cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/20260243
Google Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled
Google Chrome is now encouraging uBlock Origin users who have updated to the latest version to switch to other ad blockers before Manifest v2 extensions are disabled.
Mozilla == Democrats
Google == Republicans
{qt,gtk}webkit, netsurf, ladybird, textmode browsers == The actual way forwards
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk on US Politics
No, webkit is for all those anarchist, anti-establishment people. On a serious note, Gnome Web (Epiphany) is pretty amazing. Other than a few stuff like, Netflix not working (thanks W3C for giving us DRM /s. Also, google and widevine are the worst thing in tech) I have not yet found any particular issue. A very limited number of firefox extensions also work on it.
Firefox has a lot of issues
I dunno… I mean, what are your expectations?
Ultimately I have actual problems in my life, my browser choice is an absolutely marginal decision I make when the actual goal is to visit a website that in itself is usually just a tiny component of something else - say ordering something, checking on a piece of information, etc etc.
It’s kinda weird to even think so much about browsers - excluding when you are actively developing for/with them - that you recognize issues beyond a single big one like “Has no support for an adblocker”. I can get behind that being big enough to matter in regards to which browser is usable or not.
But again, if you develop for Firefox or an addon for it, I can see why details matter and you’d probably have a long laundry list of issues, sure.
So what you’re saying is, you’re not the target audience for the article.
Sure, but the article author is quite likely not the target audience for Firefox.
Sure, but the article author is quite likely not the target audience for Firefox.
I don’t follow the relevance of that statement.
“People focus WAY TOO MUCH on space rockets! I don’t care about them that much!”
“Ok, that means the article is not for you.”
“Sure, but the article author is not the target audience for space rockets.”
Okay?
I dunno… I mean, what are your expectations?
Honestly, some sites just don’t want to work properly. Firefox is my main browser. For some reason, Dicks Sporting Goods has like a 50% success rate on whether the page wants to load correctly. I fire up Brave when I’m looking at their website.
Use an extension to spoof your useragent, and it will probably load just fine
If it works intermittently like that it’s probably just crap code, and it will be crap in any browser.
usually just a tiny component of something else - say ordering something
Funnily enough, when I go to a restaurant and they have receipts with QR codes (I think it’s Clover), it just doesn’t work in Firefox.
Firefox stands as the lesser of two evils.
The problem is that for the past 8 months, Mozilla has been accelerating making Firefox more evil, and if it continues at this trajectory, it might catch up to Google.
I’m not really sure what you mean. Firefox is pretty good, and I honestly think the privacy-friendly ads thing is a good initiative. If you’re going to block ads anyway, it won’t impact you, and if you won’t block ads, having them be more privacy-friendly is a good thing. As long as Mozilla doesn’t sell my browsing data (and there’s no indication they are or will), I’m all for harm-reducing features/settings.
As long as Mozilla doesn’t sell my browsing data (and there’s no indication they are or will)…
Mozilla thinks so poorly of PPA data collection that they didn’t tell their users, and then basically said their users were too stupid to be told. Consider, they hid this from their user base then Google hid “privacy sandbox” from theirs.
If you don’t consider this an indication of Mozilla’s bad will, and I’m not sure why you would ignore it, Mozilla FakeSpot already sells private data to ad companies. Directly.
…I’m all for harm-reducing features/settings.
Which this objectively is not. In what universe are advertisers going to use this instead of, not in addition to, other telemetry? Especially because this is a proprietary technique that works on 3% or less of browsers, whereas advertisers that cared about privacy could have just used different URLs in their ads to do their own private telemetry.
At best, this introduces data funneling through Mozilla corporate servers for no functional purpose.
They didn’t really hide it, they just didn’t advertise it. It was in the release notes, hence why the media picked up on it. And on release, there was a checkbox in the normal settings to opt-out, so it’s honestly not that bad.
FakeSpot
That’s an opt-in extension, it’s not part of the core browser. I honestly don’t know much about it, and their privacy policy isn’t appealing, so I won’t use it. If it becomes part of Firefox by default, I’ll disable it.
In what universe are advertisers going to use this instead of, not in addition to, other telemetry?
What telemetry is this providing? AFAIK, Mozilla isn’t providing any kind of personalized info, it’s merely aggregated data.
And the reason they’d pick this is to get access to privacy-minded people who would otherwise block their ads, but may choose to exempt these ads. Mozilla has some anti-tracking features, and there’s a significant subset of Firefox users that block ads out of principle of avoiding tracking. If websites want to get some of that advertising revenue, they’ll comply. That benefits all Firefox users, because some sites may choose to use this method of targeted ads, which still provides the site with ad revenue without providing the advertisers with details on their customers.
That’s the idea here. It’s not going to happen on day 1, but having the capability means Mozilla can pilot it and see if websites are interested. And it’s possible Mozilla’s ads are more relevant because they have access to browsing history, not just whatever advertisers were able to figure out from their network of ads.
even when there are ‘no options’, there are always options
I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.
I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they’ve received show that there is real demand for an alternative.
But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.
There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.
Ladybird is the best we have. At the end of the day the big part that matters is source code and the 4 freedoms
To nobody in the real world, the 4 freedoms could matter any less if they tried. That is not to say it’s not important to have certain things be standardized and open source, but if you skew your perspective that much, you cannot find actual solutions: You aren’t even recognizing the actual problem.
GPL is not good enough, a new browser meant to thwart Google should have a strict anti-corporate anti-commercial license, even if it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of open source.
If you don’t believe me, please consult proprietary vendor android distributions.
I’m probably wrong, but isn’t the Mozilla License non-permissive? It’s likely more complicated than that. Non-permissive*
Agreed, it’s licensed under the MPL, a “weak copyleft” license. Each file that is MPL must remain MPL, but other files in the same project can be permissive or even proprietary.
While I definitely think it’s better than a fully permissive license, it seems more permissive than the LGPL, which is the main license of WebKit and Blink. So I don’t feel it’s strong enough to stop it being co-opted.
