Even if bigs exists to work around what Google is doing, that isn’t the right way forward. If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers). Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web.
A monopoly achieved thanks to everyone that forgot about IE lesson, and instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application.
> instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application
I am confused.
- The "shipping Chrome alongside their application" part seems to refer to Electron; but Electron is hardly guilty of what is described in the article.
- The "learning web standards" bit seems to impune web developers; but how are they guilty of the Chrome monopoly? If anything, they are guilty of shipping react apps instead of learning web standards; but react apps work equally well (or poorly) in all major browsers.
- Finally, how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.
Devs, particularly those with pressure to ship or who don't know better, unfortunately see 'it works in Chrome' as 'it works', even if it is a quirk of Chrome that causes it to work, or if they use Chrome related hacks that break compatibility with other browsers to get it to work in Chrome.
- Sometimes the standards don't define some exact behavior and it is left for the browser implementer to come up with. Chrome implements it one way and other browsers implement it the other way. Both are compatible with the standards.
- Sometimes the app contains errors, but certain permissive behaviors of Chrome mean it works ok and the app is shipped. The developers work around the guesses that Chrome makes and cobble the app together. (there may be a load of warnings in the console). Other browsers don't make the same guesses so the app is shipped in a state that it will only work on Chrome.
- Sometimes Chrome (or mobile Safari) specific APIs or functions are used as people don't know any better.
- Some security / WAF / anti-bot software relies on Chrome specific JavaScript quirks (that there may be no standards for) and thinks that the user using Firefox or another browser that isn't Chrome or iOS safari is a bot and blocks them.
In many ways, Chrome is the new IE, through no fault of Google or the authors of other browsers.
This is a lesson in capitalism. It’s so much more profitable to ignore small users bases when you can just tell them to “try switching to Chrome”.
I think you’re wrong about Safari itself being the reason chrome isn’t a 90%+ market owner; rather, it’s apple’s requirement that no other browser engine can exist on iOS.
Other browser engines can exist. JIT has to be the system’s. Others can use Apple’s JavascriptCore to gain access to it and do whatever they want on top.
> I think you’re wrong about Safari itself being the reason chrome isn’t a 90%+ market owner; rather, it’s apple’s requirement that no other browser engine can exist on iOS.
It sounds like capitalism has so far saved us from a Chrome monopoly, then.
To nitpick, you mean "unfettered capitalism". As in no government involvement. Which has the identical problem to unfettered anarchy: coalitions form, creating governments. Since many markets have network effects (e.g. bulk purchasing gives lower price per unit) a monopoly tends to be one of the possible steady state solutions. But any monopoly can choose to become a governor of their market, being able to impose regulation even through means other than government (e.g. pull resources, poach, lawsuits, or even decide to operate at a loss until the competition is dead (i.e. "Silicon Valley Strategy").
I just mention this because it's not a problem exactly limited to capitalism. It's a problem that exists in many forms of government and economics (like socialism). It just relies on asymmetric power
Yup. It's quite obvious that such unfettered, true capitalism quickly decays to the good ol' rule of warlords.
There should be a name for this kind of fallacy, where you look at a snapshot of a dynamic system (or worse, at initial conditions), and reason from them as if they were fixed - where even mentally simulating that system a few time steps into the future makes immediately apparent that the conditions mutate and results are vastly different than expected.
No, Safari is the new IE, nothing works on it, it's full of bugs and Apple is actively preventing web standards to move on.
Do you remember how much Apple prevented web apps to be a thing by blocking web push, and breaking most things if run in PWA mode?
Apple are by far the worst offender and I can't wait for Safari to die
I made a reader app for learning languages. Wiktionary has audio for a word. Playing the file over web URL works fine, but when I add caching to play from cached audio blob, safari sometimes delays the audio by 0.5-15 seconds. Works fine on every other browser.
Web features being pushed by Google via Chrome, aren't standards, unless everyone actually agrees they are worthy of becoming one.
Shipping Electron junk, strengthens Google and Chrome market presence, and the reference to Web standards, why bother when it is whatever Chrome is capable of.
Web devs with worthy skills of forgotten times, would rather use regular processes alongside the default system browser.
Are we really trying to argue about cross platform GUI in 2025? This was solved decades ago. Just not in ways that are trying to directly appeal to modern webdevs by jamming a browser into every desktop application.
I don't even hate Electron that much. I'm working on a toy project using Electron right now for various reasons. This was just a bizarre angle to approach from.
You can't trust the system browser to be up to date and secure or for it to render things how you want. You can not guarantee a good user experience unless you ship the browser engine with your app.
Yeah sure but I use most web apps through the browser either way so I'm already in "possibly incompatible land" and you can reasonably expect any user facing device to have an updated browser OR one specific browser in case of embedded. We're not in Windows XP software distribution times anymore.
- They raise request for feedback from the Mozilla and WebKit teams.
- Mozilla and WebKit find security and privacy problems.
- Google deploys their implementation anyway.
- This functionality gets listed on sites like whatpwacando.today
- Web developers complain about Safari being behind and accuse Apple of holding back the web.
- Nobody gives a shit about Firefox.
So we have two key problems, but neither of them are “Google controls the standards bodies”. The problem is that they don’t need to.
Firstly, a lot of web developers have stopped caring about the standards process. Whatever functionality Google adds is their definition of “the web”. This happened at the height of Internet Explorer dominance too. A huge number of web developers would happily write Internet Explorer-only sites and this monoculture damaged the web immensely. Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
The second problem is that nobody cares about Firefox any more. The standards process doesn’t really work when there are only two main players. At the moment, you can honestly say “Look, the standards process is that any standard needs two interoperable implementations. If Google can’t convince anybody outside of Google to implement something, it can’t be a standard.” This makes the unsuitability of those proposals a lot plainer to see.
But now that Firefox market share has vanished, that argument is turning into “Google and Apple disagree about whether to add functionality to the web”. This hides the unsuitability of those proposals. This too has happened before – this is how the web worked when Internet Explorer was battling Netscape Navigator for dominance in the 90s, where browsers were adding all kinds of stupid things unilaterally. Again, Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
The web standards process desperately needs either Firefox to regain standing or for a new independent rendering engine (maybe Ladybird?) to arise. And web developers need to stop treating everything that Google craps out as if it’s a done deal. Google don’t and shouldn’t control the definition of the web. We’ve seen that before, and a monoculture like that paralyses the industry.
Why not forbid them to ship any non-standard feature in their pre-installed default build of Chrome? Experimental features could be made available in a developer build, that would have to be manually installed in a non-obvious way, so that they cannot gain traction before standardization.
PWA is an antifeature anyway; it's an operating system inside a browser. This benefits companies that have market-dominant browsers and do not have operating systems; on a technical level it's just stupid.
I love PWAs when the alternative is Electron, I'd rather let one browser instance run my crapps since it improves memory sharing and other resource utilization.
I really like being able to install websites as apps too so my WM can manage them independently.
This is what Mozilla has to say about Web Bluetooth:
> This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.
Which PWA features did Apple and Mozilla remove on security grounds? What was Mozilla’s justification? What’s your justification for claiming they lied about it and it wasn’t for security reasons?
> Firstly, a lot of web developers have stopped caring about the standards process. Whatever functionality Google adds is their definition of “the web”.
Businesses who hire such web developers will lose huge amounts of sales, since 90% of visitors are on mobile and half of those are on Safari.
I use Chrome on Android because it's the default browser and I'm lazy, not because I actually like it. When a phone forces me to choose one I'm not very likely to choose Chrome. It's going to be the same for iOS users.
You should block adds for practical reasons too though, not just for moral reasons.
I can't fathom how there are so many devs that don't use adblockers. It is so strange and when I look over their shoulders I get a shocking reminder how the web looks for them.
Being prescriptive about human nature will always be frustrating. You and I can argue about what consumers “should” do but the reality is they will always pick the highest perceived benefit at the lowest perceived cost, even if deeper technical knowledge or improved ideological perspective would change those choices.
Yes, and so you should always assume every (large) company is lying through it's teeth as hard as it can, because it is in their best interest to confuddle the consumer as much as possible...
It's not ideaology to want things to work. Last time IE lost because it lost sight of the fact that it was utter dogshitte.
Chrome is now utter dogshitte, users will (eventually) be unable to ignore that...
I don't really mind about what people should do. Cats should probably not kill birds when they aren't hungry. But my opinion has no bearing on cats.
My lament is more about the current situation and our apparent inability to escape it.
In this case, I may also be annoyed a bit about your rant on ideologues. Just because people don't make decisions based on their ideology doesn't mean they don't make decisions based on ideology.
Consumers pick _largely_ based on cost and features, with a things like brand, ethics, and environment coming second. However, consumers can only pick an option from choices they've heard of. Advertising is about getting into the list (and influencing choice a bit by demonstrating the brand image); the product itself still has to a good choice for the customer to make a purchase.
If that was really the case, it would start showing up in the stats too. Firefox is still declining last I checked (I am still using it, but more and more sites have problems in FF.
KDE invented Electron, when they built KHTML as independently embeddable HTML + CSS + JS engine.
Mozilla did it with Gecko even earlier, really — but they gave up on it to focus on browser itself. (There were a number of Gecko-based browsers like GNOME default browser Epiphany using it)
Apple built WebKit on top of KHTML just as Gecko stopped being updated: I guess they invented it too.
Tools like Windmill (web rendering automation for testing) took programmable concept further.
And Sun did very similar things with Java applets and Java applet runtime for desktop.
Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:
- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"
- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)
- Google search is the default search
- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search
- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser
- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services
- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising
- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android
- Made Google accounts the default
- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer
- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google
- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)
- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues
- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results
- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise
- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android
... and that's just scratching the surface.
Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.
I would love to say another answer is "Firefox" (which is my default browser), but Mozilla have gotten fat of Googles money over the years and got distracted by other things.
I would love if some of these projects that fall backward into loads of money would stay lean, and invest that money in a way that allowed them to become truly independent. So when the money dries up, or the funding becomes dirty, they have the freedom to cut ties and continue their lean operations, self-funded by the interest from their investments.
It isn't a coincidence that Google continue to fund Mozilla: Firefox is, arguably, a fig leaf. A few hundred million a year is a small price to pay to Google if they have even a semi-willing participant in allowing them to bulldoze through the standards bodies.
It’s actually kinda simple: they don’t, at least not continuously. It’s “what you use” because you decided that’s true at some point in the past. All you have to do now is decide that some other browser is “what you use”. You can even take it a step further and decide that Chrome is “not what you use”.
(And actually, if you go through with it, you might discover reasons for why you don’t want to switch like “bookmarks” and “saved passwords”. In my opinion, if it is not easy to transfer those things, that is further reason to switch because vendor lock-in is user-hostile.)
Chrome is explicitly “not what I use” however there are literally services I cannot use on a firefox derived browser so I must have a chromium derived browser installed and occasionally use it.
For a normal user they would just switch back to chrome because that is what works, they don’t care about our complaints, they care that what they want to use works.
Pocket - fair enough (though Google probably uploads all it can). But performance? No way. Unless you are talking about Google properties which are specifically un-optimized for Firefox, in which case I don't think it is Firefox you should avoid.
> Anti-trust is crucial to make the capitalist economy work prperly
No it isn't. If you want your capitalism to be liberal, you need antitrust, true. If you only want capitalism, and don't really care about the 'liberty' part, you can check the mercantile capitalism of old. It worked quite well for people with power.
Capitalism is a great model that results in evolutionary pressures for the efficient development of goods and services.
One failure mode of unchecked and unregulated capitalism is the establishment of monopolies that can starve oxygen from the rest of the ecosystem.
In order to have maximally efficient and broadly beneficial capitalism, you need strong anti-trust mechanisms to reoxygenate the environment for new competition. Regular enforcement also means that labor and investment capital reap the most rewards instead of calcified, legacy incumbents.
Companies need to be constantly fighting to survive. If they're sitting comfortable and growing without controls, something went wrong and the rest of the fitness landscape is being distorted by an invasive species.
Antitrust Regulation is incredibly pro-market and pro-competition.
Mercantile capitalism was regulated and under the power of colonizer states though. The East India Company had to follow the British Crown orders, as were the different transatlantic companies. The competition was mostly between nation-state rather than between companies. Actually, China started consolidating its industry and "Capitalism with chineese characteristic" look a lot like modern mercantile capitalism.
I agree. The endgame for capitalism is a mega-corp roleplaying as state. You get food, housing, and so on, but you may never leave it. You will live however long the CEOs need you to live and not a second more.
Safari is also pretty user-hostile, which is why Apple is getting sued by the DOJ for purposely hobbling Safari while forbidding any other browser engine on IOS. They did this so that developers are forced to write native apps, which allows Apple to skim 30% off any purchase made through an app.
There's a huge difference between antitrust concerns, and mass surveillance and anti-user hostility. MS' business back then was to sell software, not monetise users.
You don't think Microsoft is doing mass surveillance? They own Outlook and Teams, and Windows 11 is quickly turning into a platform for training AI on your data. I doubt Edge is going to be much different. It's the reason I'm switching to Linux.
They started going down that route many years ago now (Windows 10 "telemetry" being a critical inflection point), but the Microsoft of the 80s and 90s and even early 2000s was not about mass surveillance but selling software.
Perhaps you’re right, but by the time Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1997, MSN was already two years old and had its own dialup service. Microsoft knew what they were doing.
Yes but like the post above says MS didn’t start to “monetize” their users until the 2000s and it was mainly because Google set up that beautiful business model… on top of Microsoft’s platform (Windows) which makes the whole thing really funny
There is no such thing as an anti-war movie, because anti-war imagery is the same imagery that pro-war films use, it’s just the interpretation and meanings are reversed.
Might it also be true, that there is no such thing as effective antitrust enforcement, because the one doing the investigating and enforcement is unwilling or unable to kill the goose that lays golden eggs, because their own employer’s budget and state apparatus directly and indirectly relies upon taxing golden eggs. Perhaps we’re all just carrying water for giants and giant-collaborators, whether or not giants even exist.
I didn't imply foul play. I never studied the details and I actually like a bit of vertical integration in tech (but not like Apple does it), so I don't have strong views about that case - but even assuming Microsoft really was in the wrong here and were justly told to stop, what I'm much more sure of is, advertising-based business models are worse, but also this was not obvious at the time. Still isn't to many. And so when Microsoft could not make money doing a bad thing, that became illegal, they turned to an even worse thing that wasn't (and still isn't) illegal.
Advertising is so integrated into the American way of life, I don't know if that will ever happen. The powers-that-be won't give up their toys. This one guy single-handedly did more by running ads than anyone else until probably Google, then Facebook.
> His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. Critics argue that his involvement in Guatemala facilitated US imperialism and contributed to decades of civil unrest and repression, raising ethical concerns about his role in undermining democratic governance.
> He worked for dozens of major American corporations, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations. His uncle was psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
> The Century of the Self is a 2002 British television documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis. It focuses on the work of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, and PR consultant Edward Bernays. In episode one, Curtis says, "This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy."
> Apple is getting sued by the DOJ for purposely hobbling Safari
I don’t believe the lawsuit claims this, does it?
> which allows Apple to skim 30% off any purchase made through an app.
This is untrue.
- Most developers pay 15% for in-app purchases. Only the tiny proportion of developers earning more than a million dollars a year pay 30% and even then, it’s 15% for subscriptions after the first year.
- This is not any purchase made through an app. This only applies to digital goods and services.
Excuse me. If it's on MDN, I'm going to use it if it's useful for my app. Not my fault if not all browsers can keep up!
Half JK. If I get user complaints I'll patch them for other browsers but I'm only one person so it's hard and I rely on user feedback. (Submit bug reports y'all)
The issue is completely different if the users of an app or a website are customers. Then you have to make it work for them or you'll lose sales. If it's non-commercial project then it doesn't matter if it works with all browsers or not.
I mostly do stick to baseline widely available, but once in awhile something can only be done with a niche API unless perhaps I include a 10 MiB, slow, clunky polyfill. And for a hobby site without paying users, I basically just don't care.
Can you name some examples? Are those APIs required for core functionality of your websites or are they limited to features that could be made optional?
Everyone focused on short term gains. Optimizing for browser with 30% market share, backed by Google makes more sense than a browser with 20%. Repeat with 40% and 20% respectively. And so on, and so on.
There isn't a lesson to learn. It's just short term thinking.
Now Google has enough power and lacks scruples that would prevent it from exploiting.
People should do this for many reasons. Monopolies are not good for anyone, including Google[0].
For most people, that means installing Firefox or using Safari. There are others, but the space is small. Don't listen to people, Firefox is perfectly good and most people wont see major differences.
Truth is we like to complain. It's good to push things forward and find issues that need to be fixed, not nothing is perfect. For every complaint about Firefox there's another for Chrome. You can't just switch to Brave, Edge, Opera or some other color of Chrome. Things will feel different, but really it's easy to make mountains out of molehills. So what do you care more about?
[0] short term, yes. Long term no. Classic monopoly gets lazy and rests upon its laurels
> Don't listen to people, Firefox is perfectly good and most people wont see major differences.
I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. I used Firefox exclusively for about a year and had a website not work about once a month. This included my state's unemployment portal and a small business store.
When it happens, there's no indication of why. It's only because I'm technical I thought too try it in Chrome. My non-technical family isn't going navigate that.
Echoing that this has not been my experience either. I and my household use Firefox exclusively at home and at work for the last decade and I rarely have a website not work on Firefox but on Chrome. At least not work to the point that I noticed it. Sure maybe some websites looked ugly but tons of websites were ugly and I didn't think it was because it was Firefox.
All I can say is that this doesn't reflect my experience. I'm not calling you a liar, just saying my experience has been different than yours.
It's definitely true I've run into errors but usually those are addon issues. Maybe I'll run into an issue a few times a year on some niche website but that's about it. But most people aren't going to those places
Don't put this on the users. The blame is 50% on web developers, 25% on Mozilla for screwing the pooch, 25% on Google themselves for advertising it so strongly across their properties.
We also need Google to stop showing annoying pop-ups every time someone goes to their homepage, Gmail, or any other site they own. They also need to stop promoting users on mobile to open links in Chrome, when the user doesn’t even have Chrome installed, and has chosen the “default browser” option 100 times already.
And most importantly these are anti-competitive. They are using Google's other markets to give them an unfair marketing advantage that other browsers do not have. Neither Firefox, Brave or anyone else can have these prompts on Android, Google Search. They are using an unfair advantage to take over the market against the common good.
Yeah, this was my thought process. I get the appeal, but I don't think a million-user open-source extension is gonna start relying on a clear bug to function.
It would be creating more work for the Ublock Origin developer[1]; as far as I can tell it wouldn't be creating any extra work for Google, which has to patch the issue anyway.
1: Assuming he even elected to do it; I know I wouldn't.
"If people don't agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers)."
Is it OK to use non-Chromium browsers that send search query data or other behavioural data to Google by default
"Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web."
Let's say, hypothetically, the company behind a particular non-Chromium browser is Google's business partner and dependent on Google for its continued existence
And that Google can effectively pull the plug on this non-Chromium browser at any time for any reason
Would choosing this particular browser be a correct course of action to "hit them where it hurts"
> If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers).
I disagree, on two fronts.
First, I think that the underlying root cause is a level lower - it's the fact that so much content on the web is funded via privacy-invasive and malware-laden advertisements, rather than direct payment.
Second, there are multiple valid things that you can do - you don't just have to pick one.
You can work on Manifest V2 bypasses and you can boycott Chrom{e,ium} and you can contact your representatives to ask them to craft regulation against this and you can promote/use financial models where you pay for stuff with money instead of eyeballs. All are useful! (especially because regulation is incredibly difficult to get write and takes a long time to build political will, draft, pass, and implement)
There's essentially 2 browsers in that long list: Firefox and Chromium.
Everyone using Chromium as base committed to MV2 support, but that's while Chromium itself still supports MV2. What will happen when Google changes things enough that the small browsers can't merge updates in a day or two while maintaining MV2 support? I doubt Vivaldi and Brave have the resources to actually fork Chromium... not even going to mention small projects like Thorium or Ungoogle Chromium.
And the Firefox-based browsers are in a similar position. The 2 or 3 students working on Floorp can't do much if Mozilla decides to drop support and then introduces changes that breaks compatibility with old code.
Of course those browsers can decide to stop merging upstream code, but then you get a Pale Moon... even if we ignore security flaws (which are a problem for you and your machine), a visit to their forum tells me that it struggles with a few websites.
Isn’t really about bypassing it to support the development of new extensions. It’s more just a blog about a new bug that the author found during their security research.
It’s really more a fluff piece promoting themselves than it is anything else. And to be honest, I’m fine with that.
My bigger takeaway from that article was how impressive this individual already is. They’re still a student and already finding and reporting several bugs in major platforms. Kudos to them.
Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome. I've done the pure firefox forray recently but after 6 months it gets tiresome to have 2 browsers and 3 weeks ago Ive admitted defeat for the second time and went full chrome. Who am I lying to -- market cornered, ggwp. It's like trying to eat food without paying a cent to cargill.
Treat it as isolating banking from the rest of your browsing, there are enough CVEs coming out for Chromium in spite of (or maybe because of) Google pouring billions into it.
This is what I do. Chromium for Facebook, banking, and Google (photos and map). Firefox for everything else. It's a very tiny inconvenience to switch between browsers for these tasks.
> Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome.
What countries banks?
I am in New Zealand and have not had that problem in years.
15 years ago I had to edit my user agent string to look like IE (IIRC) for the University of Otago's website (PricewaterhouseCoopers getting lots of money for doing a really bad job)
Makes me wonder have you tried that trick? Less tiresome than switching browsers....
ABNAMRO in nl, for starters. Their transaction form breaks somewhere halfway if you are not using Chrome. I've found a workaround (the transaction gets archived, so you just click on the list of transactions once more and then you can continue). It's annoying though and they do not respond to reports of it breaking. They also change the site more and more to work better on chrome so now you can no longer cut-and-paste a number of transactions in Firefox (handy during tax season) but you have to download a badly formatted CSV with way too much information in it, strip that and then you may be able to import it.
Firefox is very nice these days, and will prompt you to import all your Chrome data if you haven't opened it in a while. It's a very easy thing to do, and U-block origin works on it.
I just tried firefox because of this update but I had to switch back because it's so slow. Sacrificing competitive advantage stings too much to much just for this.
For me it depends on open tabs: with modern firefox 4 digit number of open tabs on a 64GB machine is no problem. Chromium crawls to a halt at low 3 digits.
I've been satisfied with Firefox speed for several years, ever since Chrome manifest version 3 crap started to become reality.
I keep many browsers on my laptop and use whichever one I must for in-compatibility reasons and primarily Firefox which makes me generally a happy camper. Mac os.
Yeah, it's not Firefox that is slow, it is Google properties that are slow on Firefox. Otherwise FF is fast, or at least Chrome is just as slow or slower (judging by seeing others use it).
I mostly avoid Google websites, but when I can't, I always use Brave/Edge/Chromium on those. E.g. Google Earth is especially useless outside of Chrome-land.
Firefox (with uBO) also probably wins any realistic speed comparison simply because it still supports MV2. I really don't care how fast the ads are loaded, I prefer blocking them. Especially the most privacy invading ones (i.e. by Google).
Let's not forget, you'll have to ditch Chromium based applications too, like discord, VScode, spotify, and whatever else is basically a chrome browser.
Because then the bugs we find in your app contribute back to chrome rather than Firefox. Then over time, chrome a becomes faster and more efficient browser which makes it harder to convince users to switch. Big picture thing.
I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier. It's only been a couple of months, but I can't imagine going back to a browser without multi-account containers.
The only time I've used anything but firefox for the last. Well probably since netscape honestly? I am so old. Is to get the in flight entertainment to work on american, but firefox has worked for that for a few years now. People say chrome is faster and in the early 2000s I might have agreed, but now I really don't understand why anyone not on a mac or iphone isn't using Firefox. It is great.
You have a point about iPhones, though. It's almost pointless, but not quite: it does get a few features, like cross-platform sync. "Real" Firefox is one of the things that keeps me on Android.
I tried to use Orion as my daily driver on Mac OS (instead of Firefox) but I couldn't get the simplelogin extension to work (it wouldn't authenticate to my account). Also, it was slower than FF (I know, everything says that it is super fast, but that wasn't my experience).
After a month or so, I gave up and switched back to FF.
I recently discovered that my jetkvm won't work on chrome, firefox or safari in macos, even after trying various workarounds to enable webrtc. The fix was to boot up Fedora in parallels and use Firefox there. In fact I'm thinking about shifting all my browsing to that combination just for further isolation.
Can you still get real Firefox on mac? I thought they forced chromium on there now too? The only time I got MacBook I put linux on it within a few months.
1) Apple would never force "Chromium" on any of their platforms. You might be mistaking it for WebKit, but browsers are not required to use Apple's shipping version of WebKit on a Mac either.
2) Firefox on every single platform not on the iPhone & iPad uses and has always used Gecko. I'm not aware of any other exceptions besides those two platforms, but the Mac definitely isn't one of them.
Yep, you can run Firefox on every Mac released for the past couple of decades. (Maybe more?)
Most of them also work with Linux, although it's a little more spotty on the more recent ARM-based ones ("apple silicon").
Macs are essentially "real computers" that you can run whatever software you want on, whereas iPhones and iPads are much more locked down. (Even when they have the same CPU.)
The last macbook I owned had an Ethernet port, so I wasn't sure how much had changed in the interim. I knew that had added some lockdown and I wasn't sure how much. That seems like a reasonable compromise.
> I really don't understand why anyone not on a mac or iphone isn't using Firefox
I'm on a mac and happily use Firefox. Have done for over a decade. It would take a lot to encourage me to move to a proprietary browser (Edge, Chrome, Safari).
Maybe I'm out of touch, but the attachment to Chrome that some people seem to have (despite the outright privacy abuse) is baffling to me. I mean, ffs, are a couple of minor UI compromises (not that I experience any - quite the opposite) enough to justify what I consider a frankly perverted browser experience? I'm inclined to conclude that some people have little self respect - being so willing to metaphorically undress for the big G's benefit.
I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox. But not nearly enough to keep me from using it on my personal machines. (My employer doesn't allow any browser except Chrome and Edge). For me, the most important feature of a browser is the web experience. I guess it should be security but I try to be careful about what I do online, regardless of what browser I'm using.
Many years ago I used to run the Firefox NoScript extension exclusively. For sites that I trusted and visited frequently I would add their domains to an exceptions list. For sites that I wasn't sure about I would load it with all scripts disabled and then selectively kept allowing scripts until the site was functional, starting with the scripts hosted on the same domain as the site I wanted to see/use.
Eventually I got too lazy to keep doing that but outside of the painstaking overhead it was by far the best web experience I ever had. I started getting pretty good at recognizing what scripts I needed to enable to get the site to load/work. Plus, uBlock Origin and annoyances filters got so good I didn't stress about the web so much any more.
But all this got me thinking, why not have the browser block all scripts by default, then have an AI agent selectively enable scripts until I get the functionality I need? I can even give feedback to the agent so it can improve over time. This would essentially be automating what I was dong myself years ago. Why wouldn't this work? Do I not understand AI? Or web technology? Or are people already doing this?
> I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox.
Sometimes this is simply because the site preemptively throws an error on detecting Firefox because they don't want to QA another browser with a smaller market share. Usually those sites work fine if you just change the user agent Firefox reports to look like Chrome (there are add-ons for that). Personally, I haven't had to resort to a non-Firefox browser or user agent spoof even once in well over a year now.
> I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox.
find that hard to believe. but even if you find something using an api not implement by firefox, chances are you definitely do not want that feature anyway, the firefox gave in to really awful stuff and only drew the line on obviously egregious privacy violation ones.
Yes, it is a thing. I open ms edge every time i want to view logs in our spring boot admin. Same one for one of the jira ticket workflows. Might find the time to look into it someday...
Sometimes devs rely on Chrome specific quirks, or are shipping broken apps that Chrome manages to make the correct guesses for it to be functional.
Many see 'it works on Chrome and mobile Safari' as 'it works' and they can get project signoff / ship / get paid / whatever and don't care about other users
The company that has the application may not know until a few users complain (if they complain) and by that point it could be too late due to the contract, or they may not understand what a different browser is or care either.
That's nice for you, but the monopoly is still there. In fact, you've strengthened Google's side in antitrust proceedings where they pretend they are not a monopoly because a small number of people use Firefox.
What do you propose then? Be a browser accelerationist, let Google do whatever the hell they want on your computer, and hope for big daddy government to tell them to stop?
Google is already doing what the hell they want on the vast majority of people's computers. (As are Apple and Microsoft)
Sure, go ahead and install Firefox, LineageOS, etc. (I did so too and am a happy user of both). But I'm just saying that this is not fighting the monopoly in any way, it's just retreating into a bubble where we can ignore it for a while.
I have no answers as to what to do instead, but I think acknowledging that a strategy has failed would be a useful first step.
You really shouldn't double up on ad/tracking blockers. That can cause problems for the predefined filters. Go with one or the other. I prefer uBlock Origin personally.
> I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier
Maybe because a few years ago it could be very annoying? It was mostly pretty good at rendering web pages but it had many UI problems that could really get on your nerves after a while.
For example somewhere around late 2020 or early 2021 after several years of using it as my main browser on my Mac I switched because a couple of those problems finally just got too annoying to me.
The main one I remember was that I was posting a fair bit on HN and Reddit and Firefox's spell checker had an extraordinarily high false positive rate.
This was quite baffling, actually, because Firefox uses Hunspell which is the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, MacOS, and many other free and commercial products, and it works great in those with a very low false positive rate.
Yeah, I've had some weird results from Firefox's spellchecker. It didn't recognize bachelorette or Shabbat, and it insisted on replacing "misclassifying" with "misidentifying". (Hm, doesn't seem to do the latter now.)
The main thing holding me back is lack of pwa support, since there are a few apps that i need to use that only exist as progressive web apps on Linux. And using another browser for pwa has shown to be a bit cumbersome.
You appear to be right and I feel like I am going crazy now. I could have sworn I just did it. Might be either ViolentMonkey or ReactDevTools but I need to restart maybe
How do multi-account containers differ from Chrome profiles? I hadn't paid much attention to Firefox outside of Linux installs as I mainly use Safari with Chrome as a backup, but I'm interested to try again.
First, they are color coded / icon specific tabs, not full windows like chrome. I have used it a lot in the past when I'm doing sso testing at work, or logging into 5 or 6 different AWS accounts at the same time. It's really nice to jump from the green tab (Dev) to the red tab (prod) to check some settings or logs. They feel a lot lighter then full on chrome profiles. You can also tie each to specific proxy profiles, so in my last setup we used ssh tunnels to access different environments, so each container connected to different ssh tunnels.
Mozilla is more questionable than Google? By using Brave you're still staying within the Google ecosystem, sending them the signal that their Chromium internet is the better one.
I swear - people have such a hard on for hating Mozilla because it fails to live up to an impossibly high standard, while giving all the other corporations doing actual harm a free pass.
I'll bite - if you dont use Firefox because of "questionable ethics", then I am quite surprised you decided to use Brave, considering their controversies. Also Brave is still based on Chrome's engine, and I dont think they'll be able to maintain their fork long-term, so if the reason to switch was to break the Chrome monopoly, then I'm not sure this switch really counts.
I'm sure Eich has political opinions, but he doesn't use the Brave blog to push them and he doesn't impose them on his contractors or customers in the way Mozilla does.
I don't know, I switched to Safari and it was painful for like two hours and then I stopped thinking about it. The only thing I somewhat miss is the built-in page translate, but I don't need it often enough to be bothered much.
I find switching from chrome to safari essentially doing nothing. If you switched to a non-big-company owned browser, it would make sense but Apple has plenty of lock in which is as bad as chrome lock in.
Orion is the only viable option on iOS IMO. The fact that, to this day, Safari has no way to block ads on iOS means it's just awful. Before Orion, I avoided using my web browser like the plague, because the experience was just bad.
Now I'm on Android, and Ironfox is pretty good and Firefox is also available. The browser story on Android is leaps and bounds ahead of iOS.
Actually there are several adblockers available for Safari on iOS; the functionality was introduced in 2015. Adblock Plus and Adguard are some of the larger extensions available, and now uBlock Origin Lite is now being beta tested for Safari on iOS.
I find the "switch to Safari" talk amusing because the adblockers available for Safari are functionally equivalent to the MV3 API that everyone's complaining about. The problem with the "static list of content to block" approach that Safari and MV3 use is that you can't trick the site into thinking that ads have been loaded when they haven't, like MV2 allows via Javascript injection. The effect of this is that you'll run into a lot of "disable your ad blocker to continue" pop-ups when using an adblocker with Safari, while you won't see them at all when using an adblocker with Firefox.
A quick Google search reveals AdGuard is only a DNS resolver, so it has the adblocking power of something like a Pi Hole. So... nowhere near as capable. It can't inject JS into webpages to prevent pop ups, which is going to lead to white boxes everywhere. In addition, ads can obfuscate the URL or share domains with non-ad content - so that content won't be blocked with a DNS resolver.
However, the software seems safe. Their privacy policy says they only store websites locally, and never upload them to servers. The app is also open-source.
Ad Block Plus is not privacy respecting. They collect usage data as well as unique device identifiers.
This is not accurate. Safari had webRequestBlocking functionality from 2010 to 2019 and indeed a version of uBlock Origin for Safari. What is true is that Safari was the first browser to ditch webRequestBlocking, replaced by its Apple-specific static rule content blocker API.
Otherwise, though, Safari still supports MV2. Everyone seems to think webRequestBlocking is the only relevant change in MV3, but it's not. Equally important IMO is arbitrary JavaScript injection into web pages, which MV2 allows but MV3 does not.
MV3 is so locked down that you can't even use String.replace() with a constructed JavaScript function. It's really a nightmare.
Google's excuse is that all JavaScript needs to be statically declared in the extension so that the Chrome Web Store can review it. But then the Chrome Web Store allows a bunch of malware to be published anyway!
After dragging their feet for literally years, Google finally implemented a specific userscripts API. However, the implementation was initially just statically declared rules like DeclarativeNetRequest, which sucked, and it also required that the user enable developer mode.
In Chrome 135, which is very recent—the public is currently on Chrome 138—Google added an execute() method to run an individual script. However, the API is not available from the extension content script, so if it needs to be triggered from the content script, you have to make an async call to the background script (or more accurately, the background service worker, which is a whole other nightmare of MV3). Moreover, the API accepts only a string for JS code or a filename; you still can't use a Function() constructor for example.
In Chrome 138, the current version, Google switched from developer mode to a dedicated userscripts permission toggle in the extension details, which is disabled by default. I think Google is still working on but has not finished a permissions request API. Remember this is almost SEVEN YEARS after Google first announced Manifest V3. The entire time, Google has been stalling, foot dragging, practically getting dragged kicking and screaming into doing the least possible work here.
Iv been following https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644 since 2020. I remember a moment in 2021 where Google came out with this ridiculous notion of User code stored on User computer and executed by User Agent being "remote" because it wasnt under Google control, but somewhere around 2022 things started clearing up and Jan Biniok managed to get a working mv3 version a year ago in May.
Surprisingly this async serialize/deserialize nature of the API (https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/blob/cdfc253c07... ?) somehow still manages to inject and execute scripts fast enough to make them act like content scripts at document_start. The only problem is no arbitration between extensions, cant force Tampermonkey inject before uBO (tons of adblock filters disable functions required for Tampermonkey and effectively kill Tampermonkey in the process).
I don't think in this case your argument is as clear cut and the use cases that people have today arent solved by the choices out there.
George Carlin: "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it."
The interests of APPLE (who makes money on hardware, and credit card processing) don't align with the interests of Google (who makes money on ad's). I am all for open source, I'm all for alternatives. But honestly if you own an iPhone and a Mac then safari makes a lot of sense. I happen to use safari and Firefox on Mac and am happy to bounce back and forth.
I also keep an eye on ladybird, but it isnt ready for prime time.
And I'm still going to have a chrome install for easy flashing of devices.
I'm aware of this, but in my experience it's pretty bad. It doesn't even cover all European languages, never mind the rest of the world. For the languages it does support, it's always a lottery whether it works with that specific site or not. I've tried using it a few times, but it's not even remotely close to what Chrome does.
A lot of people seem to believe that switching to a de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough. I think that's a psyop promoted by Google themselves. Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome. Brave, custom Chromium builds, Vivaldi, etc. are all very similar to Google Chrome, they just don't have Google spy features.
The argument that "Google still controls Chromium so it's not good enough" is exactly the kind of FUD I'd expect to back up this kind of psyop, too.
> Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome
I find this notion completely baffling. I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari more or less daily cause I test in all 3, and other than Safari feeling clunkier and in general less power-user friendly, I can barely tell the difference between the 3, especially between chrome and FF (well, other than uBlock working better in FF anyways).
I agree, there's little to no friction in switching to Firefox and I have never, not even once, noticed a difference with websites. The same is not true for Safari.
I'm sure they exist, I've just never seen them. I use banking and websites like Netflix, too. And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent.
I think it's a case of yes, it does work, but web developers don't think so, so they implement checks just for kicks.
> And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent.
Indeed, even in the codebase at $JOB that I'm responsible for, we have had some instances where we randomly check if people are in Chrome before blocking a browser API that has existed for 2 decades and been baseline widely available. These days 99% of features that users actually care about are pretty widely supported cross-browser, and other than developer laziness there's literally no reason why something like a banking app shouldn't work in any of the big 3.
I guarantee you that if you set your `userAgent` to a Chrome one (or even better yet, a completely generic one that covers all browsers simultaneously, cause most of the time the implementation of these `isChrome` flags is just a dead simple regex that looks for the string `chrome` anywhere in the userAgent), all problems you might've experienced before would vanish, except for perhaps on Google's own websites (though I've never really had issues here other than missing things like those image blur filters in Google Meet, which always felt like a completely artificial, anti-competitive limitation)
Some developers are lazy. Some probably don't know that that is the right way to do it. There is a lot of legacy code from when checking user agents was more acceptable. It is much more difficult for server code to know the capabilities of the client (although in practice this isn't usually much of an issue).
Also, sometimes the feature exists so the feature check is positive, but there is a bug in one browser that breaks your functionality, so you put in a user agent check. Then the bug gets fixed, but the user agent check isn't removed for years. I've seen that happen many times.
There are definitely sites which block firefox, even though they work fine in firefox. Most of the time, the block can be bypassed with simple user-agent spoofing.
There are also a handful of sites I've run into that only work on cheomium based browsers because they rely on non-standard experimental APIs that are only implemented in chromium.
What part of the Verizon website doesn’t work on Firefox? I am curious if it’s actually the browser or its the aggressive privacy options.
> a well known kindergarden
I am baffled by the choice to include this laughably obscure example alongside a major telecom. Surely there are better options less likely to be the fault of a random lazy web developer.
Youtube, for example seems deliberately hampered on non-chrome browsers.
For Verizon, it's one of their log in forms that doesn't work on Firefox, even with ublock disabled. Works just fine with Chrome. I was able to reproduce the behaviour on both my and my wife's laptop. (I haven't tried disabling the FF privacy features)
> I am baffled by the choice...
Rereading what I wrote, I see the unintended humour in my association.
That being said:
1. These are both websites where I don't have much of a choice whether I use them or not
2. I actually expected Verizon to have a terrible website based on the sum of my interactions with them (both online and over the phone) and how uncompetitive the market is. But I was surprised the kindergarden had a needlessly restrictive website because I thought they'd care more about their online presence.
And, to be clear, the kindergarden's website is fancy and expensively designed, so their lack of Firefox support can't easily explained by laziness.
I get serious slowdown with multiple (3--5) youtube tabs open in firefox, but not chrome. Seems to happen when tabs are open for a long time (weeks), so probably some leak. Lots of others mention it on forums.
It isn't unique to youtube either. Gmail offline mode only works on chrome, even though other browsers have the necessary APIs. And menu copy and paste in google docs uses a special chrome-only extension that google pre-installs in chrome, instead of the clipboard API that works in other browsers as well.
Firefox has multiple, user-affecting, memory leaks related to Youtube (unconfirmed if just youtube), going back at least 7 years. Tab scrollbar as no option to be disabled, so I had to write CSS to get tabs into a form close to what I would like similar to chrome. Tab mute icon has no (working) option to disable the click event, so I had to write CSS to remove it.
I made some other changes, but I forget what. At least FF still has the full uBlock Origin.
I can confirm the youtube issue. No idea if it might be some edge case with my distro or hardware. Forcing a GC collection helps but input events to the entire browser still feel laggy until I restart it. It's been going on for years now.
It occurs to me that it could be a pathological edge case triggered by ublock and youtube interacting. I'm not going to disable it to find out.
Go to about:processes and kill the YouTube process. All YouTube tabs and embeds will be marked as crashed, with a button to reload them. The memory leak will be reset and you won't have to restart the whole browser.
I'm pretty sure the memory leak applies the longer you navigate the same youtube tab. If I browse a lot in one day it gets to the point of crashing if I don't open a new tab/window.
Bro you probably have a monster mac pro with 256gb unified ram. I'm typing this on a N100 minipc. We're not the same. I just tried to switch to firefox (with 3 tabs including HN and youtube) and my load topped out at 2.5. I'm back to chrome now with the same tabs (and a couple more) and it's hovering at 1.
I've been using an n100 as my daily driver for months with librewolf and it's fine. I tend to end up with dozens of tabs at least before I finally decide I'll never sort through them and close the window.
16gb of ram also? I think it's youtube more than anything else. I am having a lot of problems with youtube, my other machine is a netbook which crashes while listening/watching to videos on youtube. Not sure why we put all our content (software engineering, etc) on that platform. It's awful.
Firefox now has vertical tabs built in. Not as feature filled of course though tab groups and vertical tabs together replaces all the functionality I needed from Tree Style Tabs.
If this is even true, in the end it's still "so what?" Meaning, the alternative is even worse so, let's say granted there is this problem. Where is the better alternative that does not have this problem? Chrome doesn't have other equivalent or worse memory problems? Even if not leaking, it simply uses so much it's the same end result.
I've never consciously noticed a problem with youtube so if there is a problem, it's not one that necessarily matters.
The stuff INSIDE the viewport is pretty much the same across them all, but on the daily it makes a big difference how your other services integrate with the browser. Someone who is all-in with iCloud, macOS, iOS etc might find it annoying to use Firefox without their personal info like password and credit cards and bookmarks. And the same would be true I guess for Google fans switching to Safari and not having those things.
I once made a comment along these lines (de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough, as it supports the browser monoculture and inevitably makes Chrome as a browser better) and got a reply from from Brendan Eichner himself.
His point was that there isn't enough time to again develop Firefox (or ladybird) as a competitive browser capable of breaking the Chrome "monopoly". I don't know if I really agree.
Evidently, Google feels like the time is right to make these kinds of aggressive moves, limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers.
The internet without ad blockers is a hot steaming mess. Limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers makes people associate your browser (Chrome in this case) with this hot steaming mess. It is difficult to dissociate the Chrome software from the websites rendered in Chrome by a technical lay person. So Chrome will be viewed as a hot steaming mess.
I guess we will soon see if people will stay on Chrome or accept the small initial pain and take the leap to a different browser with proper support for ad blockers. In any case the time is now for a aggressive marketing campaign on the side of mozilla etc.
I am in no way affiliated with Google. So if you still think this is a PsyOp, please consider Hanlon's Razor:
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Although, please also consider that Hanlon's Razor itself was coined by a Robert J. Hanlon, who suspiciously shares a name with a CIA operative also from Pennsylvania. It is not unimaginable that Hanlon's Razor it in itself a PsyOp. ;)
Though his brave is a relatively small company, they have enough resources to have developed, and continue maintaining their own low-level ad blocker, which IME has been just as effective as uBO, but is supposedly more efficient (since it's written in the R-word language and compiled into native code integrating deeply inside the browser):
I can't imagine what hoops Google would have to jump through to block third parties from integrating their own ad blockers. You don't need MV2 for that AFAIK.
I also installed Brave on my partner's iPhone and I agree there are no big qualitative differences in the blocking.
Probably for Google the easiest way to keep 3rd-parties from integrating native ad blockers is through licensing agreements for new code/modules in chromium. At this point there will be a fork of chromium, taking the latest non-adblockerblocker-licensed version and the two versions will start to diverge with time.
My point however was not that Google might one day block 3rd-parties from integrating ad-blockers in their own chromium variant. My point was that building on the chromium-base will improve the chromium-base, which will improve Chrome and additionally allow them to claim they haven't monopolized the browser market.
Genuine incompatible-by-time forks of chromium are not in Google's interest and thus Google needs to balance their competing interests of maximizing ad revenue, but also keeping Chrome a high-quality product and not being seen as a browser monopolist.
Isn't that the exact argument behind the Serenity project? I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers. Control over virtually all media consumption mustn't be in the hands of a corporation.
> I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers.
Aside from Ladybird and Servo, it mostly is one wallet. Chrome and Firefox are both funded by Google, and Apple also receives significant funding from Google for being the default search engine in Safari.
Btw, some informal estimates at team sizes (full-time employees) of the various browsers (by people who have worked on them / are otherwise familiar):
Chrome: 1300
Firefox: 500
Safari: 100-150
Ladybird/Servo: 7-8 (each)
Which gives you an idea of why Chrome has been so hard to compete with.
The argument just doesn't hold water, though. That's like saying Y Combinator shouldn't be the only company paying for our tech forum. It's perfectly fine unless Y Combinator decides to ruin HN it somehow. And, if they did, wouldn't people just switch to one of the many HN clones overnight? That's what's known as FUD - "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". FUD is often spread about the present, but it's often just as useful to spread it about the future. "Don't use product X, the company that owns it could make it unusable someday". Part of me thinks Google keeps threatening to disable adblocking (but never actually does it) as part of a grand strategy. But part of me thinks it's just a coincidence that Google isn't capable of pulling off such a tricky psychological operation.
The HN comparison doesn’t really hold water. There are a lot of options for tech news and forums. Lots of platforms, self-hosting options, with many business models, or simply self-funded.
That is very different than a world where every browser relies on Google for the core of their browser… and those who don’t rely on Google for funding (as they pay a lot of money to be the default search option in major browsers). Even Microsoft gave up on making their own browser, and now depends on Google. They used to own the entire market not so long ago.
People are saying this is a psyop, but I’m not sure what Google stands to gain from giving off the impression that they are seeking to control the entire market so they can steer the direction of the web for their own profit. That doesn’t make them look like the good guy, and should keep them neck deep in anti-trust filing from various governments. Where’s the upside? People feeling like they don’t have an option, so they give up and settle like Microsoft? Is that the angle?
Somewhat related - is Microsoft Edge a set of patches on top of the latest Chromium release or is Microsoft running a hard fork from a X years old version?
Users were supposedly massively exiting Reddit when that cesspool imploded, but if you find one of those threads through any search engine and click around on usernames who were leaving their "last messages ever, fuck reddit, I'm out", I'd estimate about 95% of them never left.
Do it if you have 10 minutes to waste, it's easy to check and changes your opinion about how much people are willing to endure to avoid actually doing anything.
> Users were supposedly massively exiting Reddit when that cesspool imploded
According to who? Tech journalists?
> 95% of them never left
Probably 95% of a VERY small number.
> it's easy to check and changes your opinion
Actually, I'd encourage you to take into account my theory that an incredibly, INCREDIBLY small percentage of Reddit users were making a LOT of noise about leaving Reddit, and it made a lot of people believe that there was a mas exodus, when most people didn't care at all. (What was the mass exodus supposed to be over, anyway? Blocking 3rd party apps? I know that HN is a tech worker echo chamber, but really, how many people out in the wild even trust 3rd party apps at all?)
Has any chromium based browser committed to continue supporting MV2 or building an alternative API for ad-blockers to intercept web requests in MV3 even after the code for MV2 is removed from upstream chromium?
If not, then no, switching to another chromium based browser is not enough.
And fwiw my experience trying Brave was that the user experience was actually more different from chrome than Firefox.
MV3 was FUD. But what's interesting is how FUD spreads. There were some people who identified that MV3 severely limits adblockers. That's true. There were some people who had an agenda who exaggerated the effects of those limits, making it seem like ad blocking would not work in MV3. Then there were people who read those articles, and believed them without question. There are a lot of them commenting on every thread about browsers.
I suggested that MV3 would be a big nothing from the beginning. And people on HN argued with me every step of the way (mostly people in the latter category who refused to do even the slightest bit of research or verify that the people who they were parroting were actually reliable reporters of anything at all).
Now that MV3 is here, we can see this. MV3 is here. MV2 is gone. And ad blocking still works.
I just installed Google Chrome, clicked on some YouTube videos, and verified that I was getting ads. Then I installed Ublock Origin Lite, and the ads disappeared. I no longer get display ads or video ads on any website.
Now, if you want to bring up some edge case or something, be my guest. But for 99% of even ad block users, strictly speaking, blocking ads is more than enough.
like most solutions to complex societal/economic issues:
it’s almost certainly going to take both of your ideas, more diversity in the browser space and political actions. and then other actions as well.
the collective We have fallen into a trap where we consistently talk down other important ideas because we think ours is important too (and it is.) i definitely catch myself doing this far too often.
i just hope We can get back to a place where We recognize that different ideas from our own are also important and will need to be used in our effort to solve some of our issues. because so many of these cracks we’re facing will require many many many levers being pushed and pulled, not one magic silver bullet.
Perhaps a better way to phrase it is to simply say that politicians are elected, and are nothing without votes.
A politician isn’t even a practicing politician without votes. Democracy is ultimately driven by citizens. Of course politicians will do their best to influence public opinion (it’s their job) but are ultimately in service to it though elections.
It’s why what people think (and vote) matters in a democracy.
And back to the point, why voting with your feet (switching to Firefox) actually means something.
Keep chrome installed and fall back iff forced to. That way the majority of usage statistics show up as other browsers so when developers are making guesses at which browser to support, those statistics will push them away from chrome.
Additionally: you would be surprised how infrequently you have to switch to chrome
There's one site I have to switch to Firefox for. And it's a big one that handles a lot of money, so that's kind of surprising. Can't log into their site in chrome, no matter how hard I try. Nor edge.
Find who is responsible for such sites and send them strongly-worded emails. If it's a commerce site, tell them they just lost a potential customer. In my experience it's usually the trendchasing web developers who have drunk the Goog-Aid and are trying to convince the others in the organisation to use "modern" (read: controlled by Google) features and waste time implementing these changes --- instead of the "deprecated" feature that's been there for decades and will work in just about any browser, and the management is usually more driven by $$$ so anything that affects the bottom line is going to get their attention. I've even offered to "fix" their site for free to make it more accessible.
>the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome
History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another. The only few examples of ostensible outcomes were critically meaningless and necessitate zero-friction alternatives, like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently — wow, really showed them!!
>like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently
But that was the whole point. They were marketing to children. They still haven't recovered from that backlash. Anheuser-Busch took a pretty damning financial hit and it sent a message to all the other companies not to pull this kind of stunt because it's bad for business. Changing their behavior was the entire point.
It wasn't just boycotts, however and unfortunately. The South African army was defeated militarily by FAPLA-Cuba. There's a reason why Nelson Mandela's first visit as chief of state was to thank Fidel Castro in person.
The history is a little more complicated than this…it is true that South Africa was eventually sanctioned by the US for its apartheid policies, and this helped lead to the end of apartheid. However, the US supported South Africa during much of the Cold War period as a bulwark against communism. Some US politicians were willing to look the other way when it came to apartheid before support for South Africa became increasingly politically difficult.
