> When Google can do something that every one of it's users hates
I don't think this is remotely the case. Quite a few tech-savvy people I know (some of them software developers) use Chrome and mostly don't care about whatever Google does with it. I mention "manifest v3" and get a blank stare. I talk about advertising and ad blockers, and most people don't care, with some of them not even using ad blockers.
We really live in a bubble, here on HN. Most people think of privacy as some abstract thing that they have little control over, and are mostly fine with that. And some are even also fine with government erosion of privacy, in the name of "save the children" style arguments, and of corporate erosion of privacy, in the name of getting free stuff in exchange for their personal information.
It's a sad state of affairs. If most people really did care strongly about these sorts of issues, then I think it would be baffling why we haven't seen more change here -- after all, Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use. But the lack of change is no surprise: most people don't care.
I don't buy this. I'm sure most iphone users don't care when you ask them about privacy or manifest v3 as an abstract concept, but remember what happened when Apple tried to push a U2 album to them? They lost their collective shit. They may not write blog posts about privacy or donate to the EFF, but they have deeply personal relationships with "their" phone and they absolutely hate being reminded that it isn't really theirs.
If this weren't true, Apple could just start inserting ads into every iphone's Safari window tomorrow, and Youtube could serve the ad in the same stream as the video to defeat adblockers, and they'd make a bunch of extra money with no downside. The fact that they don't do this suggests that Apple and Google understand this: people only tolerate restricted platforms that do a convincing job of pretending to be unrestricted. In practice, this means that step 1 of Google foisting off user-hostile stuff on us is getting Firefox to include it too, which is presumably why they spend so much money on it.
>when Apple tried to push a U2 album to them? They lost their collective shit
and that's exactly it. putting something in your music library is a hugely more visible and tangible thing than all the nebulous privacy concerns the internet wants me to be afraid of. nobody gives a shit if google or apple or facebook or whoever else introduces some techical measure that could be used for nefarious things. they only care if that api is actually used for nefarious things. as long as the argument is "well if google implements X, then it would potentially allow them to do Y*, that's a failing argument.
like it or not, people actually do trust the big tech companies. as long as they aren't actively abusing that trust in ways that people care about, things like "google wants to know if you're a real person or a bot" aren't going to cause a whole lot of outrage. most people can understand that letting fake people pretend to be real is bad, and that preventing that is probably a good thing.
> as long as the argument is "well if google implements X, then it would potentially allow them to do Y", that's a failing argument.
It's similar to privacy 'dead bodies'[1], where users want to know actual concrete examples. I keep a collection of them in a larger directory of web pages about privacy, about instances where 'nebulous' privacy aspects meet reality and users are impacted and upset by it.
[1] Term used by a law professor in Daniel J. Solove's "I've got nothing to hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
No one I knew really cared much about the U2 album except that it was a bad album and they didn't want it in their collection. From the people I know there no one upset about the power dynamics - everyone who complained would have been 100% happy if Apple had given them an album they liked.
And also, in a bug I'm not sure was entirely on Apple, when plugged into many car stereos iTunes would start playing the first song in your library, so users were annoyed because everythime they'd plug their phone into their car to charge it would start playing a 3rd tier U2 album.
> when Apple tried to push a U2 album to them? They lost their collective shit.
Yeah, Apple was toast after they did that. Their share price in 2014 when they did that was $24, and immediately afterwards it rose to $33 over the next 12 months. And since then, it's just been one long slow decline to almost $200 a share, as their global mobile market share has gone from the 24% it enjoyed in 2014 to the measly 29% it enjoys today.
You’re forgetting a 4:1 stock split in August 2020, so it’s even worse ;-)
I think this illustrates that people only worry about this kind of thing if it gets shoved into their face.
The privacy thing is OK as long as it’s only used for the good. For example, I think nobody would object against a world where every killer would be caught within an hour to get a fair trial.
However, such a world also would be one where every traffic offense could be fined, and where powers that be could find some dirt on anybody in their email history, presence on on-street cameras, etc. Worse, it would take relatively few people to pull that of.
That’s something I think nobody wants, but it’s abstract until it affects you, so few people worry about it.
By this argument we should defund the police because they could be used for oppression. Forgetting the reality that they are also stopping thousands of crimes every single day.
Privacy absolution is never what most people signed up for.
Where did I make the argument that “we” don’t want to give up any privacy? I’m only claiming “we” don’t want to give up all privacy.
Also, “the police” are thousands of humans. That makes it harder to use the police for oppression than if “the police” were a bunch of computers and robots.
If somebody proposed the latter, I think lots of people would object.
I care, and I've basically stopped using my iphone for anything because the web is an abysmal experience full of ads even with the maximum amount of ad blocking possible on iOS. I hate the iPhone and the only reason I haven't switched back to android is that it seems to manage to, somehow, still be even worse. We are well and truly on the other side of the enshitification event horizon on mobile, and it looks like Google is doing it's best to make sure the web keeps up on the desktop too.
Not trying to get you back on your iPhone but I can tell you that 1Blocker + NextDNS do wonders when it comes to blocking ads on the web using iphones. Granted, sometimes some sites do break for weird reasons but i'm happy to live with that if it means I get to avoid ads. Hell, it even manages to block ads on mobile youtube.
My personal experience with ad blocking on iOS is that it’s both far less effective overall than ublock origin, and still manages to break a lot more sites. I have 0 tolerance for ads though- so even a 99% success rate on a site is unacceptable to me and I’ll just not use that site on my phone. Maybe 2/3rds of sites fail by that criteria for me. If ublock origin on my desktop computer also fails, then I don’t use the site at all- but that’s a vanishingly rate occurrence.
Until Apple allows other browser engines, everything is still limited to the same set of blockers you can get in safari. None of them are remotely good enough compared to ublock origin. My current phone probably has around 6-12 months of life left in it, and if Apple doesn’t have a solution by then I’m dropping the iPhone and either going with a de-Googled android build or giving up on smart phones altogether.
This is exactly the take that Google, and companies interested in setting up WEI-enabled web sites, will adopt. When you're talking about business, technical details that will affect a tiny minority of nerds simply doesn't matter. What matters is what value can you capture from the lion's share of the market? And how much is it gonna cost you to support the tiny minority that remains?
Back in the 90s, much of the web was designed for Internet Explorer exclusively. A bit later, Flash took off. Both of these posed problems for users of niche browsers and operating systems, but from a business standpoint, nobody was complaining.
Multiple bubbles on HN. Obviously, most of us are complicit in some techbro business conventions today that, 30 years ago, would've gotten us shunned by our peers, and reported to the authorities.
(Not that current phenomena weren't foreseen. SF writers had already been all over it. Anecdotally, Internet-savvy techies were often informed by various forward-looking thinking and by world history, and tended to act like stewards rather than exploiters.)
I'm a tech-savvy person and I consider Manifest v3 an improvement (improves security + performance), and Firefox implements it as well as things like declarativeNetRequest[1].
Manifest v3 itself is an improvement and is probably non-controversial. I can't see why anyone would think deprecating manifest v2 along with removing webRequest is a good thing. The latter is what everyone is mad about when they talk about "manifest v3". I'm not sure whether you're trying to making a nitpick point about the difference between the two, or you legitimately think the latter is a good thing.
Can you expand on the security improvements of v3? This is the first I've heard this.
As for performance... That sounds dubious. Declarative blocking surely will be faster than v2, but what is being blocked by v2, I would imagine, is generally way slower than the difference between v2 and v3. At the end of the day, I don't see the performance of my browser negatively impacted by uBlock Origin, I see it saving CPU, bandwidth, memory, privacy, etc.
I'd be willing to bet that whatever isn't blocked by v3 is sifnificantly slower than whatever supposed slowness there is with v2 (in general).
this argument is inadequate because it only examines and explains one side of a multi-part system. The users of consumer electronics as a mass at a point in time is not sufficient, even if well described, to explain important changes of the system over time.
When you talk about communications technology adopted at a societal scale, changes in norms and routine have ripple effects. Most certainly one of those is a change in asymmetric power relations by central communications companies, versus the user of their systems who get strictly limited information views of what is happening with their phone calls or emails.
When you have asymmetric power relations with market advantage and secondly literal surveillance at stake, a unilateral change in the service agreement is not a small "oh well" matter.
This single statement "people do not care" does not show all the players, and most especially does not show the players making decisions, the management of the companies making more money or new revenues with new decisions.
Yeah, because you called it manifest V3, not gimping adblockers, which is what it actually was. How many of Google's users love that they're gimping adblockers?
Same for Web Environment Integrity API. Nobody knows what those jargon terms means. That's part of how enshittification works. If everyone knew how badly they were being fucked, this would never work.
I actually don't understand it well. What does it mean? I can't browse the web from xubuntu any more? I believe it's scary, but can't seem to actually sell myself on that.
If it's so bad, why can't we bring a monopoly lawsuit against them over chrome/chromium? This is pretty similar to what Microsoft did, isn't it?
The problem with remote attestation is that there's no bound to exactly how bad it could become. If you can get enough of the internet on browsers that support remote attestation, to the point where it's an acceptable loss to simply reject anyone who does not have a browser that does support remote attestation, you can theoretically assert full control over the end user.
What will actually happen? Nobody knows for sure. The most likely outcome is that you will not be able to do banking, watch Twitch streams, etc. on anything other than Chrome, Firefox and Edge, on Windows and macOS. Linux will probably be relegated to the legacy web that does not enforce remote attestation. Alternate browsers like Librewolf, Brave and Mullvad Browser will just disappear as if they never existed. You can not browse Tor on clearnet websites anymore, as if you really could anyways. Etc, etc.
> If it's so bad, why can't we bring a monopoly lawsuit against them over chrome/chromium? This is pretty similar to what Microsoft did, isn't it?
Microsoft of today is doing things blatantly in the open, that Microsoft of 199x would never dream of doing. The difference now is that all of the major computer manufacturers are basically going the same way, just at different rates.
The reason HN is a bubble is because people here actually get and interested in real tech news.
If a journalist would explain these news to the masses AND the news has a way to reach the masses.
These days these kinds of news do not make it to broadcasted news and most people do not watch the old broadcasted news.
The news currently get people attention from the news feed on Android and Apples phones.
Those feeds recommend only the kind of content you usually interact with. No many people gets tech articles. And you can even argue that there is some extra filters on what news get on the feed in first place.
I have to disagree with Firefox... in terms of functionality and configurability it's by far and away my preferred browser but in terms of performance it just crunches to a crawl on my Mac. Load times of pages are absolutely fine but changing tabs crunch , scroll down the webpage judderfreeze whereas Edge is just silky smooth.
Maybe it's an extension or three I'm running but I just want to use the bloody thing not sit there and figure out what extension is not working nicely (and then potentially find out it's none of them) on one platform but is fine on another.
Every so often I go back and have look to see if it's improvised but it hasn't in the last few years for me.
Did that and weirdly nothing seems to be excessive... indeed the Macs own performance monitor doesn't suggest anything is particular excessively using cpu or ram but here it is juddering away especially when scrolling pages.
Three year old Mac btw... everything else runs pretty well... if I get a chance I might fire up Firefox in Parallels and see if it's a Mac issue
When you write "about:performance" to your address bar, and press enter, you should access to the internal performance monitoring page of Firefox. That should list every tab and extension by RAM use and power impact.
I use brave, arc, firefox, chrome, and safari. Safari is the best performing. 'tis a shame that other web browsers are unable to use it as their rendering engine.
If I don't want to be tracked, I won't use chrome. If I don't care then I'll use it.
Just like I'll have some conversations on WeChat but if I want to talk about Chinese politics maybe I'll do that on another platform.
I don't really see the erosion in the corporate space. The erosion of privacy is happening at the government level. With "forced backdoor" laws and/or just outright forking the internet backbone (ala PRISM). I've never really understood "Corporate erosion of privacy"... It's opposite, Privacy is literally a USP of Apple products. They had to back out changes that hinted at an erosion of that trust with the on-device processing of Photos for cloud-sync. People are more aware than ever.
"Exactly how the rest of the world feels about this is not necessarily relevant, though."
This quote is from page 2 of the article. It is common for certain HN commenters to remind us that HN is a bubble. True. However, the author of this article is not necessarily in this bubble.
But, honestly, what difference does it make whether HN is a bubble or not. Google is a bubble. The Register, another entity outside the HN bubble, calls Google "The Chocolate Factory".^1 Does it matter that Google is a bubble.
1. Of course it's also common for certain HN commenters to try to broadly dismiss all journalism, on a news aggregator site no less. Maybe there is a pattern here.
Would anyone outside the HN bubble try to discredit the observations about so-called "tech" companies mabe by those inside it. (Besides those with vested interests in so-called "tech" companies.) All evidence I've seen since 2009 points to the contrary.
I can still block content in any way I see fit on Gecko-based applications, not so much on Blink-based things. There are many things about Firefox-the-browser and Mozilla-the-organisation which could do with an overhaul but as it stands it is still my go-to browser. I only use Blink-based things to test and for those (annoying) sites which insist on it in which case I first try Bromite, then Ungoogled Chromium. If it still does not work it is not worth visiting. I do not have Chrome installed on any device and have never felt I was missing out.
>Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use.
The problem is that it isn't.
Do you know why Firefox managed to usurp IE6 in the first place? Because it won the adoption and appeal of tech enthusiasts and professionals. Mom and pop (read: the general population) switched to Firefox from IE6 because their tech nerd kids installed it for them, and the enterprise largely moved off of IE6 dependence because the general population moved off.
But the Firefox today is not the Firefox that defeated IE6. Mozilla steadily eroded and destroyed every single thing tech enthusiasts and professionals loved about Firefox, to the point it practically became just a Chrome ripoff. At that point, why bother? Chrome's right there, the real deal.
Not to mention Mozilla happily takes money from Google with no shame at all so their CEO can get her fat paychecks.
Firefox is not a viable alternative, Firefox is literally controlled opposition to pedantically argue Chrome is not a monopoly. Not even the Intel and AMD x86 duopoly is this blatant.
It's a small difference, perhaps, but its "my" browser in a way chrome will never be. Blink sucks.
Also, not a clue what you are on about - I don't have an issue with firefox. Chrome is basically for dealing with google stuff, and for the rest of the web I don't care about them.
Sometimes Drive stops working for me, trying to download something results in a redirection loop.
Clearing the cache sometimes fixes it. I suspect the Firefox anti tracking settings but I haven't bothered to test it.
Firefox did not defeat IE6. That was Chrome. Firefox has basically been a fringe browser since Netscape imploded.
The original reason Google started the Chrome project was that the stagnation of IE6 was a barrier to implementing the web software they wanted to build. At least that's what they told us.
This is true. As someone who had a work time card I could fill out on Solaris using Firefox. This the new time card website came out that was “ie” only and we had to log onto a virtual NT server do our time card. Ugh. It was a nightmare. Then slowly Firefox came back. It was short lived majority but I still use it. I rather like it.
The "death knoll" was dev tools for chrome - they hired the firefox guy who was doing better work, then you couldn't lift an arm without hitting some web dev thinking they were cool for using chrome.
Firefox got better dev tools and mozilla did random crap for a bit, meanwhile brain-dead devs insisted on continuing to use chrome. When the devs supported it, they started favoring the googlified things.
Honestly it's a terrible browser - we are back to the bad old IE days (almost).
> after all, Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use
I don't use Firefox because it's slower than Chrome and because their behavior regarding limiting which extensions are available in phones, requiring signed extensions, Firefox Pocket, ads in new tab page, etc, does not exactly give me confidence that Mozilla truly has my interests in mind. In fact I bet they'll implement the nightmare DRM API once it's done swiftly and without complaint lest their money flow suffer.
If Mozilla ever decides to stop screwing around, clearly position themselves as an ally of the consumer, clearly express support for adblockers and put resources into making the browser faster and better and more customizable instead of whatever makes their CEO richer then I'll switch to Firefox even if it is a bit slower or has some flaws.
In the meantime uBlock works right now in Chrome which makes it usable, so since Chrome is the fastest right now, Chrome it is.
> limiting which extensions are available in phones
As opposed to chrome, which doesn't allow any extensions on mobile
> requiring signed extensions,
So does chrome
> ads in new tab page
Chrome is made by a company whose main business is selling ads ...
> clearly express support for adblockers
Mozilla has long shown support for ad blockers for example, uBlock origin was the first extension aupported on mobile, Mozilla has no plans to drop the blocking WebRequest API, largely because it is needed for sophisticated ad blockers like uBlock origin, etc.
I don't agree with everything Mozilla has done, but I still think Firefox is better than the alternatives.
uBlock Origin doesn't work on mobile Chrome. I don't understand this perspective. At the very least you would want to use an alternative Chromium browser on Android, even if you weren't willing to install Firefox. You're upset about not being able to run every extension and so you're running none of them?
Look, I will absolutely criticize Mozilla for some of its policies. Pretty much every issue you've raised there is spot-on, in fact I'll go a step further and remind everyone that Pocket was kind of supposed to be Open Source by now, and it still isn't.
But it's cutting off your nose to spite your face to use Chrome. Google is less receptive to criticism than Mozilla is, has worse extension APIs and is more restrictive of how extensions get installed, has worse privacy features, allows for no extensions on phones, is more directly tied into an advertising network, and is actively trying to make the web worse.
Use Firefox.
I am not telling you to be complacent or to ignore Mozilla's problems, I am telling you not to lend support to the browser that is actively trying to make the web worse. We're all very happy for you that you're very principled about not just picking the better of two bad options. We're happy that you have those standards. But we're less thrilled about your policy of picking the worst of two bad options. At the very heckin least you're not even going to use a Chromium fork? You're just going to make the worst browser choice you can make for the Open web?
That's true, I was talking about desktop, I probably should have not mentioned the phone extension thing.
In Android I use Bromite (a Chromium fork) which I should probably replace since it's fairly outdated at this point.
But you're wrong about me not using Firefox out of spite, the real reason I don't use it is because it is (or apparently was according to the other replies) slower to the point it is noticeable, at least on my desktop (and even more so on my old phone). The rest is just why I don't support them despite being worse.
Will you at least consider switching to a DeGoogled Chromium fork? Yes, it would still be the same browser engine, but there are a lot of features in Chrome proper that Google uses to help contribute to its ad network and data collection.
Firefox may not be _as_ fast as Chrome, but it's a fairly negligible difference nowadays. rendering speed hasn't been a limiting factor for a while, and i feel like network latency and poor application optimization has been more the culprit there. you can only squeeze so much blood from the optimizing inefficient JS stone, and no amount of rendering engine optimization will ever fix shitty backend API response times
Firefox fails because there is no actual industry pressure to build a better browser. you simply can't sell a browser alone anymore: the free offerings have been good enough since the early 2000s.
Safari only needs to be good enough for iOS users to not abandon the platform entirely, and the ecosystem wants to push you into native apps anyway (Apple wants their IAP cut).
Chredge is, well, _there_, but basically just a minimum batteries included that maybe funnels some set of users into other Microsoft offerings, but it isn't the core product.
Chrome is, well, Chrome.
Firefox is comfortably supported by Google funding as an antitrust action shield. there's no real pressure for them to try and beat Chrome in market share because they're explicitly paid to be minority market share, and aren't really going to lose that share because they already have all of the "intentionally don't want to use Chrome" market. Mozilla faffs about making also-ran internet services (idk, whatever the heck that VPN offering was, etc.) because they fundamentally can't lose their main revenue stream so long as Google wants to avoid antitrust action, and have no real pressure to offer a competitive product.
I don't think this is remotely the case. Quite a few tech-savvy people I know (some of them software developers) use Chrome and mostly don't care about whatever Google does with it. I mention "manifest v3" and get a blank stare. I talk about advertising and ad blockers, and most people don't care, with some of them not even using ad blockers.
We really live in a bubble, here on HN. Most people think of privacy as some abstract thing that they have little control over, and are mostly fine with that. And some are even also fine with government erosion of privacy, in the name of "save the children" style arguments, and of corporate erosion of privacy, in the name of getting free stuff in exchange for their personal information.
It's a sad state of affairs. If most people really did care strongly about these sorts of issues, then I think it would be baffling why we haven't seen more change here -- after all, Firefox is a perfectly viable alternative to Chrome that very few people use. But the lack of change is no surprise: most people don't care.