A great video about the Manifest v3 and how Google is trying to make you view ads.
Who uses chrome anyway even there’s vivaldi
Although you could take into account what the makers are telling you. You have to trust someone, and at least to my knowledge, Google fails and it’s all over the news, Vivaldi has not. It’s not like I can validate the Firefox source either, I’m just trusting the website I download it from, or more likely my distro packaging. And people do look at call outs browsers make etc.
I just can’t use a browser so… primitive? I wold gladly change to Firefox if it gave me all the customisation options Vivaldi has. Mouse gestures, synchronising my settings across 2 PCs and an android phone, shortcuts to different searchers etc. Plus it would need to be visually customisable so od doesn’t irritate me every couple of minutes.
Mouse gestures, synchronising my settings across 2 PCs and an android phone, shortcuts to different searchers etc. Plus it would need to be visually customisable
It sounds like perhaps you haven’t looked into Firefox for a while, because out of the box it does all of the things you listed, except for gestures. There are multiple popular plugins that provide Firefox gestures easily. I’m not sure what visual customizations you’re referring to, but Firefox also has had support for themes for ages now.
All browser companies monetise you to some extent. Even Firefox does this a bit (Paid deals make Google is the default search, and Amazon search is also paid to be included as a link for example).
However the big difference is the private companies like Vivaldi, Brave etc monetise your data more and less transparently, plus the entire Chromium ecosystem is basically under Google’s control. Manifest 3 will not be restricted to Chrome, it is being built into the Chromium project and will end up in Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Brave etc. Chromium is a trojan horse project, used to push Google’s priorities and objectives across the web, not end users.
The only viable alternative is Firefox based browsers. I use Firefox itself (aware of it’s compromises and using a whole host of extensions), but there are also forks and projects that strip even Firefox’s compromises back - LibreWolf in particular. For all the flaws of the Mozilla foundation, it is transparent on what it does to keep the project going, and the independence of the project compared to chromium is hugely important. Note Firefox is also going to support Manifest V3 (so that extensions can continue to be cross-browser) BUT it is also keeping support for the key APIs that Google is removing (i.e. the ability for extensions to use the block webRequest API which is foundational to current Ad and privacy protection extensions).
Vivaldi is no different to other Chromium based broswers; it uses the exact same Google controlled code base, plus it is doing everything it can to monetise you. You are the product; all these companies are stealing and financially exploiting your data and we’re all just handing it to them on a platter for free and thanking them for fucking us over.
All beautifully preached to the choir. Now: how to communicate all this to the unwashed masses who think the web and the internet and Chrome are all the same thing? Serious question.
I don’t see any reason to think Vivaldi is trying to monetize it’s users, it seems to have a lot of privacy features and the like. They strip out the chromium spying.
If they’re honest then Vivaldi really sounds pretty good for privacy:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
But they’d certainly win a lot more trust if they went open source.
why are people that allergic to firefox?
vivaldi is chrome with extra steps
Mostly because the browsing experience IMO is much much worse with Firefox. I tried extensions to get functionality back, it made it worse - slower, buggy, extensions would stop being developed etc. I wish Firefox was better, I really do. But IME it’s frozen functionality like it’s 2010 or so. Like, they have tabs, who hoo. I really find save/restore, multi window control, tab stacks, sessions, workspaces, and easy UI config pretty important in day to day use. That said, I also think ads are a deal breaker, but I really wonder if this won’t bring back some of the ad-blocking proxies you run locally or something.
Or, someone forks chromium to keep Manifest v2 or whatever.
And google will kill its self
Wishful thinking on my part tbh, I forget that there is an ecosystem with gmail :/
You wouldn’t believe how many people are actually incompetent using a pc beyond using default values and browsing the web, for example in school one day I had to help classmates save their project documents to the school’s server, because they didn’t know how to browse the select folder dialogue box (or whatever it’s called), and another dude in my class didn’t know how to use the shortcut bar at the bottom of the window in PowerPoint so he literally scrolled through the ribbon for like 2 minutes before he managed to launch the presentation (and this guy is a straight A student to note), I also heard stories about coworkers which didn’t know how to open a zip file or how to forward an email
The oversimplification of software is really problematic, since everything is made to be as straightforward as it can be people just go with it and then have a problem when they need to do something a different way
I think the same, obviously Google don’t know the Cobra Effect
Everyone losing their minds over this like Firefox doesn’t exist.
Stop using Chrome.
The reason this is even a big problem is because everyone piled on Google’s browser despite all the obvious reasons that wasn’t gonna be a good idea on the long term.
I never understood why anybody thought a company – whose principal business is advertising and data mining – wouldn’t eventually rug pull everyone like this with their browser as soon as it hit critical mass for market share.
Firefox exists, but it has its issues, it’s def not so great at memory optimization. It will regularly crash on me once I go beyond around 100 tabs regardless of how much system resources I throw at it (Seriously, it did the same thing on a 4 socket server with 512GBs RAM)
And starts getting sluggish when I even start approaching it. Chrome otoh, reserves a lot of RAM for itself, but at least it can manage it well into the hundreds of tabs I throw at it
Please leave this conversation, because you’re probably the only user who goes over 100 tabs. Normal people have about 10 open just for your reference
I routinely have more than 100 tabs open. Firefox doesn’t crash for me or use much RAM. Many tabs is a normal use-case and Firefox working worse than alternatives in such scenarios is a failing of Firefox.
But again, mine handles it fine. So potentially OP should try again with an up to date Firefox.
I have the opposite experience. I easily can have as many tabs at times and I’ve seen chrome use over 10gb of ram and fully lock at times. I switched to Firefox for that reason and others and it performs much better with that many tabs open. Most ram I’ve seen it using is about 6gb. Minimal and equivalent plugins in both. I’ve never had firefox crash. This across multiple computers. I now have uninstalled chrome everywhere…
Since you are sharing anecdotes, let me join.
For me FF has always been extremely stable, and I too regularly keep 100+ tabs open, on much more limited system resources. It is so stable that I’ve completely disabled history saving, and if there is something I want to read later I just keep the tab open. Never had an issue.
Tree Style Tabs also pushed me to have many tabs, because now I can actually organize those that I’ve opened and find them later.
Because there weren’t any great options at the time. Firefox has gotten better, but at that time Chrome was just super fast and lightweight in comparison to all the competitors.
I’m interested but I’m not watching 30 minutes of video…
get firefox and ublock origin.
its so fucking simple, why do people have such weird attachment to chrome??
Agreed on using Firefox/LibreWolf and uBlock Origin, I love that combination. I think the thing is that Google Chrome is much faster than Firefox on Android phones (I don’t mind, I hardly ever use mobile to browse), and long time habits can be hard to break for some people.
Yup, can say that firefox is quite a bit slower on android (but honestly it’s still quite ok, unless it decides to loop loading the page, or it bugs out in another way, at least on my phone it’s quite prone to breaking, for comparison brave is really a bit faster than Firefox
Way faster when you consider time spent loading and navigating around all the fucking ads. The mobile web without adblock is a dumpster fire of the highest order.
Yeah, it IS slower on android, but adblocking more than makes up for it IMO.
We are in the middle of rolling out a new SaaS solution at work that just works better in Edge. The amount of outrageous levels of anger and disgust we get from telling them to use Edge is stupid. Even telling users it is built on Chromium, just like Chrome, does nothing to dissuade their unfounded anger.
With some people it actually comes down to telling them, “if you don’t use Edge, then I guess you need to start looking for another job that only uses Chrome”.
I just don’t get it.
Edge can go fucking die, MS has lost all trust with me when it comes to them and Internet Browsers, I rip edge out of all my systems no matter what it might “break”.
Maybe you should deploy solutions that are browser agnostic. That kind of shit is how we ended up with IE and its proprietary BS like ActiveX years ago. Clearly, people are forgetting history
lol like management gives two shits about how browser agnostic a product is. business solutions look to address the perceived gap or need, not tailor to IT personnel feelings.
For better and worse, most people don’t care what’s under the hood. They care about the surface features. I.e. Chrome already has their bookmarks, the buttons are all in the same place, etc.
You and I know there’s little difference but end users don’t want to change, even if it’s to something that would benefit them in the long run (i.e. Firefox)
Not so much chrome, but many browsers (like my favorite Vivaldi) are chromium based. I wish they’d just keep uBlock going in the chromium rebuilds, but IDK if that’s possible. Seems like it should be to me though.
Also, we switched at work from Firefox because somehow they broke system level updates a few years ago, and nothing I could do was able to figure out why their installer stopped working without first having someone run the uninstall graphically to update to the new version. It would just say Firefox wasn’t a valid windows exe till I manually removed it. And even the Mozilla Enterprise list seemed flummoxed. Honestly, I think they should have reverted the installer change, or even just use a standard installer that doesn’t have this problem, but hey.
This is precisely why I’ve never found Chromium based browsers to be of much relevance. These are just skins on top of the rendering engine which is the core of the browser and that’s entirely controlled by Google. People kept ignoring this and now we’re in a situation where Chrome and its derivatives dominate the market to the point where sites no longer care whether they follow W3C specs as long as Chrome renders them. We’re now back in pretty much the same situation we were in the days of IE.
It’s depressing that people were unable to understand where things were going until Google started doing blatantly evil things. The only thing that was keeping Google in check before was the fact that it was lack of market dominance. Google is an ads company, and there is a huge conflict of interest with them being the gatekeepers to the internet.