If you can, use Firefox.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page.
The blog post says the ad platform is hitting “general availability” today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users.
This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.
Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an “ad privacy” feature has been rolled out to them and enabled.
That’s actually what started this whole process: Apple dealt a giant blow to Google’s core revenue stream when it blocked third-party cookies in Safari in 2020.
Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads."
The original article contains 587 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
WELL I HOPE YOU FUCKS LIKE SOME WEIRD ASS PORN AND SHITPOSTS
I’m gonna spin up a Windows VM and see how many porn sites and open chrome sessions i can spawn
Switching away from Chrome is something that is always worth repeating, but just FYI this happened last September and isn’t “new”. If you’re on Chrome and are only just now realizing this, it’s been your reality for the last 5 months.
The scary part is presenting it as a fucking privacy feature with no consequences.
Does this only affect Chrome or all Chromium based browsers? Are Brave and Edge going to be implementing this too?
Just Chrome in this instance, as it spies for Google. Any anti ad blocking features go though to all chromium based browsers and it is better to switch Firefox. If that browser disappears we won’t have a good alternative anymore.
It is better to switch to Firefox. But chromium forks can generally do whatever they want, it’s just a matter of maintenance burden. e.g. nothing is stopping a Chromium fork like Brave from running a manifest v2 compatible appstore, but it’ll cost money to make, maintain, and operate, plus you have less discoverability as an app developer when using a smaller app store.
Can we be certain this isn’t in the obsfucated binary blobs provided by Google? How can people act like Chromium and Chrome based browsers are free from Google BS when most of them still use precompiled hunks of executable provided by Google that we can’t see into?
We’re in a lose/lose scenario here. Google has been inserting ad-tracking and soon will be nuking ad-blockers.
Then you’ve got Firefox wanting to implement AI soon at the cost of employees.
Is there really anywhere else we can go before both of their shit hits the fan?
Firefox needs to ship with IPFS & IPNS built in, then we’d have a Distributed web. Which is I think what you’re asking for maybe?
Maintaining a browser is crazy hard. If Firefox goes to shit, it would require some serious foundation to maintain a good fork.
Yes, and expensive. This is often overlooked when people just say don’t worry it’s FOSS. The enshitification happens slowly, and by the time there is outrage about how bad it becomes the last non intrusive fork might be several years old and take even more work to modernize. I’m not giving up all hope, but you are correct, it would be a very ambitious community undertaking to keep such a thing competitive with the plethora of evil browsers out there.
I don’t think we should equate Firefox’s AI plans with other ones.
Firefox’s AI will be trained entirely locally with data that you choose to give it, and won’t send information back to Firefox.
By the sounds of it it won’t be a chatbot either, but rather an aid for finding more sources, pointing out fake reviews, assisting in (offline, local!) translation, etc.
My two main issues with AI are unethically sourced training data, and hoovering up personal information when you use it. Neither are a problem for Mozilla’s AI plans. This is how AI should be done.
Well this is the thing here. We’re in an era of time in technology where we DON’T want people having as much of our data. Whether it’s for good or bad use, we just don’t want it. How hard is that for these companies to comprehend?
The internet was fine without this sort of thing. We were fine without AI. Why complicate it at all?
Opera, Vivaldi and Brave are descent alternatives.
EDIT:
Vivaldi (based on Opera, but FOSS and not Chinese) is still good.
I didn’t realize Brave inserted referral codes, TIL.
Brave is shady af and iirc Opera got bought by some Chinese spyware company.
I only listed Opera b/c Vivaldi is based on it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)
Vivaldi is absolutely a descent FOSS product, but will agree with the Opera sentiment and have edited my post more accordingly.
I’d argue Firefox is the descent alternative.
- Opera is Crappy Chinese ad-filled browser
- Vivaldi, although it’s extremely nice tab management system and unique features, isn’t open source. But probably the better chromium browser of the owns you mentioned.
- Brave… Is a crypto shilling browser run by a turd wanting to ban same sex marriage
There are a plethora of sources out there of good reasons not to use these browsers. But seriously, Firefox is an excellent browser, treat yourself to better privacy 🦊
