Between these two options DuckDuckGo Browser is at least free and open source, while Vivaldi is closed source, which makes DuckDuckGo Browser the better choice.

Firefox and its forks are better than both. Firefox’s Gecko engine is independent of Google and Apple, while Vivaldi uses Google’s Blink engine and DuckDuckGo Browser uses either Blink or Apple’s WebKit engine depending on platform.

(and possibly Snap)

I hope they exclude Snap from the default installation. Don’t want an OS with built-in support for Canonical’s closed source app store service when Flatpak is decentralized and FOSS on the server side.

Bypass Paywalls Clean removed the paywall on this article for me on Firefox for Android.

Hey, I think you’re totally right to challenge a statistic when it looks questionable. Censuswide didn’t release the full data publicly, and the survey was commissioned by the Ghostery ad blocker, so there’s reason to suspect that the data is biased.

I trust the YouGov data more, since YouGov is also a credible pollster and the data is being provided as market research data for businesses. However, since I don’t subscribe to their data service, I don’t have details of the methodology here, either.

Frankly, I’m not sure about the quality of the Censuswide survey.

Market data from YouGov Global Profiles shows that 51-52% of people globally (in “48 markets”) use ad blocking on at least 1 device. That percentage is 45-46% for people in the US.

My point is that when a significant proportion of internet users have ad blockers, they’re not just niche tools anymore.

Mull has defaults that improve privacy at the cost of performance and website compatibility. They maintain a list of changes that you can reverse through about:config. If Mull seems slow for you, consider re-enabling the JavaScript JIT.

Over half of all Americans use an ad blocker. It’s time to recognize that average users do block ads.

Most types of ads can be blocked with uBlock Origin, while only some kinds of paywalls can be skipped with Bypass Paywalls Clean. Ads are the most privacy invasive monetization solution and with ad blocking becoming more common, I don’t think ads are a sustainable way to fund content in the future. Still, I would prefer to see voluntary subscription and donation options rather than hard paywalls.

Tusky has been working very well for me on Android. There’s also Ice Cubes for iOS. Both are free and open source.

Any details on that? The full uBlock Origin works well on mobile and I don’t see how a lite version with reduced blocking effectiveness could be more useful.

This was apparently fixed in 2020 and I’ve just been disabling in-app browsers out of habit. Corrected, thanks.

Turn off the in-app browser in your Lemmy reader app, then switch to a browser with ad blocking (such as Firefox with uBlock Origin with the cookie banner filters enabled).

That’s not the worst possible scenario, I’d love to see the Snap Store completely replaced with decentralized FOSS alternatives. Any scenario in which the Snap Store takes market share from decentralized FOSS alternatives is considerably worse.

Also, who said I wouldn’t use proprietary apps? I refuse to use Snap because Flatpak and other FOSS application packaging solutions that aren’t locked to a store controlled by a single for-profit company already serve my needs. I don’t have any objection to using proprietary apps that don’t have alternatives that meet my needs.

Silly whataboutism. When there are multiple Linux package management solutions to choose from that are functional, decentralized, and fully FOSS, including ones that work across distros, switching to the proprietary Canonical-controlled Snap Store is moving backward for no good reason.

The Snap Store server is completely proprietary and fully controlled by Canonical.

Yes, Plasma 6 was the turning point for me, since it introduced pixel-perfect fractional scaling on Wayland for just about every application.

I was responding to a comment that claimed “he isn’t on the project since last year”. Based on his activity on social media, he is clearly still in the project.

That’s dubious, since the “former” lead developer is still referring to the project with the pronoun “we” on social media.

Direct link to PDF of RCS Universal Profile specification

This PDF link can be found on a search engine. You can also fill out the form with fake information and a throwaway email to get the link, though you don’t have to.

The RCS Universal Profile is a publicly available standard, but there is no FOSS client stack that implements the standard. Google restricts RCS support on Android to the proprietary Google Messages instead of making it part of the Android Open Source Project. Apple Messages and iOS are also proprietary.

The EU should use the Digital Markets Act to force Google and Apple to allow competing RCS clients on Android and iOS.