We’ve been anticipating it for years, and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.
Now that it is finally happening, many seem to be oddly resigned to the idea that Google is taking away the best and most powerful ad content blocker available on any web browser today, with one article recommending people set up a DNS based content blocker on their network 😒 – instead of more obvious solutions.
I may not have blogged about this but I recently read an article from 1999 about why Gopher lost out to the Web, where Christopher Lee discusses the importance of the then-novel term “mind share” and how it played an important part in dictating why the web won out. In my last post, I touched on the importance of good information to democracies – the same applies to markets (including the browser market) – and it seems to me that we aren’t getting good information about this topic.
This post is me trying to give you that information, to help increase the mind share of an actual alternative. Enjoy!
Switch to Firefox
We kept Firefox alive for you all these years. You’re welcome.
Finally made the switch to Firefox just 2 days ago. Great so far.
be sure to check out the extensions, there’s several that are game changers.
For me, it was multi-account containers. All Meta properties open in their own independent, sandboxed tabs now. Xwitter opens in a different independent, sandboxed tab. It makes their tracking cookies useless, plus it also lets you be logged into the same service with multiple accounts simultaneously.
probably different for everyone, for me i use Adblocker Ultimate Ublock Origin Enhancer for Youtube DeArrow Stylebot Buster Context play/pause
No, HVEC / H.265 codec support so no modern 4K security camera or plex/jellyfin etc high quality video support.
According to caniuse.com, it works now in the Nightly builds and can be enabled in other builds via the media.wmf.hevc.enabled pref in about:config.
I use Firefox Dev Edition and I think it’s enabled there. But either way, you can enable it on stable.
Night, windows only, and needs to be enabled with about: config… ie it almost has some support maybe. Also doesn’t work via webrtc so it doesn’t actually help me with the viewing the security cam feeds.
plex/jellyfin etc high quality video support
H265 isn’t the only option there. AV1 is great and fully supported by Jellyfin (and I imagine Plex?)
H.265 is the defecto standard on Security cameras, and I am not going to migrate content to AV1 that is already in H.265.
looks like the bigger issue is hvec itself. Also the support is extremely spotty with all the other browsers as well, with it still only having limited support in Chrome as well depending on your hardware.
Or just use av1 instead. I’ve literally never run into this as an issue before lol.
lol. Obligatory “you guys use chromium?”
For interface unity I use Voyager in Chrome’s web app functionality, it’s nice to have the same interface. The last multi platform Lemmy app was Liftoff which was really nice but it’s dead.
Lemmy in a tab in Firefox, no matter the front end is so… I want the sleek experience dang it!
Firefox, give web app functionality on desktop!
