What about a small TL;DR?
A quick, non-technical explanation:
- Google is working toward implementing a new protocol in Google Chrome, “Manifest v3”, that will be intrusive and help enforce Digital Rights Management, as well as stopping ad blockers.
- Under the guise of this being safe, secure, and to curb bots, Mv3 will require users to become Trusted by using the Chrome browser.
- Since the majority of users are using Google Chrome, this will heavily influence corporations to adopt this protocol in their service.
- A Trusted user can access Netflix in the browser. If you’re using Firefox or are an untrusted user, you will not be able to access Netflix in your browser.
- This protocol will appear one day in some form, and it will greatly shift the internet and force more users into Google’s ecosystem.
- This will spread to all areas of the internet - Banking web sites, government web sites, healthcare, entertainment, education, etc.
- The internet will become less “free” over time. More censorship, less rights.
- Lots of ads can contain malware. Considering that Google allows phishing sites to pay for an ad to appear directly in Google search results, there is no confidence that Mv3 will be safe or secure.
See my other comments in this Post for more details.
WTF?!!! Monopoly is always a bad thing, we must remember it!
Absolutely. But there’s the catch - if Google passes this (and they will, because they don’t like ad blockers since it hurts their revenue), others will implement it.
Other Chromium browsers will be forced to adopt Mv3 too. If they don’t adopt it, the users that continue to use those browsers will find that certain web sites or services won’t work, and they’ll uninstall them and leave the service. “Why can’t Opera/Brave load my stupid bank? This is so stupid. I just want to check my balance. Whoa! It works in Chrome! That’s awesome! Why are these idiots at Brave even developers if they can’t fix the simplest shit? They should learn from Google, I’m switching to Chrome.”
And thus, Google Chrome isn’t necessarily “a monopoly”, because other Chromium browsers will adopt it if they want to stay in business. Opera belongs to China, Brave feeds their advertisements and has Basic Attention Token (BAT) cryptocurrency, Microsoft Edge is everything Google is but with a heaping pile of Microsoft privacy invasions. They’ll adopt it, they don’t have a choice.
Other Chromium browsers like Ungoogled Chromium, which is made by voluntary developers in their free time, will not adopt it. But because they’re unpaid, how long can they fight Mv3? Eventually, Ungoogled Chromium will disappear.
Firefox and its forks (Librewolf, Waterfox, etc.) are safe for now. In 10 years when Web sites don’t work, if they don’t adopt Mv3, they too will disappear. Firefox is a corporation that has salaries and a bottom line - they’ll have no choice but to comply or they will perish.
The only way this can somehow get turned around is if Google is upended and a new competitor emerges that the majority of users flocks to. The largest competitor is Firefox, which is not Chromium. Web developers and corporations design their services for the majority of users, so maximum compatibility is for Chromium. I don’t see that happening ever. Hopefully Brave and Microsoft have enough power and decide they don’t want to use Mv3. That’s our only chance.
I don’t know anything else, but I have been using firefox for a while, and I can’t think of any times where a website didn’t work. Seems like a almost perfect drop in replacement for chromium currently, just needs people to do it.
There are some extensions that are only available for Chrome, but beside that this compatibility issue mostly happens with government sites and stuff like that. Since in their case it’s you who want something from them and not the other way around, they’re free to only check compatibility with something and say that anything else might not work.
Most of the time I stumbled upon such sites requiring IE, but that era seems to be over by now, fortunately.
I’m sure there’s a few sites that don’t work on Firefox, but I’ve definitely never ran into one, so its gotta be a very very small issue.
Regarding extensions, that is an issue I’ve had, but it turns out that some extensions can be ported to Firefox relatively easily. I don’t have a clue how to write browser extension’s, but all I had to do was make a mozilla developer account and you can convert automatically them there. There are certainly some (or most, not sure) that would require someone to manually port to Firefox though.
All in all, its almost a perfect drop in replacement.
Exactly!
If the last 5 years are any indication, they’ll shelve it on their own within a month.
There is no ecosystem as mature, polished and integrated as Apple’s. I am all in with them and the way all their devices and services work together is just marvellous.
But the answer to your general question is you will need to go all in on a single company. And TBH, you should. They are all bad to some degree. But cobbling together a pipeline of various manufacturers will always result in a terrible experience, and you’ll be generally paying the same for it anyway.
There is no ecosystem as mature, polished and integrated as Apple’s. I am all in with them and the way all their devices and services work together is just marvellous.
But the answer to your general question is you will need to go all in on a single company. And TBH, you should. They are all bad to some degree. But cobbling together a pipeline of various manufacturers will always result in a terrible experience, and you’ll be generally paying the same for it anyway.
Have been using Firefox forever basically, with a brief departure when Chrome was fairly new, but later returned.
Almost the same for me. Used Firefox since it launched, then when I saw chrome had that thing where you could pull tabs into windows it blew my mind and made the swap. Didn’t come back to Firefox until COVID though when I took the time to degoogle my life
What part of this can be used for DRM? It looks like its just a crypto-graphically provable User-Agent, assuming I’m reading it right. Am I misunderstanding?
The proposal’s explainer dances around the fact that it can be used for that.
Some examples of scenarios where users depend on client trust include:
- Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.
- Users want to know they are interacting with real people on social websites but bad actors often want to promote posts with fake engagement (for example, to promote products, or make a news story seem more important). Websites can only show users what content is popular with real people if websites are able to know the difference between a trusted and untrusted environment.
- Users playing a game on a website want to know whether other players are using software that enforces the game’s rules.
- Users sometimes get tricked into installing malicious software that imitates software like their banking apps, to steal from those users. The bank’s internet interface could protect those users if it could establish that the requests it’s getting actually come from the bank’s or other trustworthy software.
Combine them and you have an anti-adblocking feature.
It also says
How does this affect browser modifications and extensions?
Web Environment Integrity attests the legitimacy of the underlying hardware and software stack, it does not restrict the indicated application’s functionality: E.g. if the browser allows extensions, the user may use extensions; if a browser is modified, the modified browser can still request Web Environment Integrity attestation.
Which is a whole lot of nothing. Of course you can still install extensions and sure, it can still request attestation, but that doesn’t mean it will get it. But this isn’t even important because I’m sure attestation for being a human (case 1) will fail anyway if the ads get blocked.
But even assuming that it doesn’t interfere with ad blockers, this is still going to allow some shitty website to query code running on your device that isn’t under your control to snitch on you. It’s fundamentally stupid and wrong to trust any client data about the client, using extra processors and features is a garbage, intrusive workaround that still doesn’t even actually work reliably from the shitty developers/website owner’s point of view. Also see: Android custom ROMs and the lengths they successfully go to in order to run banking apps.
And the second and forth points are already solved using client certificates.
As Zoanoids* said in Michigan**:
“We’re fucked.”
*An indie rock band
**A song on their self-titled album
Honest comment with a bit of a question buried in here this novella… I use Google devices; Pixel Pro’s, Pixel watches, Nest hubs, Nest thermostats, etc. This is a understood agreement (not symbiotic) between me and the behemoth that is Alphabet: I pay them for hardware, and use their “free services” that are heavily subsidized by pillaging my data. I know the hardware does it too, and I’m paying.
I’ve switched most of my networking and cameras to UniFi, my browsers are all Firefox… The question is what’s next? I dislike Apple iPhones but like my wife’s MacBook, but I’m a nerd. All of my devices need to “play nice” in their respective ecosystem. I’m tired of having the inbox app, hangouts, etc only to find Google has grown tired or doesn’t care and scraps them.
When the iPhone 15 comes out, I was getting the wife that and myself the Pixel 8P. Now I struggle. The “ultra” premium phones (we both care most about camera) are few and defined. I don’t want to jump to Apple, it’s the same thing, just packaged differently. Ugh.
I’d consider installing graphene OS…
Or CalyxOS. Both are totally reliable as daily drivers on pixels. Installation is super easy via web installer and you can still use the original Google cam app that makes your images look as nice as you are used too. Join their respective Matrix chats to get things going and ask the noon questions.
People have been very vocal about this in the issues for that repo. https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues?q=is%3Aissue
ELI5: what is DRM?
Drm- Digital “rights” management, more like digital restrictions management is a thing that tries to make sure the things you own are restricted by someone else. It s the reason some singleplayer games dont work offline, some apps wont let you record them or Blu Ray discs try to stop you from copying them. things that you own. Thwy are controlled by corporations that can say who can use the media. Even if a device is perfectly able to play a movie, Google can not allow it so Neflix would not trust the device. Examples are Denuvo and Widevine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
In every comment thread about the importance of supporting Firefox, there’s always at least one comment claiming Firefox is slow, even while I repeatedly see the data say otherwise.
Anecdotally, I’ve used Firefox, Waterfox, and Librewolf on PC, and none have been slow.
I’ve used Firefox, Firefox Beta, and Fennec on Android, and if anything they seem faster and easier to use than Chrome (and they actually tend to work like an actual internet browser).
I’m not saying these commenters are all Google sockpuppets, but maybe they’re parroting misinformation, or maybe they’re using
an Apple OSiOS, where Firefox is basically Safari.It’s just really perplexing to me.
Also slow compared to what ? I mostly think its just the UI that makes people think it’s slow. Cause I think most browsers load sites at an equal space, or prioritize different kind of caches.
Chrome is a memory hog compared to Firefox lol
This was true when Chrome first came up, they even made those ridiculous ads, which Opera (before they stopped developing their own engine) was ridiculing: https://youtu.be/zaT7thTxyq8
Firefox after they they rewrote their engine to be multithreaded (I think it was called project electron?) is faster than chrome that is currently very bloated.
What saddens me the most that, while there are ignorant people who don’t know better and use what are they familiar with, there are also self proclaimed techno geeks, who are equally ignorant and don’t seem to remember the times of Internet Explorer.
Edit: here are the chrome ads: https://youtu.be/nCgQDjiotG0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/ZdirsXNaibo
https://piped.video/ZdirsXNaibo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Tbf we’re in a new generation of techno geeks who weren’t around for a lot of things and lack the full context. I think about that every time a young person chides me for “stealing” from YouTubers or even Google itself by blocking ads.
I(31/m) have a buddy(25/m) who gives me shit for pirating stuff sometimes because he says I’m stealing from the creators. But I’m not because I wasn’t gonna pay for it in the first place 😂 I’m more than happy to pay for things and do all the time. I just cancelled my audible sub a couple days ago because I got an email that my credits were going to expire and I needed to use them soon. Like what? I paid you for those. So I just used them on the series I’m currently listening to and spent the rest of the night figuring out how to host my own audible 😂
I wish to were simply ads. The big issue is that its targeted ads. I don’t want to pay them if it means deleting any sense of privacy from my life.
Targeted ads that are also intrusive. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d even be too much aware of the issues surrounding advertising if they weren’t so hellbent on encroaching on the very usability of a site. When YouTube ran banner ads, I didn’t really bat an eye. It wasn’t until they inserted ads into the videos themselves that I took notice. On top of that, every news outlet started looking like those malware sites people warned you about in the 90s. In a way, I guess I’m thankful that ad agencies became so awful that we had no choice but to become concerned about their impact on our privacy. I can’t even imagine using the internet without an adblocker and alternate apps or frontends for the worst offenders.
I think it depends on the website. There are some websites where chrome will work better either because chrome works better with certain libraries/technologies or because the developers put more time into optimizing for chrome.
On the other hand Firefox might have less bloat around telemetry that gives it an advantage too.
If you want to online shop or research something to buy, or spend money in some way, Chrome and Google search is superior. If you are looking for information, news, anything not requiring payment, Firehox and duck duck go are the best
I’m going to have to strongly disagree here. Trying to research a potential purchase on Google or Bing will net you page after page of Amazaon Affiliate sites peddling junk. I’m into longboarding, and most of the results you’ll find trying to Google a decent longboard would result in wasting your money at best, severe injury or death at worst.
It’s not just longboards, either. I’ve noticed these promoted results trying to search PC parts, appliances, dog food, tools, and anything else you might be looking to buy.
There’s a reason people started appending searches with “reddit,” but honestly it’s better just to use a search engine that doesn’t net you these results, or ask somewhere else entirely like a community forum. Sadly, most people rely on results from search engines and will end up spending money on junk.
I’m also not sure why using Chrome would make online shopping easier. I literally make all my online purchases through either Firefox proper or Fennec, and I’ve never had a problem.
Oh absolutely true, and one would probably notice it more if one uses a lot of Google’s services (though Microsoft is even worse in my experience, with nerfing its services if you don’t use Edge), but this still doesn’t explain why just a normal user would proclaim Firefox is “slow as fuck” without anything to support this, and that’s what I’m seeing in nearly every thread that mentions Firefox.
because that’s google bot replying
because being faster is what got chrome it’s market share in the first place even though it hasn’t been true for a very long time if it ever was.
I never switched to chrome because my 50tb of ram wasn’t enough to open 2 tabs.
Yeah I’ve noticed the same thing. I’ve been deliberately trying to do a bit of Firefox advocacy for a while (cos I honestly believe increasing its userbase is our only chance to avoid google ruining the internet). But yes every time there’s a bunch of people confidently complaining about how bad/slow Firefox is and advocating for brave or chrome.
Initially I thought it was just a bit of historical baggage but it happens very consistently and aggressively so I’ve had the same thought.
Meanwhile, I’ve been using Firefox for ages and have never experienced the problems these people keep complaining about.
There was a brief time when Chrome ran better than Firefox on an old 512MB laptop I had, but Chrome has since become an infamous RAM hog. Firefox is the lightweight one now, and has been for quite a few years.
I think some people also just haven’t used Firefox in a while, and it’s gotten better since the last time they used it. I’ve never had issues on Firefox, however I only became a Firefox user a few years ago. Meanwhile my girlfriend insists it’s buggy and slow, but she hasn’t used it in many years.
I’ve noticed a lot of people not wanting to ever revisit older paradigms. Like when the Reddit protests started a lot of people were adament that going back to forum type software would be a disaster and I felt taken aback. I loved that shit. The only reason I saw to do that with Reddit instead of a dedicated forum was because Reddit already had users that could wander into your community and slowly onramp. Here on the fediverse we get the best of both worlds, but there are people who hate the idea that !news@ttrpg.net and !news@lemmy.world don’t aggregate together even though they might actually be about completely different subject matter because “we don’t want to go back to the phpbb days”
Well y know what? Maybe there are parts of the phpbb days that were worthwhile and good. Maybe hosting dedicated servers that are specifically about something is a positive thing as it makes there be more people excited to host a small part of the internet that people can make use of. Maybe what we needed was the easier on ramping, not the centralizes forums.
Maybe that’s like, just your opinion man.
I have suspected for a while it is astroturfing. Same as with GIMP and Libre Office where inevitably someone will trash the UI as it’s “soooo bad”. If you say a lie, and repeat it enough, people start to believe it.
I love GIMP’s UI. It’s clean, it’s to the point, and it’s stayed basically the same for ages!
Damn, this positivity isn’t welcome in free software circles! How can I respect you? (Kidding, I think you and your positivity is awesome.)
Every time I introduce someone to LibreOffice I half expect them to hate it, and that I’ll have to go through the alternative interfaces and try to make them accept it and potentially install OnlyOffice instead if that doesn’t help.
Instead, I’m generally met with an “oh, this is nice”, before they start typing away.
I get that some of the bigger nerds would prefer something different (I would personally love the power of LibreOffice inside a modern minimalist GTK app), but LibreOffice is working great for most users. Those passionate enough to see an issue with it probably prefer markdown or latex anyway.
I’ve only introduced LibreOffice to one person in recent memory, and her reaction was basically, “This is free?! I wish I knew about this years ago.”
I honestly prefer LibreOffice to what Microsoft Office has become.
When I went to grad school, I was told MS Office was required, so I purchased it, but turned out we just used basic word processing and a handful of simple presentations, so I ended up using LibreOffice for everything instead.
Same here. I found the Microsoft ribbon they introduced in 2007 to be a major anti pattern. It didn’t make things easier, it made things way harder. Our IT department tried to bust me for not using the official Microsoft software (outlook, excel, word, etc) so I outright uninstalled windows and put fedora on there. Granted, I was trying to do partitions and fucked it up, but whatever. The point is I wanted to get away from their “antivirus” spyware so I could use what worked for me. I got the idea when I saw the Dean of academics was using i3 as her window manager
I can just imagine your IT dept. running into the Dean’s office to complain, only to be met with yet more Linux. Hilarious!
“Oh God our eyes. The non proprietary software we didn’t buy licenses for. It burns!”
I’m a huge fan of open source but saying the only people saying Gimps UI is bad are astroturfing is insane.
It’s famously controversial and uses UI paradigms that don’t exist in any modern desktop environments.
I’m not, but it’s not like it’s an occasional thing. Every time it’s brought up, it’s trashed. Free software that does a better job than anything else free, and folk bash it. Either they like and are motivated by Adobe dominance, or they’re useful idiots.
It’s balanced to say “great program, but could do with a UI improvement”. It isn’t to say it’s unusable because of UI. I cannot imagine any free software advocate should be proud of taking that line.
We don’t need to praise the software specifically because it’s Open Source. We need good Open source Software of which there are plenty of great examples.
Blender, Krita, Libre Office, Audacity. These are great. Better than the paid competitors in a lot for ways.
Gimp and scribus are simply not. That should mean we start developing good FOSS software to fill that gap, as a collective.
Tenacity, not audacity. Audacity got took over by a company with questionable record and tried to add telemetry into it. Tenacity was the OS fork which stayed true to principles.
GIMP may not be your bag, but it’s highly used and many find it has much higher quality features than the alternatives. UI may not be popular, but it doesn’t prevent it being a solid bit of open source software.
Btw, what steps have you taken to improve open source graphics software? It’s easy to bash, it’s harder to learn and contribute.
Open source contributors > open source advocates > grateful open source users > almost everyone else > open source critics
One doesn’t need to be a dev to have opinions about ease of use of a piece of software, don’t be dense.
That is true, but to get free software made by people in their free time and say “this is rubbish” is a little ungrateful.
“Here, have this free food…”. " ewww gross, that is so bad".
Woah, hold on now. Gimp actually is unusablly bad. I say this as Linux Graphic Designer who would rather use Krita (anillustration software) to do photo edits.
Libre Office is great tho.
I’m involved in open source software, and of the artists I’m aware of, most use GIMP, not Krita, because it has better features. Krita is a great option, but it doesn’t quite have the same features for producing quality art.
Also talking about GIMP, plenty of people have said “there’s heaps of Photoshop alternatives” yet legit everything on Ubuntu I’ve has been buggy AF and feature poor. Like I get that FOSS software is hit and miss but this has been really rough
“Other people who have bad experience ces with something just be asteoturfing.”
Ivw consistently had an issue with Firefox that I described in a thread a few days ago that I can’t seem to identify or fix. Am I just not allowed to mention it?
Maybe their issue tracker is the best bet, or in a separate question thread about the issues. Raising it in every thread it comes up when people recommending it isn’t going to solve the issue or help anything, is it?
No, it won’t. I bring it up in this particular thread for 2 reasons.
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I don’t like the insinuation that anyone who claims to have problems with Firefox must be bots. I don’t think that’s at all true, since I’ve run into multiple problems with the browser myself that I haven’t been able to solve.
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I brought it up in the previous thread because I think that if people are considering switching, knowing what problems exist is useful. It isn’t meant to dissuade anyone, in fact I regularly recommend Firefox to my friends and family. But I don’t personally use it because of a pretty major problem, and I don’t think it’s bad to mention it when the topic comes up.
“I don’t like the insinuation that anyone who claims to have problems with Firefox must be bots.”
I did not say this, multiple people have interpreted it this way. It’s a little defensive. I said there is a targetted campaign against it where every time it is brought up it is trashed. You may be be a genuine person who is also trashing it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t also a targetted campaign at play. I just find it hard to believe that some folk hate FOSS projects so much they have to smash it every time it’s brought up. Sounds exhausting.
There is a difference between “it’s great software, but i’ve notice a few issues” and “this project is trash”. The second is posted purely with the intent of trying to dissuade people from using it, and all they do is keep people using Chrome, which I think we can all agree has bigger issues.
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Firefox is not “basically Safari” on macOS, that is only true on mobile.
People seem to be unaware that Firefox on Android (not IOS unfortunately) has support for several useful extensions. Ad blocking is the obvious benefit, but I use a Text-to-speech extension every day.
Firefox for iOS might switch to their own engine if Apple relaxes the rules on web browsers. New EU laws will put full pressure on Big Tech.
I think Apple will have to, since they’re also going to have to allow sideloading. However, knowing Apple, they’ll probably wait right up until the deadline the EU has set before actually giving us what we want.
I did not know this, so thanks for the correction
Worth mentioning that, as much as it pains me to back Apple, Safari is also a good alternative for those it’s available for (at least in this regard). It’s one of the only browsers other than Firefox not using Chromium. And WebKit, it’s renderer, is a pretty badass project.
Chromium and its forks actually all use WebKit as well: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/displaying-a-web-page-in-chrome/
Blink and WebKit completely diverged in 2013 after the fork. That document is virtually identical to its 2012 version and is marked as outdated in several places.
Is this up to date? I thought they forked from WebKit ten years ago.
We just need to respond with “objectively wrong: <link to some data>” and copy paste it again if the same person replies.
By some metrics, Firefox surpasses Chrome now.
Switch from chrome to Firefox about a year ago. Firefox certainly opens faster on my PC but I don’t notice much difference on my android phone.
On top of that, Firefox was recently found to be faster than Chrome.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Google.
Sigh. Whoever they have working in their DRM department has been an asshole for a long time now.
This is what the third or fourth - minimum - thing like this they’ve tried to pass in a few years? I actually like Google as a product family but every time they do this it hits me right in the “maybe I should reconsider” department. Its also usually met with a hard resounding no from everyone. Maybe its that they have a task force that is paid well to protect their ad interests and recover some sort of deficit they see in their ad product.
I donate to the EFF to fight things like this at a professional level…also good to point out though that its not just google’s fault. If they build a moat for businesses and everyone installs one, that is everyone’s fault.
I end up switching more and more of my stuff away from Google every time something like this comes out.
The day adverts are forced on me is the day I quit using the internet for anything other than gaming. I fucking hate adverts.
I’ve lost interest in multiplayer games too with all the battle passes and loot boxes.
Try BattleBit
Can confirm, one of the best multiplayer games we have seen in years.
Except they’re planning on implementing FaceIT, which is an extremely invasive anticheat. Great game though, play it while you can
They cancelled adding it for the time being
Homestly, as soon as PeerTube gets more users or someone makes a video sharing platform on Gemini, I’ll be able to completely abandon Google.
I already use CloudTube, but it’s obviously still dependent on YouTube.
