone, and at least to my knowledge, Google fails and it’s all over the news, Vivaldi has not. It’s not like I can validate the Firefox source either, I’m just trusting the website I download it from, or more likely my distro packaging. And people do look at call outs browsers make etc.

        • driveway@lemmy.zip
          4·
          5 months ago

          Although you could take into account what the makers are telling you.

          Google claims Chrome is private too.

          all over the news, Vivaldi has not

          Becauae not many gives a fuck about Vivaldi enough to reverse engineer it

          not like I can validate the Firefox source either

          You don’t have to. Thousand of people who know what they’re doing does.

          just trusting the website I download it from, or more likely my distro packaging

          This is a separate security, not privacy, issue resolved by trust chain model of distro packaging.

          • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
            1·
            5 months ago

            You don’t have to. Thousand of people who know what they’re doing does. But why would I trust any of them? I’m pointing out you have to choose who you trust, and from the history with the makers of Vivaldi, I trust them. Same as I don’t trust Google given their history.

            Of course, I’m screwed anyway because there’s not reasonable competition in the phone space, and I have to use Microsoft products for work, and… {insert a dozen more things here}. Given all that, I’d like the browser that works better for me.

            • driveway@lemmy.zip
              4·
              5 months ago

              that works better for me. sure, I could not care less what browsers others use.

              Trusting a company to do right by you (for unknown reasons) vs. trusting thousands of independent researchers who have no incentive to wrong you. Though pick, I guess.

      • hOrni@lemmy.world
        48·
        5 months ago

        I just can’t use a browser so… primitive? I wold gladly change to Firefox if it gave me all the customisation options Vivaldi has. Mouse gestures, synchronising my settings across 2 PCs and an android phone, shortcuts to different searchers etc. Plus it would need to be visually customisable so od doesn’t irritate me every couple of minutes.

        • LukeEnglish
          101·
          5 months ago

          Mouse gestures, synchronising my settings across 2 PCs and an android phone, shortcuts to different searchers etc. Plus it would need to be visually customisable

          It sounds like perhaps you haven’t looked into Firefox for a while, because out of the box it does all of the things you listed, except for gestures. There are multiple popular plugins that provide Firefox gestures easily. I’m not sure what visual customizations you’re referring to, but Firefox also has had support for themes for ages now.

          • Lunya \ she/it@iusearchlinux.fyi
            6·
            5 months ago

            except for gestures

            2 finger swipe to the left or right is the gesture to go back and forward, don’t know what other gestures you’d need.

            • hOrni@lemmy.world
              1·
              5 months ago

              The “cradle” for going forward and backwards plus swipes for closing a tab, refreshing and opening a new tab.

          • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
            2·
            5 months ago

            My problem is - last time I looked, which was a while ago to be fair - there weren’t good tab management plugins that also supported tab title search, a list of tabs to easily close ones I didn’t need anymore with ctrl+click or shift+click, no session management, problems with cross window tab viewing/searching, no tab stacks, and now workspaces are kind of awesome for me too.

            I’m not saying there aren’t extensions for each thing, I’m saying I could NOT get them all to work together, and have a fast performant browser without weird hangs, and the UI was kind of all over the place and hard to remember cause none of the extensions were designed to work together from what I could tell.

            What I don’t get is why Vivaldi didn’t code on top of Firefox, but I think it’s because there are sites that work in chromium and don’t in Firefox, and fail silently - and just like in IE6 days, they’re sites like my parents retirement site, they can’t NOT use them.

          • hOrni@lemmy.world
            21·
            5 months ago

            I don’t care for themes, just need night mode. I need the option to throw out any taskbars except fot tabs and address bar. Including any search window. I need a zoom slider at the bottom right corner, and this is a must. It’s also nice to have these things built in instead of looking for extensions. And You are right, o haven’t looked into Firefox for a long time.

    • umbrella
      182·
      5 months ago

      why are people that allergic to firefox?

      vivaldi is chrome with extra steps

      • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
        59·
        5 months ago

        Mostly because the browsing experience IMO is much much worse with Firefox. I tried extensions to get functionality back, it made it worse - slower, buggy, extensions would stop being developed etc. I wish Firefox was better, I really do. But IME it’s frozen functionality like it’s 2010 or so. Like, they have tabs, who hoo. I really find save/restore, multi window control, tab stacks, sessions, workspaces, and easy UI config pretty important in day to day use. That said, I also think ads are a deal breaker, but I really wonder if this won’t bring back some of the ad-blocking proxies you run locally or something.

        Or, someone forks chromium to keep Manifest v2 or whatever.

        • driveway@lemmy.zip
          3·
          5 months ago

          Vivaldi doesn’t have to use v3, Brave won’t. If Vivaldi does upgrade to v3, that should tell you something.

        • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
          21·
          5 months ago

          I use both Firefox and Chrome-based browsers and I haven’t come across any major differences in functionality. What are all these things Chrome can do that Firefox can’t?

        • umbrella
          1·
          5 months ago

          those are all things that don’t exist on most browsers without many extensions

    • BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.social
      151·
      5 months ago

      All browser companies monetise you to some extent. Even Firefox does this a bit (Paid deals make Google is the default search, and Amazon search is also paid to be included as a link for example).

      However the big difference is the private companies like Vivaldi, Brave etc monetise your data more and less transparently, plus the entire Chromium ecosystem is basically under Google’s control. Manifest 3 will not be restricted to Chrome, it is being built into the Chromium project and will end up in Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Brave etc. Chromium is a trojan horse project, used to push Google’s priorities and objectives across the web, not end users.

      The only viable alternative is Firefox based browsers. I use Firefox itself (aware of it’s compromises and using a whole host of extensions), but there are also forks and projects that strip even Firefox’s compromises back - LibreWolf in particular. For all the flaws of the Mozilla foundation, it is transparent on what it does to keep the project going, and the independence of the project compared to chromium is hugely important. Note Firefox is also going to support Manifest V3 (so that extensions can continue to be cross-browser) BUT it is also keeping support for the key APIs that Google is removing (i.e. the ability for extensions to use the block webRequest API which is foundational to current Ad and privacy protection extensions).

      Vivaldi is no different to other Chromium based broswers; it uses the exact same Google controlled code base, plus it is doing everything it can to monetise you. You are the product; all these companies are stealing and financially exploiting your data and we’re all just handing it to them on a platter for free and thanking them for fucking us over.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
        61·
        5 months ago

        All beautifully preached to the choir. Now: how to communicate all this to the unwashed masses who think the web and the internet and Chrome are all the same thing? Serious question.

        • lemmyreader
          5·
          5 months ago

          Good one. I’d say it is too late already. USA big tech is almost everywhere, and countless people are addicted to USA big tech, especially on their phones, and do not ask critical questions anymore.

      • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        5 months ago

        I don’t see any reason to think Vivaldi is trying to monetize it’s users, it seems to have a lot of privacy features and the like. They strip out the chromium spying.