- cross-posted to:
- lealternative@feddit.it
- cross-posted to:
- lealternative@feddit.it
EDIT: Apologies. Updated with a link to what gorhill REALLY said:
Manifest v2 uBO will not be automatically replaced by Manifest v3 uBOL[ight]. uBOL is too different from uBO for it to silently replace uBO – you will have to explicitly make a choice as to which extension should replace uBO according to your own prerogatives.
Ultimately whether uBOL is an acceptable alternative to uBO is up to you, it’s not a choice that will be made for you.
Will development of uBO continue? Yes, there are other browsers which are not deprecating Manifest v2, e.g. Firefox.
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Comment from gorhill (the developer of uBO and uBOL):
I didn’t recommend to switch to uBO Lite, the article made that up. I merely pointed out Google Chrome currently presents uBO Lite as an alternative (along with 3 other content blockers), explained what uBO Lite is, and concluded that it may or may not be considered an acceptable alternative, it’s for each person to decide.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1ejhpu5/comment/lgdmthd/
“uBlock Origin developer slams NeoWin, backpedals on recommendation!” —NeoWin editors, probably.
Sounds about right for any news outlet. “Slams” is so overused, and usually nowhere near an accurate euphamism.
They should recommend switching to Firefox instead. It’s clear that Google cannot be allowed to have a monopoly on browsers.
The title is misleading, or false.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox
This document explains why uBO works best in Firefox.
Even better is FF mobile (on Android) supports full list of addons, including uBlock Origin.
The using the web without uBlock Origin is cancer.
Though not container tabs (yet)?
Unfortunately no.
I only use Firefox and have for the past few years. Yesterday I tried to schedule an appointment to get my oil changed at the dealer but was unable because the process on the site just flat-out breaks on Firefox. This is not a complaint about Firefox, but the fact that Chrome is so popular that some websites only work with Chrome. I don’t have a Chromium-based browser installed (besides Edge, which I’ve never opened intentionally) and I despise being on the phone (which is why I was trying to schedule online in the first place), so I just didn’t make the appointment. I’ll go somewhere else to get my oil changed. Sorry for the rant but it was extremely frustrating.
Chrome is so popular that some websites only work with Chrome.
It’s the Internet Explorer problem all over again, but this time from an even more invasive company.
The more people choosing non-Chomium browsers, the better. Keeping them popular enough that most sites have to support them is the only way to preserve what little agency people still have on the mainstream web.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask
This addon will work if it’s not letting you
I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Man, you never worked for a large corporation that that had internal web based apps that only work on Internet Explorer and refused to update it.
I worked somewhere like that back in the 2008-2010 time frame. Thankfully, there was a extension, I believe the name was “IETab”, that would spawn a new tab in Trident (IE’s browser engine). So you could set certain sites to launch in one of those tabs and everything else would use standard Firefox. None of the people I supported were any the wiser. They just thought everything worked in Firefox.
Granted it was only that seamless because Windows already had that rendering engine built in. There are some extensions that do something similar with Chrome, but because of more modern security standards and whatnot you have to install extension helper applications which is gross.
Are you sure that it was Firefox itself? I find the few times something like that has come up, it was because of extensions (like adblocl, actually).
Delta’s website started blocking me due to using Dark Reader, apparently something about detecting that the contents of the page were being altered. And another site worked fine when I disabled unlock; I assume because it was blocking loading some .js that was actually being used for something other than just ads.
As far as I can tell. After disabling all extensions it still didn’t work.
On the same day Google was found to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act…
Too bad nothing will come from that.
I’m going to call foul play on Judge Mehta’s ruling. They are a direct competitor.
How the hell is a Judge a competitor with Google for Search?
Because their maiden name is Judge Fasbuk?
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One of Googles biggest competitor’s is the company “Meta” which is phonetically similar to the judges name. The previous commentator made a joke where they appeared to confuse the corporation for the person. A situation that would be absurd if true, and from there the humour arose.
When a respondent (you) appeared to miss the subtext in the comment, and took it at face value, I made a post where I gave the impression I had made the same mistake , and suggested that the judge had previously had a name phonetically similar to “Facebook” which was the name previously used by the corporation now called “Meta”.Such a situation would require a coincidence even more implausible and absurd than the first, and was intended to demonstrate that neither comment should be taken seriously.
Your comment indicates you either failed to identify the absurdity, possibly due to confirmation bias following your previous response. Or you are attempting to “up the ante” by erroneously taking such absurdity seriously for further humourous effect. Your follow up comments elsewhere suggest the former.
Regardless, the “joke” has now been thoroughly killed by way of explanation. You can choose to accept the explanation or choose to remain in error.
This is the biggest whoosh I’ve seen on lemmy.
What happened?
They lost what may end up being the biggest antitrust case in decades. And it’s not weak sauce like the ruling that may get overturned regarding the Play Store monopoly (which is kinda weak since Android manufacturers can and do include other app stores on their phones).
It had to do with their anti-competitive behavior regarding Online Search. Specifically stuff like paying Apple and other manufacturers to make Google the default or even exclusive search engine, then using that not only to capture the market, but to charge more for ads than the competition they sabotage.
As a bonus, it’ll probably hurt reddit too, since it almost certainly makes their recent deal with Google illegal.
It’ll be appealed, but it’s a pretty big ruling. Between the US Courts, EU legislature, and what looks poised to be a flop for Gemini/Bard, Google is on its way to having a real shit year.
This has been a long time in the making…hopefully Firefox will see a market share increase. Google is doing this right as they get slapped by an antitrust ruling ironically lol. If you haven’t already just go ahead and switch, if you like Lemmy you’ll probably like Firefox as well.
Side note: I try not to be negative here, but this would be a great time for Mozilla to get their act together as an organization. Love Firefox and the idea, but Mozilla has been pissing off the FOSS space for a while now with their decisions. If they’ve improved in recent years, disregard this.
The tricky part is that Google isn’t wrong about Manifest v3 increasing security for some people. Just allowing any extension to access the full URLs from a webpage is honestly pretty sketchy for most things that aren’t adblockers. Think about Beth in accounting who has 27 bloatware toolbar extensions installed on her home PC, which are happily collecting her full browser history and sending it off to gods know where. Manifest v3 is targeted at increasing security for those users, by making it more difficult for extensions to track you.
The issue is that it also makes ad blocking virtually impossible, because the blocker is forced to just trust that the browser is being truthful about what is and isn’t on the page. And when the browser (developed by one of the largest advertisers in the world) has a vested financial interest in displaying ads, there’s very little trust that the browser will actually be honest.
The issue is that there’s not some sort of “yes, I really want this extension to have full access” legacy workaround built in. Yes, it would inevitably be abused by those scummy extensions, which would just nag idiot users to allow them full access. And the idiot users, being idiots, would just do it without understanding the risks. Even if Chrome threw up all kinds of big red “hey make sure this extension actually needs full access and isn’t just tracking your shit” warning flags, there are still plenty of users who would happily give bloatware full access without reading any of the warnings. But it would also allow ad blockers to continue to function.
The single biggest security improvement you could make for Beth in accounting would be to install UBO. Where do you think she gets all those shitty toolbar extensions? That’s right, from ads.
This is targeted at destroying adblockers because Google is, first and foremost, an ad serving company. That’s their business model. It incidentally improves security for certain users in certain edge cases, because they need some kind of figleaf of legitimacy.
Ads and crappy installers, all though that seems less common than it used to be. I can’t say if that’s a general trend or tunnel vision due to me not installing crapware.
If it was about security then they should simply block Manifest v2 extensions from their store or at least start doing some actual verification of the extensions they host. Taking away freedom claiming it to be for security is almost always a lie.
Verify! But what will all the “Cändy Crunch 7 Browser Edition with 12 Free Play Levels” players do?
Can you share some examples of things that pisses off the FOSS space? Mostly just curious to understand more
Here’s the most recent example:
The browser that promises “no shady privacy notices or advertiser backdoors” on its storefront has suddenly added an experimental feature to beam user interactions to advertisers and enables it by default. Many are not happy.
It should be noted that the advertisers get zero personal information, neither does Mozilla, and it has been designed in a way so that the data is impossible to fingerprint in a way that can tie it back to any individual person, machine, or specific location.
It’s a way for advertisers (and like it or not, a decent amount of the content we want has to be paid for somehow) to see how effective their ads are without anybody’s privacy being encroached on.
Should it have been turned on without informing the user? Fuck no. But there’s a lot of misinformation going around about this.
Personally I’ll still be using uBO, because I despise any ads at all, but if we are to have ads, the system Mozilla has built is just about the most ethical and privacy-respecting way to do it.
Even if Mozilla takes precautions to avoid de-anonymizing our data, any private data sold to data brokers becomes a part of the puzzle for learning our identities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification
Even knowing something a trivial as two movie ratings led to a 68% success rate in learning an identity.
I suggest you actually look into how their system works. This kind of strategy is not possible with Mozilla’s system.
In fact, your very link points to ‘Differential Privacy’ as a very effective foil to re-identification, and that’s basically how the Mozilla system operates.
This is not a matter of Mozilla having a load of data about your account or IP, then Mozilla scrubbing that information then sending the database to advertisers.
I appreciate your informed response but no system other than advertising-abstinence is fool proof.
Im saying this as a supporter. My browser of choice is firefox and I send them money regularly. And I understand their need to generate more revenue. But there has never been a company who has sold customer data discretely. My understanding is that every piece of data that’s sold can be de anonymized when combined with other data sets. And the data is horsetraded until it gets into some very marginal actors’ hands.
Mozilla’s need for money is largely driven by massive mismanagement. It should have been fully funded in perpetuity through establishing a foundation that operates off interest payments but they decided to try and build a headquarters in Mountainview. They also operate offices in some of the most expensive cities in the world. They have made expensive software aquisitions. These are not necessary and have only whetted mozilla’s thirst for other revenue sources. It’s guaranteed that they will look for more customer data to sell because that’s the path of least resistance.
I wish them luck but I also wish they’d not chase advertising money.
As for the “no system is foolproof”, you’re thinking of implementations, not algorithms. An algorithm can indeed be something-proof. Most “known” algorithms are built on top of very strong mathematical foundations stating what is possible, what is not and what is a maybe.
As for the ads thing, Mozilla is not making a dime off this. It is not monetizable. They’re basically expecting that by giving advertisers a fairly “benign” way to do their shenanigans they will stop doing things the way they currently do (with per-individual tracking).
The absolutists might say that there’s no such thing as benign ads, however truth is that the market forces behind ads are big enough that you’d get website-integrity-bullshit rather ad-free web. Having tracking less ads is better than having a “this website only works in chrome” or “only without extensions” internet.
Is there any other possibility? Maybe. Is is reasonable to think that the moment tracking starts getting blocked em masse, we risk a web-integrity-bullshit +wherever-said-tracking-can-exist-only internet? I think so.
That’s a good thing
Getting trackers out of cookies is something users want
What the uBlock dev actually said:
Manifest v2 uBO will not be automatically replaced by Manifest v3 uBOL[ight]. uBOL is too different from uBO for it to silently replace uBO – you will have to explicitly make a choice as to which extension should replace uBO according to your own prerogatives.
Ultimately whether uBOL is an acceptable alternative to uBO is up to you, it’s not a choice that will be made for you.
Will development of uBO continue? Yes, there are other browsers which are not deprecating Manifest v2, e.g. Firefox.
I recommend switching to another browser like Firefox or Librewolf.
I love Librewolf currently but I worry it’s going to stray too much from what it originally was like Waterfox and others ended up doing, and then end up randomly breaking compatibility with certain plugins or introducing other issues.
Right now, Librewolf is the best way to experience Firefox. Will that still be the case in 5, 10, 15 years? That remains to be seen. I hope it’s still the best way to experience Firefox years from now. Having to change browsers every so often does suck tbh.
Those are jumping to Librewolf from Firefox, keep the following things in mind
- It’s a privacy first, usability second browser
- It’s not a browser for your grandparents. You have you take some steps to give it the same functionality as Firefox
- Good news is it removes a lot of Mozilla cruft
- Browser fingerprinting, which allows websites to recognize an individual user, is disabled on this browser. This feature greatly enhances privacy.
- But it means it will ‘slightly’ break some websites. Nothing very serious but certain QoL features will be missing at first. Eg. When downloading a software, it can’t determine which OS you are using.
- You can enable browser fingerprinting and get those QoL features back.
Hope you have a good experience on Librewolf. I’ve been using it for the past 1 year and it’s fine.
Meh.
Librewolf already breaks loads of websites with it’s fingerprinting resistance - just get used to turning it off.
In any case, you already need a chromium fork handy for all the sites that just plain don’t support firefox any more. I’ve run in to weird issues in firefox that don’t arise in chromium several times in the last month. This is going to get much worse.
As for changing browsers. I don’t care very much. I don’t use many browser features like bookmarks or passwords.
Which websites did you run into issues with Firefox? I haven’t had any issues with any websites. I do think you’re right that it’s probably going to get worse over time, but maybe not if more people make the switch to Firefox.
booking.com is the worst I’ve encountered. There’s a captcha type anti-bot thing that I can’t pass with firefox. I think it uses canvas.
edit: another I use all the time is called echo360. It’s the platform my university uses to host lecture videos. The player just plain doesn’t work in firefox - blank screen.
Using firedragon for desktop (Linux) and between iceraven and mull for mobile
hello, i have chosen to value your opinion above my own based on very shaky reasoning i will not be sharing
I abandoned chrome for being too RAM-hungry when im playing games w the browser open
i abandoned Internet Explorer for being too slow
and i abandoned firefox for being too bloated and sluggish, but that was like 2010 and things change
im currently using Opera but why do you choose firefox over its contemporaries?
Because it’s not based on chromium(blink web engine), there are two other well supported web engines which browsers can be based on, WebKit (Apple), and Gecko (Mozilla).
At the end of the day, if it’s built on Blink, it’s liable to have Google break things they don’t like on the back end. Including ad blockers.
Opera used to be built on it’s own web engine (presto) but since 2013 it’s been built on Blink.
that was a great summary, thank you
trying to research such a broad topic was overwhelming
Firefox is open source and Opera is still based on Chromium (the engine for Chrome, same as Edge and a number of other browsers).
For practical use, Firefox seems plenty fast on my devices including mobile.
What are the main differences, for someone considering going from Firefox to Librewolf?
Librewolf is hardened out of the box whereas with Firefox, you have to harden it yourself
You should also consider arkenfox user.js
Librewolf is to Firefox what Chromium is to Chrome, essentially. Removed many bloated Mozilla anti-features, has sensible (but not paranoid) privacy and security defaults and ships with uBlock origin pre-installed. You can archive all of that with Firefox, but Librewolf makes things easy for you.
the first comparison is not technically correct, in the sense:
- Chrome is built on top of Chromium
- LibreWolf is built on top of Firefox
LibreWolf implements additional privacy features and settings on top of Firefox. Chromium is the base browser that everyone else built on top of. It does not implement additional privacy features.
perhaps a better comparison would be: LibreWolf is to Firefox what Ungoogled Chromium is to Chromium
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I’ve been eyeing up librewolf, having made the switch to Firefox on all machines a while back.
If I’m using DDG for search, uBlock Origin, bitwarden, strict tracking protection, disabled data collection and ad measurements, and then have https-only in all windows and max protection dns over https, will I see any practical difference?
In this case I do prefer functionality over 100% perfect privacy and anti-advertising. I’m fortunate to be able to run Linux on my work machine (I use mint, btw) and so I use the browser versions of M365 including Teams video conferencing.
So many kids with assigned school Chromebooks are going to get fucked over by this. You can apparently install Firefox on a Chromebook via the Google Play Store, but that was disabled on my daughter’s Chromebook. I don’t want her exposed to constant advertising while she’s doing her schoolwork. It’s bad enough that she’s exposed to it the rest of the time just being in America.
I think this is something most people rarely talk about but it strikes home to many of us. As a parent, I have a responsibility to defend my children against this persistent cognitive manipulation and experimentation. Just as I would not want a random stranger at the corner have exclusive attention of my kid and sell them insurance or grammarly or mesothelioma, I would also never want them to have that unfiltered access to my kids online. One can then say AdBlocks are a parental obligation.
there has to be collective voices and collective action taken. do parents unions exist?
Usually, they are used to burn books :/
*Limit access to pornography in grade school libraries. Translated your groomer speak to English for you.
What a weird thing to say
You think little kids need to view explicit material? I hope no one trusts you around children. Parents have a right and a responsibility to know and approve of the curriculum taught to their children by state schools financed by their taxes. If they do not approve they should have the right to send their children and their money elsewhere. This will be the law.
And, pray tell, what library or school has pornography in it that is easily accessible to minors?
Furthermore, having lived my entire life around educators and now working for an educational institution: parents are fucking stupid lol
The sheer numbers of videos of parents removed and crying at school meetings or libraries about “X book is pornographic” or “this book has witchcraft and should be burned” is absurd. Those mouth breathers don’t even know how to critically examine a fucking facebook post for bullshit, let alone comprehend the difficulty in teaching children.
Don’t like your kid learning about how Trans people exist? Go fuck yourself and homeschool your kid so they can be permanently stunted in terms of preparation for the real world. Let the vast majority of regular people make sure their kids grow up socially aware and at least passingly prepared for the future.
Also, “this will be the law?” Have you seen the flailing Republican party? Guess what fucker - the average American thinks project 2025 is batshit and the republican party got hijacked by a manchild and ruined their stupid plans. It’s only downhill from here now that they went mask off - most people think they’re nuts.
It’s normal for system admins to not let their users install non-whitelist software
You should PTA to switch from Chrome to Firefox
I think it’s very unlikely that they would pay for the IT department to install Firefox on every Chromebook. You’re talking 14,000 students in this county and only the kindergartners don’t get Chromebooks.
You might be surprised! This type of change is usually automated and centralized, so an administrator shouldn’t ever have to even touch any of those Chromebooks. Might be worth having a chat with your school administrators.
My own daughter is in online school now (it’s still a public school, it’s just not in a physical location) so she can use her own computer… but I have to do the user agent switcher thing because the school’s own website testing software isn’t Firefox-compatible. And the school is run by evil Pierson who basically has a monopoly on American public schools, so I’m guessing that’s true for all of those Chromebooks out there too.
Still, I might suggest it to them anyway just for the benefit of the other kids.
Yeah, they sign major contracts that have a lot of stipulations so they get the best deals since theyre govt funded. This backfires, ofc, by locking them into bad products.
Im not saying dont try, definitely do.
Should be able to do either remotely or by including it in the image
I imagine personal work is saved to a server not locally
But it doesn’t hurt to try
That’s really wild to me. They give each grade school student a chromebook? That is honestly terrifying.
Why is it terrifying? A lot of kids don’t have computers of their own and this gives them access to the internet. It’s also, in my opinion, a far better way to give kids tests than filling in bubbles on a sheet of paper.
I mean I wish there were other good, cheap options, but there aren’t.
I really hate to “back in my day” this but we had computer labs for that when I was younger. And that didn’t require giving a monopoly company my name or any other information about me. And I wasn’t being ad-tracked all day long going to websites.
Computer labs aren’t going to help the kids going home at night to study and I don’t really think shuffling kids into a computer lab every time there’s a test in any class makes much sense.
I mean, both can be true if we’re living in a cloud-based world.
Schools can provide workstations and households can either opt in to using their own computer at home or be assigned a laptop or laptop credit. Choice is the important part here, and limiting kids choices at the benefit of major oligarchy organizations sucks big floppy donkey dick.
How about a DNS-based ad-blocking service? NextDNS is pretty good and not expensive. You should check if you can set custom DNS servers on that Chromebook, though.
I have Yunohost installed on my local network and they have DNS adblocking apps that you can install.
You can also very easily install apps like Owncloud to have your own version of Google Drive.
That probably will not be suitable because the Chromebook could leave the home network.
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Don’t tell me that, there’s a Dad yearnin’ to help his spawn?!?!
DNS over https bypasses much of that, right? till you find and block those DNS servers
I just got firefox yesterday, cause I noticed youtube started baking unskippable ads into their site.
If any site doesn’t work you can try this official addon Chrome Mask. If it works with it on you can report it Mozilla.
Edit: a bit of context:
I"m going to try that extension to see if it helps with a couple of websites. So thanks for the recommendation!
If it does help be sure to report it to Mozilla! Otherwise the site admins will just see another Chrome user and have little. Incentive to focus on FF.
Thanks for sharing the extension! I just got some passkeys and they just weren’t working on several websites for Firefox (looking at you Azure) but that solved the issue immediately!
Be sure to report a bug to Mozilla regarding those pages!
I’ve been using LibreWolf on Desktop and Mull on Android. Basically more securely configured versions of Firefox with the proprietary telemetry and some other stuff removed. Takes some tweaking to get certain websites to work that need more access than they should or use Certificate Authorities that don’t have working OSCP servers.
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Floorp is an excellent browser. I mainly use it for the first class vertical tab support, but it’s ability to pin websites to open in a sidebar is great. I use it for stuff like Proton mail and drive.
I will say in case anyone here saw it in the past, it had a bit of drama around the author making part of it closed source, but that was fortunately resolved before it was ever released with any proprietary code.
Tell us more of the Floorp. (as long as its not based on chrome)
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Any issues with not being set up in Japanese?
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Vivaldi does have it’s own built in adblocker. You can add sources. It’s not as robust at uBO, but than nothing
I don’t like or use brave for multiple reasons but why is the fact that it’s built on chromium a problem?
Because every browser is becoming 3 chromes in a trench coat.
Long term this will be an issue.
LONG LIVE GECKO
They are doing what Apple has done to browsers on iPhones. It’s all safari all the way down… lol
Ironically, Apple forcing Safari on iPhones is the single greatest thing standing between Chromium and total market domination.
Not that it’s a good thing for Apple users, but it’s the one remaining reason not to slap a “Not on Chromium? Don’t bother visiting” sign on every website. Us Firefox users don’t matter, statistically speaking
Fuck. I hadn’t even thought of that perspective. You are totally right.
Link is borked, add another ) at the end
Works fine for me and has the ), what are you using to look at it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browsers_based_on_Chromium
This link works for me but the previous has the same broken link. I’m using the Sync android client. ¯\(°_o)/¯
The 1st opens a link to the wiki page: Chromium (web browser
Missing the ending ) for me
Odd so it does not like the link getting renamed then.
Ah yes, the browser that monetizers based on activity tracking. The one based on chromium, handing Google further control over web standards. The browser with a a mysterious nearly unlimited budget for advertising before they even had a handful of users. That browser.
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i use brave on my phone since its harder to adblock on phones for me
Firefox mobile has ublock origin
ooh ty i’ll try it :)
I switched my phone browser the Firefox Mobile and have installed ublock and I am quite satisfied so far.
memories of Internet Explorer doing the same thing intensifies
They did? Never used that garbage. Switched from Netscape Navigator to Opera to Firefox.
I used chrome on mobile since in the old days, Firefox mobile was unusable, but that’s been years ago.
Now for the 3 websites that stubbornly refuse to open in FF I use Edge on desktop, and kiwi on mobile.
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.
If you’re not stuck on chrome due to workplace policy or something, now is the time to switch to Firefox
Do you know if the lite version still blocks YouTube ads?
AdGuard browser extension is on manifest v3 and they have elements picker feature
The best action ublock origions devs can take is drop support for chromium based browsers and retract ublock lite from the chrome webstore.
I was hopefull for something more than just a wiki page on github. adding a banner to chrome’s add-on menu is way more powerful and far more reaching than what they did
i crave decisiveness like that. it would make me so happy if that sort of behavior became the norm.
too many corpos getting away with murder because they are more convenient than their competitors or because switching is too hard
Understatement, I know, but I find this so annoying, and it certainly feels malicious.
I was just commenting the other day how ridiculous it is that google search results literally serve up malware to people via paid ads. My neighbor was running into issues where her computer kept getting “infected” and a full screen scam would take control, blaring out a loud message that her computer was infected with a virus, that it was infecting microsoft’s servers, and she had to call them now to fix it.
After investigating, I found out that these types of scams are stored as blobs on Microsoft’s cloud service, but the links are spread via ads in google search. When I tried searching for the exact search terms my neighbor was using on my own devices and my own network, I found out that google was serving me the exact same ads, aka sponsored links. They look like legitimate results for things that people search for, like showing what appears to be a link to Amazon when searching for a product, even the links will say “www.amazon.com”.
Obviously I told my neighbor not to use Chrome and suggested some browser alternatives. I installed uBlock on all the browsers (including chrome) just to be safe. Then I showed her how to tell when things are ads, even when they are deceiving, and to never click on ads or sponsored links under any circumstances.
But it’s definitely infuriating that they are serving up malware in their ads, don’t respond to reports in a timely manner, are getting people caught in scams that they allow to advertise on their network but then somehow object to people managing those risks by blocking ads from untrustworthy sources, like google.
I just did a cleanup on someone’s computer that got this. They actually called the number and got scammed out of their whole life savings. The usual Indian scammers.
They should update the Chrome extension to tell people to download Firefox instead
Imagine if Google’s decision to do this to fight adblockers results in them losing the lead in the browser war because everyone switches to other browsers.
Dreaming is one thing, but I remain skeptical. Tech people always seem to vastly overestimate how much the average population will react to tech news. Most people don’t care. They should but they don’t. In addition to that, use of Chrome by businesses is heavily entrenched. The IT guys probably hate it on a personal level, but it takes a lot to make business bigwigs change direction away from a “trustworthy” big company like Google.
I mostly agree, but lets remember
use of Chrome by businesses is heavily entrenched.
So was internet explorer
Chrome was backed by Google, a multifaceted staple of the Internet ecosystem and rolled out with a ton of marketing behind it.
I remain skeptical that Firefox could plausibly overtake Chrome. The mere word of mouth of tech enthusiasts simply isn’t enough to make a population majority proactively switch.
And we had it like forever.
“like” being a very important word in that sentence.
The thing that finally got businesses to finally get off IE wasn’t from the browser being worse than every other option. Heck, it wasn’t even because it was a decrepit piece of software that lost it’s former market dominance (and if anything businesses see that as a positive, not a negative).
What finally did that was microsoft saying there won’t be any security updates. That’s what finally got them off their ass; subtly threatening them with data breaches, exploits, etc. if they continue to use it. I don’t see google doing this anytime soon, at least not without a “sequel” like microsoft had with edge.
The vast majority of people aren’t even going to know or care. A lot of people will probably just continue on even when their adblocker becomes less effective. Of course the type of people who use adblockers are also more likely to wonder why their adblocker suddenly became less effective and then switch to a browser where it’s more effective.
It takes a lot to change the inertia that already exists. People have been predicting the rise of the Linux desktop for at least a decade now and it still hasn’t really caught on.
Tech people are niche but over time we will pre-install what we consider “good” on our grandmas, dads, moms, friends, etc… PCs
The older generation demographic continues to shrink, while it seems the great majority of Gen Z and A are perfectly happy to use whatever ecosystem is built into their device. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t want better software, merely being realistic about the choices of populations.
