Reminder to switch browsers if you haven’t already!
- Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
- The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
- Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.
Long live Firefox.
hear ye
Pretty great outcome for firefox really.
I don’t think firefox numbers will get a huge & immediate bump, but I think that over time it will support a reputation for firefox as being cool different and just plain better.
I can’t imagine raw-dogging the internet without an ad blocker in 2024. I’m aware that most people aren’t bothered by ads, but surely… surely some people might be interested in blocking them if they become aware that it’s possible and easy.
After bingeing that show, I have a constant fear that he’s been standing behind me the whole time, just waiting for me to catch a glimpse of him.
Been here since Kevin helped the project out?
netscape was the standard back then when expolorer was crap…fast forward today,firefox(netscape’s successor) is still the standard when other browsers are still crap.
edit: spelling firefox and netscape…god damn butter fingers…
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t use Firefox. Actually back in highschool I used IE around 2002ish but only because I didn’t know any better back then.
Now we gotta have websites developing for all web browsers instead of Google Chrome like it’s Internet Explorer 2.0.
There are effectively only two web browsers: Chrome and Firefox. Literally everything else, aside from some really niche things that can’t render modern webpages, is a fork of one of those two that uses the same rendering engine.
Not to toot the kagi Horn, but they are talking about releasing thier webkit based Orion Browser on Linux. Ive been following that one closely since it has firefox extension support.
I mean, if folks really want something like that, I’d say they shouldn’t have let KDE’s KHTML (which is what WebKit was forked from) die. But as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, KHTML→WebKit→Blink are related and thus fail to combat Google’s web hegemony the way that Gecko (Firefox) does.
I’ve become very skeptical of anything Kagi, wishing they’d just focused on making one thing good instead of getting distracted by mediocre AI and a browser they can’t realistically support while their search is still subpar. Illusions of grandeur.
Subpar Search?
Yeah, wtf is he/she talking about there :)
Iirc the browser is older than their search engine. If anything that is their og product
What about Apple’s WebKit? Does it count?
You mean KHMTL, born in KDE’s Konqueror. That spawned WebKit (Safari), that spawned Blink (Chrome, Edge, Opera, etc). The whole thing then finally came full-circle when Konqueror dropped KHTML due to lack of development, now you have the choice between WebKit and Blink (via Qt WebEngine).
Then there’s Gecko (Firefox) and Servo which had a near-death experience after Mozilla integrated half of it into Gecko but by now development is alive and kicking again. Oh and then there’s lynx, using libwww, tracing its lineage back straight to Tim Berners Lee.
No, they don’t mean KHTML. KHTML is an ancestor of WebKit and Blink, but WebKit forked from it over 2 decades ago. They meant WebKit.
They also didn’t mean lynx and yet I mentioned it. How come? Might the distinct possibility exist that I used the opportunity to draw a wider picture, and “you mean X” has to be understood as internet brain-rot rhetorics, not literally?
Just a suggestion.
Nope, it doesn’t count. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn’t considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.
They’ve been separate for over a decade, and even before that they were heavily customizing it. They’re cousins, but absolutely not close enough at this point to be considered the same.
I’m sure they’ve diverged enough for it to be pretty significant compared to the Chromium browsers
So it wasn’t, like, forked hard enough that now after the years it counts as a different browser? Expect it to render pages ‘n’ stuff pretty much like Chrome?
I admit, I haven’t really looked into it. It’s possible Apple implemented new HTML/CSS/JS standards independently, but it’s also possible that Apple continued to backport Google’s changes. Unless they had a business goal of being independent (or NIH syndrome) I would guess that they’d do mostly the latter, but you’d have to go read the code to know for sure.
They are definitely still more related to each other than either is to Gecko (which is to say, not related at all), though.
And safari, although it’s a cousin/uncle to Chrome at this point.
Not that I use it, but still.
haha Safari would like a word.
What word? I spoke the truth: there are only two rendering engines. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn’t considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.
I deleted my original comment before you replied because I am not really in the mood to defend this but the OP was talking about the pain of developing for different browsers and I don’t care what is a fork of what, this is a fact: Chrome, Firefox and Safari all render differently and have to be catered to individually.
Also, Safari, between desktop and mobile, has 30% of the market to Firefox’s 8%.
I don’t LIKE it, but there are “effectively” three, not two, rendering engines.
It’s about browser architecture and not silly names (“Safari”, “Firefox”, “Chrome”). The point is that there are only two actual variants.
That’s…not true at all.
Not when you have to make a web app render identically in them, which is what the OP was about.
No, you still have three rendering engines. WebKit and Blink are different. Since the second is an (old) fork of the other one, they are similar but far from being the same. They are pages that work in one but not the other, even if you change the user agent.
I’ve been way more than a decade (closer to two decades) uninterruptedly using Firefox. I’ve never used chrome as a my main browser, ever.
But still, I’ll be naive if I didn’t recognize that this kind of shit will affect me even if it’s just indirectly.
Next year they’ll surely will be forcing many webs only working in “manifest V3 compliant browsers”. I’m sure of that.
Firefox is looking to implement Manifest V3 to keep extension feature parity with Chromium, but their version will not ban the one API that adblockers use. So Firefox will eventually be V3 compliant
Maybe it’s my tinfoil hat but if any part of this is related to
theirgoogle’s pursuit of ad revenue, I don’t imagine a v3 compliant Firefox will work with adblock for long.At the very least they would probably make using it a huge headache
edit to make it clear who I was referring to
Firefox has ad revenue?
I’m realizing that was unclear.
I meant google’s maifest v3, not firefox’s implementation of it.
Ah, appreciate the clarification. I’d also just woken up and hopped on Lemmy, so maybe partially my fault 😋
I switched to chrome because they were the first to have each tab be it’s own process so one bad site/connection did crash the whole program. Also the cloud based password saving across devices was super convenient.
Firefox does both now too, has better ad blocking, and is a little less invasive and bloaty. A lot less invasive if you know how to set it up, which I don’t.
But yeah, Firefox is my guy again
Same here. Made the switch back to Firefox a year ago when I saw the writing on the wall about where Google wanted to take Chrome with Manifest V3.
The problem is that Firefox has like a crumb of the market and it’s held by a lifeline given by Google itself
There is no guarantee Firefox would survive the long term … Heck it would die short after Google decides to cut them off
Back in the Dim Times (1990s), before ad-blockers appeared, there was a program called WebWasher. It’s basically a proxy server you run on your own computer and it contained all the ad filters. You just configured your browsers network setting to point to WebWasher and it would handle all the ad filtering.
So even if companies completely remove extension support from their browsers, we’ll still have an alternative. :)
Still not unheard of today if you’re using a VPN. For example, if you’re using Mozilla VPN (Mulvad), in the DNS settings it gives you choices between regular DNS, DNS + ad blocking, or DNS + ad blocking + tracker blocking.
I did not know about WebWasher, that’s very interesting.
That man-in-the-middle principle doesn’t work with TLS.
But ads are still often delivered by content delivery which is blockable by domain, hence the reason piholes work. Not that in-stream ads aren’t the future, perhaps, but life finds a way.
What you’re describing is not a man-in-the-middle proxy, but a simple DNS block. That’s a very crude approach to blocking ads and notoriously doesn’t work for YouTube and Google ads because they’re served from the same domain.
I run a pihole myself but there’s still a huge difference between browsing with pihole only and pihole+ublock. It’s certainly not the answer to the Manifest V3 shenanigans.
however its relatively rare that an ad company provides a bunch of services I want to use. The only exception i can think of is google.
obvs its hard to avoid gmaps because the alternatives are beyond godawful (no, openstreetmaps, i didn’t want to go to the coffee shop of the same name in connecticut, I wanted to go to the one 3 km away), but for youtube I use a python tool called youtube-local which is very very effective, strong rec. Im sure google will defeat them eventually, but so far all of the incremental “block a little of this, block a little of that” stuff the g-man has been doing has been bypassed within a few days. Viewtube is also pretty easy to self-host, but they never quite figured out how to make the UI work.
Hey that’s awesome! Thanks for sharing
Fortunately I at least have Firefox on Linux. But then when I need to use Windows for something… well look at that, also Firefox!
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
Always has been.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
it’s all inevitable. client signatures, the end of privacy, jerking off on my way home from the office. there is no God
Firefox is a good option.
But I will raise people one more. Waterfox. Been using it for over a year now and enjoy it.
Firefox’s marketshare is small enough relative to Chrome’s that some websites might just block it at this point, if Chrome users mean ad revenue and Firefox users don’t.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Firefox has 2.88% marketshare.
Chrome has 65.34% marketshare.
It’s gonna be interesting to see what happens…
It doesn’t necessary cost a meaningful amount to a site to allow Firefox users to view it; it does however cost to make it compatible with non-chromium browsers. For most viewing that’s a non issue (I mean, most crms are going to work) but specific sites might stop working (YouTube already got caught throttling firefox, and tbf, streaming would cost more than reading an article or something).
User agent switcher
Based and
incognitoprivate mode pilled
Firefox blocks statcounter tracking by default. It’s an inherently flawed metric, though Firefox is definitely in the minority still vs Chrome
The numbers may be indicative of the general trend, but every single privacy oriented browser and so forth is spoofing the user agent, pretending to be the most widespread and popular os and browser.
Which is why privacy checks on my Linux+librewolf PC return win10 with chrome.
My worry is what the EU changes might mean for the mobile web and beyond. With iOS’s market share and only the same rendering engine Apple used in Safari being available, sites/apps had to support more than just Chrome. If forcing iOS users to Chrome is an option (either through pointing them to the browser or an app built with that rendering engine), then there’s even less of an incentive to test with anything else. It’s great that users get more choice but if providers use it as an opportunity to reduce support for other browsers then it might not be a great benefit after all.
Firefox and WebKit for all!
I did have some issues on firefox om some sites.
But I will raise people one more. Waterfox
Never heard of it, I prefer LibreWolf
https://librewolf.net/#what-is-librewolfbut I’m gonna list some other popular forks
TOR Browser (anti-censorship enhanced fork, bundled with TOR network)
https://www.torproject.org/GNUzilla IceCat (GNU version)
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/Pale Moon (able to use old XUL based extensions)
https://www.palemoon.org/Mullvad Browser (a security hardened fork, IIRC based on TOR, made by Mullvad VPN company)
https://mullvad.net/en/browserFennec F-Droid (Fennec version available on F-Droid, clean of propietary blobs)
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/
https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuildMull (hardened fork of Fenix)
https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenixIceRaven (yet another hardened fork of Fenix, able to install an extended list of extensions)
https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
Meanwhile, Firefox.
It’s weird that I’ve been on firefox for the vast majority of my life and I always had this perception that “everyone” was using it. Here in lemmy you hear about it all the time, my friends use it, I see it on my newsfeeds etc
But when you check the market share it around 2.8% while chrome is 65.1% https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Good thing I exclusively use Firefox.
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They expect most users to not care, and sadly they’re right.
I think people just genuinely don’t know that firefox (and I suppose Safari) is the only true alternative browser i.e. Not based on chromium.
I do my best to transition people I know across, but people are retty comfortable on chrome. If ad blockers stop working, I think there will be people who care just enough to switch.
I think people just genuinely don’t know that firefox (and I suppose Safari) is the only true alternative browser i.e. Not based on chromium.
Safari is only “not based on Chromium” in the sense that the heredity goes in the other direction (Chromium is based on it).
Firefox is the only browser that maintains a rendering engine codebase fully separate from Chrome. That’s why using Firefox, and evangelizing it to help keep up its marketshare, is so vitally important for the health of the web.
Huh, I didn’t know that about Safari/Chromium. Absolutely agree that having a Google-controlled browser monopoly would be catastrophic.
Used Firefox on and off since it came around, not a fan. But if chromium blocks ad-blockers, I’m switching instantly. I doubt many people know or care enough to switch.
I’ve been on Firefox almost exclusively for about a decade and I can’t really tell the difference between them honestly in terms of performance of normal web browsing.
I’m having some weird graphical issues with my NAS frontend Web portal display on Firefox atm though, so keep chromium installed for that.
I honestly don’t understand why anyone would refuse to switch from away Chrome. It’s not like the other browsers lack functionality or are slow. The only problem they might encounter is some rare incompatibility which is the result of Firefox (and its forks) small market share and web devs not caring enough.
I’ve never used Chrome as my primary browser and I don’t think I missed anything. I started using Opera years before Chrome was even a thing (back when everyone was using IE) and then when the old Opera died, I didn’t think even for a second about switching to Chrome and went straight to Firefox. Which could at least be highly customized to bring some Opera exclusive features (eg. mouse gestures, tab grouping) back.
I think, they just stopped caring about users instead. They’ve got enough market share. Might as well internet-explorer it for a while.
80% of people I know does not use an ad block, even the ones more tech savvy. I have no clue how brainwashed they are for eating ad garbage all day long.
To be fair, let’s be glad that 80% of people don’t use an ad block. If it were the opposite and 80% did use ad block, web services would be much more aggressive in combating ad blockers and many more of them would end up pay-walled (although it seems we’re heading there anyway).
On one hand, I feel kinda bad that my ad-free experience is only supported thanks to those who do undergo the torture of ads, on the other hand, the companies have only themselves to blame. If web ads were decent, only limited to sides and headers or even between paragraphs of web pages and didn’t cover the content you’re trying to view, didn’t try to trick you into thinking it’s part of the content, didn’t lead to malicious websites, didn’t autoplay videos with sound or didn’t put unskippable ads before and inside videos, I would have never felt the need to install an ad block.
I am the only person at my work that even knows what an ad blocker is. My boss, director of IT, doesn’t use one. Uses chrome with no extensions like everyone else.
What does google expect users to do once they realize they get better extensions with firefox?
If that happens en masse, which is extremely unlikely, Google can just pull its funding for Mozilla and cripple them
The entire sector is fucked because of lack of regulation
They already don’t let you add ublock origin to chrome on mobile. I had to teach my elderly mother to use Waterfox with the extension, but as a plus side she can now turn on desktop-site and and turn the screen off without interrupting her hokey crystal meditation flute music [3 hours].
