cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/20260243

Google Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled

Google Chrome is now encouraging uBlock Origin users who have updated to the latest version to switch to other ad blockers before Manifest v2 extensions are disabled.

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I think people come down a lot harder on Firefox than they should. It’s a great browser, and they do a lot for the freedom of the community and as an open source ambassador.

    I feel like people generally feel that, given their prominence, they could do a lot more. This is certainly true. Their weird corporate structure, their half-baked experiments like Pocket or VPN, their Google ad money, these are all valid issues.

    But do you know what else is supported by Google ad money? Chromium and every browser built on it. Do you know what has a far more corporate culture? Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc. Do you know who else had weird little money making experiments? Every other browser (Brave’s Basic Attention Tokens, DDG’s Privacy Pro, etc.).

    Firefox makes a bigger target because of their relative popularity and long history.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      It has always felt so goofy to see people say “x” based Chromium browser is better than Firefox because Firefox takes Google’s money but “x” based Chromium browser doesn’t. Like… It just completely ignores the investment Google puts in Chromium lol. Google’s money into Firefox equals bad, but Google’s money into Chromium, oh, that’s actually not bad because we just cover our eyes and ears and go “LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” or something???

      All that to say, I’m glad to see someone else explicitly share this opinion.

      • astro_ray@lemdro.idOP
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        4 months ago

        Isn’t the only reason firefox gets google ad money is because google is afraid they would slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit? Firefox getting money from google doesn’t seem like a valid criticism.

    • stoy@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      When Chrome came out it was heavily promoted by everyone I knew (apart from my best friend) I tried it, didn’t like the UI (still don’t) and didn’t see the point of it.

      People talked abour how fast it was, and I felt that Firefox was fast enough, and Firefox just worked as I wanted it to, why change?

      I kept stedfast with Firefox, apart from when the horrible Australis UI was launched, then I switched to a fork called Pale Moon, which I used for several years untill the current UI was launched.

      • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        it actually WAS really good when it first came out and for a few years, it was also back during the days where google still kind of follows the “don’t be evil” principle.

        • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Yeah there’s a good reason we all started to use it, unlike Firefox it was far far quicker to boot up and load pages. And used significantly less resources, so there was really little upside to using Firefox apart from a few addons not being available for a while.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          Yup, I used it for a year or two, then I found Opera, which was about as fast and also had an independent rendering engine. Around that time, the independence of the rendering engine really mattered to me, so when Opera switched to a Chromium base, I switched back to Firefox. Firefox has since caught up in perf and is the best non-Chromium browser for me (well, I use Mull on Android because FF isn’t on F-Droid and has some defaults I prefer to Fennec).

      • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Chrome was so lightweight and fast when it was launched. And it had a blazing fast Javascript engine. No other engine came close to it.

        It was a pretty awesome browser back then during the “do no evil” era of Google.

        • stoy@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          Sure, I get what you are saying, but I never had an issue with Firefox and Javascript.

          • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Oh, I understand. I’m just saying that the reasons were enough for a lot of people to give it a go, me included. You probably had a beefed up machine back then in 2008. I didn’t, and launching a browser took several seconds, whereas Chrome launched like in one second or so.

            Of course, Chrome started to suck and I came back to Firefox, especially when they caught up with Javascript.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Honestly it’s more that Lemmy as a whole is just a big group of curmudgeons. Most discussions on here veer strongly negative, not limited to Firefox.

      • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        That was after the reddit migration. Lemmy was much better before the reddit doom-and-gloom gang made themselves home.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          I don’t see what’s relevant about your argument. Whether they came from Reddit is irrelevant, they’re here now and this is how they behave.

          • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            It was not an argument. Just an observation. And your opinion doesn’t make it less relevant.

            As the matter of fact, both can co-exist.

            Reddit fucked up Lemmy, and now that they’re here, welp, it’s bullshit.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      I want there to be a competitive market so that Firefox gets better. Without good competition it will continue to rot.

      • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I don’t understand the premise of this statement. Do you think Firefox doesn’t have competition in the browser space?

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          It only has Chromium which somehow is worse than Firefox. We need something that supports all the same features as Firefox but isn’t a fork

          • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Are you talking about the rendering engine? Safari still uses WebKit. Everything else was killed off by chrome. No one wanted to make addons for Internet Explorer, so they switched to Chromium as well.

            It would be extremely difficult to put something new into the market at this point. If even Microsoft lacked the resources, it’s hard to imagine anyone succeeding IMO.

              • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                True, I forgot that is happening. Hopefully it makes a big splash. It’ll be interesting to see how they handle add-ons. I doubt that a modern browser can succeed without it. From my understanding, there may not be any interoperability with existing browser extensions.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              4 months ago

              That’s certainly what I mean, but I can’t speak for anyone else. I used Opera for years until they switched to being a Chromium-based browser, and Safari isn’t an option on Windows or Linux, so I use Firefox. It’s really not any more complicated than that.

        • Fernlike@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          It doesn’t have competition in terms of a “private browser”. As far as I can see there is only Brave, and Ungoogled Chromium which is soon to be an unviable option because of the switch to Manifest V3 for Chromium.

          There are of course browsers like Mullvad Browser, GNU Icecat and Librewolf etc. but they are all based on Firefox, so I wouldn’t really count them.