“The browser built to be yours”
Hahaha sure thing Google
“The browser built to be piping your data into our hands”
There, fixed.
So … can we like finally dismiss Google Chrome as the obviously awful idea it is and which should never have made it this far and remind all of the web devs married to it that they’re doing bad things and are the reason why we can’t have nice things?
Hmmm … a web browser owned by a monopolistic advertising company … how could that possibly go wrong!!!
Do you remember the Internet Explorer days? This, unfortunately, is still much better.
Pretty good reason to switch the Firefox, now. Nearly everything will work, unlike the Internet Explorer days.
- Firefox User
I think some people overestimate how many will migrate to Firefox in the near future over this.
- High switching cost compared to finding another extension (e.g. uBO Lite), even if the resulting experience is worse.
- Just as many Firefox users like Firefox, lots of Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don’t want to lose that.
- The kind of tech-aware person who’d switch over this is much more likely to have seen the news months ago and taken action already.
As fun as it is to imagine an Adpocalypse shocking the masses and pushing them to try out alternatives to big tech, it’s also way too optimistic, I feel.
Hopefully it will give Firefox a bit of a boost anyway. Firefox needs a boost.
There’s also other chromium browsers with built-in ad-blocking that still work AFAIK. If all extensions and forked brower’s ad-blockers stopped working, I think there would probably be a surge in firefox usage (even if there’s not that much change in chromium usage).
Yeah I use Vivaldi as my daily driver and love it. There’s built in ad blocking but it’s not as good as the extension. If the extension stops working there I’ll switch to Firefox in a heartbeat though
As a supporter of Firefox and FOSS, the closed-source, Chromium-based Vivaldi is my guilty pleasure. It has the best UI experience I’ve found on a browser, and the company behind it doesn’t seem to be very evil.
Yeah the founders are ex-Opera devs who left after the company was acquired by Qihoo 360, and the power user UI features are leagues ahead of other browsers I’ve tried. I wish Firefox developer edition would embrace of a philosophy of a more customizable UI centered around power users
Leaving Vivaldi was a sad moment for me. That UI, that sidebar, the settings, those features…! Goodness. I’m an avid enjoyer of bells and whistles, and Vivaldi’s got all of them and then some. I miss that a bit.
The folks working on it seem great, check their blog for their decision track record 1 2 3. Did you know they also host a mastodon instance? Literally my only issue with it is the engine, and that just so unluckily happens to be a deal breaker.
Vivaldi is cool. I installed it (for those who wanted a chromium browser) and FF on all the work computers where I work. Eventually uninstalled it because people started playing Vivaldia. Disabled Edge, so now they are FF only.
Is there any other browser that does a right-side vertical tab bar with compact tabs?
There’s an extension for Firefox to do it, but it’s a bit clunkier than Vivaldi’s - definitely something I’d only switch to if I really had to… but every other browser I’ve seen only offers left-side vertical tabs at best, which is terrible if you want 3 monitors in a left-to-right layout with your browser on the left.
I think what you want is in Firefox nightly right now: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/08/07/firefox-sidebar-and-vertical-tabs-try-them-out-in-nightly-firefox-labs-131/
That expands and compacts based on the sidebar state and can be flipped to the right side of the window in the ‘customise sidebar’ settings.
I haven’t watched a single YouTube advertisement in 5 years
Yeah, same with people here declaring the death of reddit, or Twitter, or any of these massive, mainstream services. People in bubbles (and Lemmy is definitely a bubble) always seem to underestimate how little everyone else cares or even knows about the things that are important to them. The service needs to be extremely bad in a user experience way, not an ethical way, for an extended period of time and there needs to be a big social movement where lots of people migrate to a direct and equivalent competitor within a short space of time. Most people will not do it on their own, they will wait until they see their peers doing it and only then can a migration start to snowball.
“Netflix will die when they ban account sharing!!” - Reddit/Lemmy/Techtubers
Netflix actually went on to have a massive jump in revenue, because most normal people can’t be arsed to set up a Plex/Emby/Jellyfin server and buy a shitload of storage.
I’ve been on Firefox since manifest v3 was announced. Firefox has its own shortcomings but no dealbreakers.
What are some shortcomings in your view?
I don’t like the lack of customisability. I’ve been using Vivaldi for a long time now and nothing comes close to how customisable and feature-packed it is. Everything can be set up and tweaked exactly how I want. My version of Vivaldi would look, feel, and act entirely different to someone else’s, because it does what I want, not the other way around.
Unfortunately, it’s Chromium-based. But the developers have been working on its native ad blocker in case extensions are impacted. They’re quite a brilliant bunch, so I’m hoping it all goes smooth. I really don’t want to have to go back to Firefox if I can help it. I can’t stand UX for the masses and these guys get it.
The uBlock Origin chrome extension
hashad 34 million users. Chrome has 3.45 billion users.Even if every uBlock user switched, it’s less than 1% of chrome users.
Yeah, I thought about mentioning that. But the comparison goes both ways. Less than 1% of Chrome users switching to Firefox could still mean an increase in Firefox users of over 10%, if I remember my numbers correctly. That’d be a sweet boost for most products.
Ya, it’d still be huge for Firefox, but what I’m really getting at is that even with this change, Chrome is going nowhere. They’re the big fish, they can afford to make these kinds of changes, because the people who care are a very small minority.
To be fair, nerds will tell their tech-illiterate friends about this change and probably influence them enough to consider it. Especially when it’s something as easy as downloading an application.
It’s much easier to switch a browser then it is to stop using Google, Facebook, etc.
Depends on their methodology. Sure, a huge proportion of those are users who haven’t heard of uBO, but we’re forgetting a lot of caveats:
- Electron exists and lots of apps are built on top of it and identify as “Chrome”. Judging by the numbers most have been weeded out, but some edge cases do visit more sites so they end up in the count.
- A lot of workplaces mandate the browser, which is often Chrome. This also gets counted.
- A not insignificant amount of Firefox users change their useragent to Chrome.
All of these skew the numbers towards Chrome. Some Chrome users use a different adblocker which lowers the uBO statistic.
And then there are Safari users who are watching from the sidelines.
1 year ago I had basically free Spotify Premium because Safari was unable to play ads. That’s a kind of ad blocking.
And you ran zero ad blockers in Safari and on your network?
No ad blocker. This bug started to break song playback on Safari (according to Spotify’s forums, I faced no such problem) and then it was fixed so I got ads.
High switching cost compared to finding another extension (e.g. uBO Lite), even if the resulting experience is worse.
You’re not wrong about the high switching cost.
Switching from Chrome to Vivaldi (because of Chrome’s whole FLoC thing) to Brave (because I didn’t like Vivaldi’s layout) to Firefox (because of Brave’s whole thing) was a pain.
And I don’t mean as a whole. Taking the time each time to change from one browser to another was always a pain. Transferring bookmarks and passwords was easy (Chrome and Firefox are at least compatible in that regard), but transferring extension settings was a whole different beast.
Some extensions had cloud sync support. Others had local export support. Some didn’t have either kind, and I’d have to manually copy the settings from one browser over to the other. And that’s not even getting into finding replacements for the Chrome-exclusive extensions (of which there were only a few, thankfully).
(because of Brave’s whole thing)
Ha.
I’m sorry to hear that, been there (Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Firefox in my case). Hopefully we can stick around for a while.
My friends will stick to chrome, I switched to Firefox months ago. You’re right
- Just as some Firefox users like Firefox, many Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don’t want to lose that.
Do you have some source for that? IIUC, you mean that more Chrome users like Chrome than Firefox users like Firefox, right?
“Some people like things.”
SOURCE?!
“Some firefox users like firefox” vs “many chrome users enjoy what they have” sounds to me like something that could have a source. Many sound to me more than some, so this is a comparison, which can be given a better foundation by supplying some numbers.
I thought that might’ve been the source of your misunderstanding. Sorry, that’s just how I write sometimes, no deeper meaning intended. As far as I know there’s no public data on what percentage of Firefox and Chrome users like their browsers’ features.
No. I simply meant that there exist Chrome users who appreciate what it provides them (features, UI, etc), so for these users to leave they’d have to give up those things. That’s always a hard ask.
Not to mention all the people who don’t even have an adblocker and for some reason don’t seem to care that their web browsing is infested with ads.
A lot of people don’t even know it’s an option, or have grown to believe that’s just how the web is. When was the last time you saw adblockers in mainstream media or news?
This is why I think it’s so important to keep raising awareness. If you have people in your life who you believe would be better off using uBlock, consider bringing it up when you have the opportunity.
I think probably the single most important thing that nobody is saying is that Google have ALL the numbers on this decision and they are not stupid, so it would be silly to assume this will work against their interests. Not only do they know how many people use chrome, their ad network gives them insight into ALL browsers.
I agree folks are overestimating how many will switch. but also maybe you’re underestimating too - a lot of browser installations are managed by the “family tech guy”. the father, mother, brother, sister, aunt or uncle who sets up everyone’s new laptops on Christmas and has the suggestions when you look for a new phone. we all know the type. a lot of us are the type.
setting up granny’s laptop? I’ll install whatever browser lets me automatically block the most “1000th visitor!” banner ads and change the desktop icon to the old AOL icon because that’s all she knows the internet as. she doesn’t know of care about the browser options so it’s up to me. Chrome used to be fast and simple so it was the right choice. Firefox has caught up a fair bit on UX simplicity and speed and now offers better blocking and general security, so it just stole the crown for these installations imo. I trust it more to not let her mess the computer up, so even if I’m not using it as my main personal browser, it gets use here.
For what it’s worth, I hope you’re right.
If large numbers of people were going to switch browsers over an ad-blocking extension, the whole advertising industry would be significantly less successful than it is.
Meh. They had plenty of time to move to Firefox but they ignored all the warnings.
It’s not like they contracted some sort of terminal illness. Anyone can migrate whenever. It’s not hard.
My organization has blocked all browsers other than Edge and Chrome - and has also blocked all plugins except for UBlock. For security reasons, of course.
Everyone knows seeing a bunch of uncontrolled JavaScript-powered ads from who knows what server is good for security.
I believe that some organizations restrict what applications can be installed on work computers, so that might not necessarily be true, at least for work machines.
if they’re restricting apps to that degree you probably can’t install extensions anyway.
One more vector of malware for these corporate systems. Sucks for them I suppose.
And I mean, there’s still time now. Switching browsers isn’t that bad. Export+import some bookmarks and adjust some settings, good to go.
I think FF has been a good option for a while. But the second best time is now. I can totally get it if people didn’t want to switch until they had more of a concrete problem.
FF still hasn’t brought back a tab group API for extensions or native tab groups. Extensions can only do so much given what they have to work with. I still use FF on the side, but it simply isn’t a practical as a primary browser for me currently.
But for casual users, many probably have never even touched their browser settings.
Tab groups are coming but in the mean time containers work well enough for me with the added benefit that they’ll also block tracking from the sites that are within them.
Understandable, I’m really looking forward to FF getting tab groups too. I don’t know why such a nice feature was left unimplemented for so long. 🫤
For all the firefox fans out there it might be good to note there have consistently been more Safari users than Firefox users since 2014. Hell Safari has been the number two browser by market share since 2015.
Browsers have to get very SHITTY or a new browser has to have a killer app to unseat a dominate one.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-202408
I don’t think safari is even remotely comparable given that it’s a default browser on macs.
Also, I’m pretty sure it’s not possible to install any other browser on iPhones unless you get root.
Edit: It looks like you can with iOS 15.0
Those are all just skins on safari. Until like 6 months ago you couldn’t install any web browser with a renderer other than safari. And that’s only in the EU.
I’ve had iPhone for years and I can’t remember the last time I didn’t use chrome with it
Never rooted my phones either. It’s definitely not blocked
As I understand it, any browser on iPhone has to be built on WebKit, so even if you install fire fox or chrome, it’s running on a totally different web engine than the desktop version. Making them more safari re-skins in the same way that stuff like brave or opera are just chrome reskins.
How so ? The default browser on Windows is Edge, people keep installing Chrome? Chrome is available on MacOS, yet people stick with Safari?
some people stick with safari, but no one is replacing chrome, fire fox, or edge with safari. People choose to replace edge because it is obtrusive and annoying to use, safari isn’t.
In that context, safari is not a competitor for Firefox in the same way chrome is. It’s comparing apples to oranges.
Almost like being the default gives you an unfair advantage or something.
Firefox.
This is the way.
This is the way.
This is the way.
Used Chrome forever, switched to Firefox back when this stuff first started going down. No ragerts.
No Rugrats!
I just listened to a rugrats song yesterday though.
Which one?
You’re a friend to me.
We should all probably start donating to Firefox. Isn’t Google their main source of income?
There might come a time when they prefer to gut Firefox, forcing Mozilla to either reject uBlock Origin or die (or they could simply pull the plug on funding knowing they’ll earn more when people go back to Chrome-based browsers)
If they can pay 5-8 milion the CEO while laying off employees, they do not need donations.
You’re absolutely right, ~80% of Mozilla’s revenue is from Google’s paying to be the default search engine in Firefox - and the US is going after Google for it’s anticompetitive behaviors as we speak. Ad blocking aside, Mozilla is going to need help pretty soon anyways if Google gets their monopoly broken up.
Mozilla still does pretty good without any donations, and your donations will most definitely not be spent on Firefox.
This is what drives me mad about Mozilla. Let me donate to Firefox! I don’t want to donate to another hairbrained idea to “diversify your revenue streams” - I want to donate to Firefox.
As I’ve said many times before, Firefox would be better off as an opencollective-driven, smaller (50-ish) team, with code on Codeberg, than driven by a 600 strong org who needs to compete with SF salaries and fancy offices. They have become Google by another name and it ain’t healthy.
Your money is honestly better spent donating to new efforts like Ladybird or Servo.
Is Servo independent of Mozilla now? It’s instructive how much they swayed when Mozilla cut them away, but seems they’ve found a new team to steward it.
Ladybird I hadn’t heard of so thank you for the suggestion. I’ll check them out.
I really couldn’t agree more.
I actually think it’s a good thing they are seeking other income sources. After all Google is both their competitor and main income source while being under investigation by the government. Firefox barely manages to keep up with Chrome as-is. Nevermind if they had a team a fraction of its current size. It’s just not really practical for a project this size and scope to have a small plucky team. It needs a big organisation of some kind behind it. Ideally one like Google or Microsoft who can pull income from more profitable projects to pay for better browser engineering. It’s also needed so they can have a say in web standards. An organisation like that also has more ways to make money from their browser like with ChromeOS and Android. Firefox actually tried to make their own smartphone OS, to be honest I am annoyed they didn’t succeed. It would have given us a real alternative to Android while giving them needed income.
I like LibreWolf! But while they may be the natural successor to a folded Firefox, they would need to beef up dramatically to actually be the stewards of the codebase. Right now they do a good job at removing stuff, but setting a direction for a browser that zings with users requires a fully fledged product org.
Firefox is caught between those two worlds.
Fair take. I agree 👍
Mozilla still does pretty good without any donations
because Google pays them so that they keep offering Google as the default search engine. now that Google has been declared a monopoly, they might not be allowed to do that anymore, which means Mozilla loses its funding.
Mozilla’s funding did mostly consist of the Google partnership (86%), but as you can see, it’s not their only source of income. And you really don’t need half a fucking billion just to develop a web browser, which is open source, which also gets community contributions. This is made pretty obvious by their current revenue (>$1,000,000,000) and their CEO’s whopping $5.6 million salary.
Don’t donate to a shitty for-profit that masks itself with their non-profit company. Instead donate to something like Ladybird, whom are currently in early development but have no plans on adding features that actively spy on you (FakeSpot, Pocket), and they don’t need $500 fucking million to develop a web browser.
And if you’re going to talk about Mozilla’s social work, just don’t. I’ve already seen it.
You have zero idea how much engineering it takes to create a standards compliant engine and then maintain it. “And you don’t need half a fucking billion just to develop a web browser”. Technically this is true if you are willing to use someone else’s web engine. Firefox aren’t doing that, and it requires huge investment to maintain their own engine. There is a reason only large companies these days (Apple, Google, Mozilla) have their own engines. The actual browser part is tiny compared to the engine. We are talking about something the size of the Linux kernel or bigger, that gets far less contributions from outside sources. It actually makes perfect sense they are looking at starting other projects when you think that all other companies that do this kind of work need those other projects to remain profitable. Web engine development from my understanding does not pay. You get almost the same amount of money using somebody else’s engine as you do developing your own, yet one costs way more.
The fact Mozilla manages to maintain a better web engine than Apple’s WebKit only from Google’s advertising money is actually incredible. Did I mention Apple didn’t even start that engine themselves? It’s based on KHTML. Chrome is in turn a WebKit derivative. Firefox on the other hand actually comes from Netscape, and was first developed under the name Mozilla based on Netscape’s code. So Mozilla has put in more work than Google in modernising their engine.
Thank you. Yes, they are also developing their own web engine, which is a very complicated piece of software because of the current sad state of the web. But it doesn’t excuse any of the things I mentioned, and web engine development still doesn’t suckle up that much money as we can see from their current revenue and other efforts to make an independent web engine such as Ladybird.
I do not mind Mozilla starting other projects, but if you’re talking about FakeSpot or Pocket which are getting integrated into the “more private alternative to browsers like Internet Explorer, and now Chrome” by the “non-profit” whom “prioritize people and their privacy over profits”, I think you need to take a look at those privacy policies I linked in my previous comment.
I agree with you on your last paragraph, but there are some things I’m bothered with. Mozilla is (or was) a company that focused on one thing, their web browser. Apple and Google are (and were) different, in that they have a vast range of products to maintain. And Gecko is most definitely inferior to Blink in terms of speed, although I’m not familiar with any of their “modernity”.
other efforts to make an independent web engine such as Ladybird.
Notice the word efforts here. No one has actually succeeded yet despite multiple attempts, some even by Mozilla themselves like Servo. Ladybird is not a fully functioning browser yet. Are they anywhere even close yet? Even if they are close it also has to be fast. Google and Mozilla have spent quite a bit of time, money, and effort making their JavaScript engines as fast as possible.
I will have a look at some of the links you have given, but honestly I think most criticism thrown at Mozilla isn’t anything close to what the alternatives are guilty of, and is mostly done by conspiracy nuts. The kind of people were Mastodon and Lemmy is their only social media, and refuse to own a modern smartphone that isn’t running custom firmware.
Ladybird is fairly new. Just like how Mozilla didn’t get Gecko to this point in 1 year, Ladybird will take years of development to become a reliable browser and browser engine.
I pretty much agree with you. The alternatives are far worse. Seeing Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge being literal spyware, other Chromium-based browsers cutting out support for content-blocking extensions Firefox is vastly superior to them in terms of privacy. Although that still doesn’t mean Firefox is good, at least if we’re past talking about web browser engines etc., using another Firefox-based browser which is less bloated (Firefox Sync off by default, no Pocket, no recommendations in Addons tab), more privacy-friendly (all telemetry off by default, uBlock Origin installed by default, some hardening options from about:config enabled by default) seems to be the best choice currently, since other options like GNOME’s Epiphany and KDE’s Falkon sucks, if we’re being honest.
And I do kind of fit your description, if we exclude being a conspiracy-theorist.
I’ve read the one for fakespot. Given what it’s designed to do then having your purchase history makes perfect sense. How else are they meant to make recommendations? If you really have a problem just don’t use that service. The only real criticism here is the name doesn’t imply they also make product recommendations. Nevertheless they explain that on the website.
I have skimmed the pocket one, and as far as I can tell they aren’t doing anything dodgy. Keeping information only to provide the service, and some anonymised analytics to see how it’s actually being used. The later is needed to direct development effort.
In summary: Not everyone is out to get you. Some information is needed to provide services.
Edit: sorry for there different comments, wanted to come back and do more research before I finished making a statement.
Okay, what does a sweepstake or a contest have to do with a browser extension, made to spot fake reviews. Trade shows? What?
I did take a look at this privacy policy before to check if the extension was worth installing, but holy fuck I didn’t see that.
And they collect a lot of things, supposedly “automatically”. I have never developed a browser extension, but does the browser force this information on the extension? Do they just look at their data collection and find the geolocation of their users, how they accessed the extension download page, browser specifics etc.?
They also sell your “automatically collected” geolocation data, “internet or other electronic network activity”, “inferences drawn from other personal information to create a profile about a consumer”, and “commercial information”. I’ve quoted the three data selling points I really don’t understand, since their “descriptions” aren’t very descriptive. But if we are to fully trust the lawful descriptions they provided, I hope the extension stays at 40,000 users really.
Yeah, no problem at all. This is a lot better than people downvoting and not actually talking about what they disagree on. Felt like r/apple.
Reading it again, Pocket’s privacy policy is actually not that bad. Thankfully it was not one of those 100 page ones that are made to confuse the shit out of consumers, but I have a slight problem with it.
“Personalized Advertising: Some Pocket web pages have ads. With your consent, Pocket’s ad partners will place advertising cookies on your device to personalize the ads you see here and on other websites.”
How does this consent exactly work? Is it just a simple check you have to tick in your account settings, or is it one of those cookie banners that require you to untick 800 advertising partners to “not give consent”? I’m not exactly a Pocket user so I’m a bit ignorant about it.
Though there doesn’t seem to be another privacy concern with Pocket. It seems I had misconceptions about their practices.
The one other problem I have with Pocket though is, it’s not a feature that should be in a browser, it should be an extension. They have already made a lot of extensions for features that not all of the userbase might need, even FakeSpot is currently an extension (approximately 40,000 users). I guess this is a whole another argument though.
I will write my thoughts about FakeSpot in another reply.
Oh also the devs behind Ladybrid are apparently against anyone who isn’t male using their technology. People tried to change masculine pronouns in the documentation to neutral pronouns just to be more grammatically accurate, and it started a whole chain of GitHub arguments arguing the change is “political”. Apparently it’s political not to imply that every computer user is a man.
There are many software from bigots and shitheads that still get used, being seperated from their creator (e.g. Hyprland, I guess you can put here some social media platforms like Xitter if we’re not only talking about open-source software). Although I prefer not using or supporting such software, I’ve not been able to find what you’re talking about. I’ve tried searching “ladybird pronoun controversy (forgive my search engine skills)” and other similar sentences but nothing really related pops up, so it would be great if you told me your source. Thank you!
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Screw the mozilla foundation. My only hope at this point is that Ladybird or one of the other projects produces something viable one of these days.
Possibly when the US government decides to break Google up next week.
Stallman was right.
I can’t listen or look at this man anymore after seeing him scrape shit off his feet and eat it in front of a bunch of people. 🤢
He has went on record multiple times saying having sex with children (even within the family) or family pets is fine. Eating his foot gunk is the least of my issues with him.
That said, when it comes to warning about software, he was pretty bang-on.
Post the link to him saying that having sex with children is okay
It’s pretty well-known at this point, I thought? Regardless:
“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”
RMS on June 28th, 2003
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. "
RMS on June 5th, 2006
"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
RMS on Jan 4th, 2013
You can find these on Stallman’s blog, which I believe is Stallman.org iirc. Just go to the dates I provided.
Yeah, necrophilia is fine as long as both parties are consenting.
When one of the parties objects, that is when the fun starts :D
I cannot find any of this on his blog, why didn’t you just link to his blog?
I did link to his blog… It’s stallman.org
I said from there you can go to the dates I provided.
I don’t wish to be rude, but do you really need this hand-holding? It took me less than 10 seconds to find a specific link to the first quote, for example:
https://stallman.org/archives/2003-mar-jun.html
Did you really look?
Stallman being pro-paedophila is not new information.
You pasted the domain not an actual blog post link. And you’re the one making these claims about him on a forum, does it really surprise you when someone asks for the source? Sorry you had to google something.
How is it that you’re so well-versed in all of Stallman’s negative quotes (from over a decade ago), yet conveniently omitted the fact that he later retracted those statements?
On September 16, 2019, Stallman announced his resignation from both MIT and FSF, “due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations”.[124] In a post on his website, Stallman asserted that his posts to the email lists were not to defend Epstein, stating "Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve called him a ‘serial rapist’, and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him—and other inaccurate claims—and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.
The FSF board on April 12 made a statement re-affirming its decision to bring back Richard Stallman.[133] Following this, Stallman issued a statement explaining his poor social skills and apologizing.[134]
You mean when he had an epiphany and changed his mind 2 days after his job became under fire?
Gee, I dunno. Maybe because it was a clear last-ditch effort to save his job, rather than because he genuinely went from his decades-held (and publicly-championed) view that sex with children is ok to sex with children is rape, by sheer coincidence, 2 days after people started requesting he step down over Epstein comments?
It was about as convincing a statement from Stallman as when Zuckerberg says he cares about privacy.
Do you genuinely believe him when he says he changed his mind? It’s an awfully convenient timing, even you would have to admit.
And can I also ask - are you only looking favourably at him because you like him? If Andrew Tate, just before his court case, came out and said that his views on women are wrong and he doesn’t believe that stuff anymore, would you believe him? It seems to me that you’re likely sweeping Stallman being pro-childrape under the rug, because he happens to have cool ideals when it comes to software.
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Those issues are ones that it’s hard to just walk back with a mea culpa, especially when the apology comes precisely when it starts to impact your career.
Stallman spends decades publicly-championing adult-child sexual relations on his personal blog and using his work email address.
Stallman later comes under fire for strange comments about Epstein’s underage girls/clients. Some people say he should step down, as his poor image jeopardises the effectiveness of the FSF.
2 days later, Stallman has a sudden change of heart. Child/adult sexual relations are wrong. Children can’t consent.
Some Linux nerds: “see, he’s changed his mind, he’s a different man!”
Maybe I’m overly pessimistic, but to me the timing of his epiphany seems rather convenient.
How ready people are to treat celebrities as deity-like figures is scary to me. Just because Stallman has some great FOSS credentials doesn’t mean he can’t be a total POS in other areas. People bend over backwards to defend him as some saint who can do no wrong, even to the extent of trivialising child rape. It’s scary what a bit of celebrity worship can get people to do.
It’s pronounced GNU Stallman.
who
It’s a very searchable name
Too bad he spent all his energy getting Linux users to say GNU/Linux instead of talking about the real issues
Just because that’s all you ever listened to doesn’t mean that’s all he ever said.
cackles in firefox…
It’s like the reporter went out of his way to not mention ff at the end of the article:
uBlock Origin will continue to work as usual across other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Opera, and more.
Edge isn’t using manifest v3?
It is, it’s deadline is just a little farther out.
At this point I am seriously wondering why people would like to use Chrome over Firefox for instance.
“What’s a browser?” —the general populace
I just install uBlock Origin on every device I come across. Graffiti software.
I use multiple profiles in chrome for my different logged in usages, for some reason Firefox makes it hard to switch profiles.
“Hard” is a strong word. It’s not built into the default interface, granted, but it’s not that hard to use FF’s command line:
firefox -PThey have said they’re thinking about rejigging the whole thing though.
Ok, telling people to open a command line and TYPE firefox -P is HARD. In chrome you just click the icon in the upper right and select whatever profile you want.
It makes no sense that you have to either open about:profiles then select “launch in new window” or open the command line to start a new profile, makes NO sense at all.
You can open a firefox private window with a keyboard shortcut, but if you want to be logged into two different accounts in two different profiles, you have to go through a minimum of three non-intuitive steps.
Even the extension that adds the profile switching doesn’t work anymore because it’s not maintained.
Dude, if that’s all-caps HARD, then I don’t know how you’d classify, say, compiling things from source and fixing any problems that might crop up along the way. Or fixing missing DLL / OCX hell when trying to get an old Windows game running under Linux, because let me tell you, I’ve done both of those and had to give up.
firefox -Pis heaven by comparison.You could even put it into a shortcut and you wouldn’t have to type it any more.
Yes the interface sucks, but HARD is not it.
Sure, but you know most people do not have to do what you just described.
Most people don’t need multiple profiles either.
Fair enough
it has something like ‘-no-remote -p name’ param on cmd that you can do it seamless like chromium, or u can use the fork of the drop official pwa firefox support, it could be better, i know n i get it, but if u just use chromium base for it, than i got u covered
Look up the Firefox Containers extension.
The profile manager is definitely annoying, but it shouldn’t be that hard to visit about:profiles to switch / open other profiles. Afaik they do work on a better one though.
Personal preference I guess. I’ve tried Firefox many times over the years and always ended up going back to other browsers. I find Firefox doesn’t render some pages quite right, the user agent stylesheet is odd, and the UI is less streamlined. Performance also used to be a problem although I hear it’s caught up now.
I used to be a Chrome user but now I prefer chromium based alternatives like brave and edge (which incidentally, uBO will keep working on). Chrome is still required for work, but uBO change won’t be an issue I think, there are plenty of other ad blockers that will work with MV3
I am using Firefox as of last week I made the switch to the browser a different password manager and so far it is fine but there have been a couple of hiccups but it’s not necessarily a Firefox issue but an implementation with Android issue.
For example auto forwarding to an app from a webpage in Firefox has worked half the time for me and the other half not so much.
This is a small example, having Google Chrome and like wise the Google app be native to Android so they move back and forth between one another and are interchangeable while using my phone is much more smooth on my Android device.
Other than that, I am not positive as to why. On Desktop, zero issues. Works like a charm.
Being able to cast seamlessly from Chrome to Chromecast is the only major issue I’ve had since switching to Firefox. It’s possible with Firefox and it works 99% of the time but it feels a little clunky. Completely worth it though overall and not a dealbreaker
How do you cast from Firefox?
Search up the fx_cast extension
Its cool well just message the maintainers of Android to improve it, I’m sure it’s a mistake. Lemme go check who who’s behind it… /s
Because I use chrome for standard use and Firefox for sailing the high seas. And I much prefer just having 2 separate browsers for containerization. I’m just going to have to use librewolf or something when I do get the the mv3 update.
Why not just use something like Fences on Firefox? It allows you to containerize individual tabs. I use it all the time to separate work and personal accounts.
This is also how I have it set up, with “firefox multi-account containers” and “simple tab groups” working together, you can have multiple containerized accounts within one firefox instance. Works great!
Does this allow you enable/disable add-ons on a per container basis? What about bookmarks?
Use chrome to download Firefox.
I didn’t even need a browser to download another browser, I just git clone it from the AUR :P
Just curl it from Mozilla, they provide an archive file that’s distro agnostic.
That’s Edge’s job. Though I guess they’re basically the same thing…
Equally fkin useless.
I wish I had a 1.0 version of netscape saved somewhere so I could use it.
Back in the day when I still used windows, I did not even use IE to download Firefox. I used the FTP functionality inside the explorer to download Firefox from the Mozilla FTP.
I wonder if this leaves Chrome users susceptible to ads that load malware, which has been a problem for the last decade, and a driver of adblocking extension development. You can get spyware and worms from Forbes, for instance.
Adblocking is not just a matter of a cleaner internet experience, but also of good internet hygiene
Google says Manifest v3 is being done “for security reasons” but what they don’t say is that it’s not for your security.
It’s a Judge Dredd situation.
Google is vertically integrating the roles of content provider (ads) and content server so that web pages load exactly the way the page’s developer expects them to. This necessarily excludes things that selectively filter content, like blockers.
They’re essentially taking an open framefork for the web and replacing it with interactive pdfs, that show exactly what the web developer wants, and collects exactly the information the developer wants to know about you.
If you think you should have more control, use Firefox. Anyone using Chrome is complict at this point.
Oh yeah, I have a feeling we’re about to see 2000s level bullshit on computers/phones again.
The majority of people already don’t use ad blockers though. The Chrome Web Store says that 34 million people use (used?) uBlock Origin, while it’s estimated that around 3.3 billion people use Chrome. If those numbers are correct, only around 1% of Chrome users use uBlock Origin.
I feel sorry for that 3.26 billion people, most of whom have to deal with ads, spyware and malware.
its not just ads and malware, and its not only about beeing sorry for them. ads are also manipulating how people think. not only the obvious things like “that product is good”, but also that products in general would help (with problems you didn’t have). and the format itself of ads (even without considering its contents) already has a changing effects on the minds of those who watch it. i am thinking of some parts of neil postmans thoughts about television back then and i guess there is plenty of possibilities to make a realistic conspiracy theory out of it why exactly the most poisonous parts of television are replicated to the internet with massive force even though everyone ignores ads in the net. i like theories
unfortunately, feeling sorry for them does not help society to stability. 😥
What’s the alternative to ads, though? Not everyone wants to (or can afford to) pay for every site they use.
What’s the alternative to ads, though? Not everyone wants to (or can afford to) pay for every site they use.
its not about paying for the site a user uses, its about paying those who run the site (and less to pay for someone only “managing” the site by doing actually nothing)
maybe these could be alternatives:
- patreon
flattr- micropayment in general
- donations (somafm runs on donations)
- link to shopping platforms (musicians on somafm mostly have links to the songs on amazon that you see while playing the song for free)
- communities, like FSF, local groups
- some small payed supporter part (like lwn.net) while the important stuff that makes the win-win of the site is free to use
- maybe the list from this page can help too: https://kinsta.com/de/blog/patreon-alternativen/
Kickstarter Indiegogo Podia Sellfy Buy Me a Coffee Memberful Hypage Ko-fi Substack Kajabi Gumroad WooCommerce Mighty Networks MemberPress Uscreen
maybe even a combination of multiple of those *whoa!!! mindblow!!! could be a good choice to allow usersvto choose how to contribute.
so really only choosing to offer exactly one option that also puts all users at a real risk of real attacks where they can get ripped off of all or lots of their real money and data for the sake if earning 0.003 ¢ per each putting them at high risk is not really what should be done, or do you personally profit from their users high risk and are thus completely okay with it? hope not.
if you have to earn money with your project or whatever, why not offer several options to choose from? why only one? and while we’re at it, offering an ad-free “membership” for 400 times the price of what they would earn by the same visitor with ads like they try here sometimes, does not make any platform look good, but the opposite.
there are many platforms that i would pay for monthly and i would spend much more money alltogether than now on that if their price would not be artificially pushed into astronomically heights per service…
there is one project where i do donate each month a little bit via recurring bank transfer since years. my transfer says the name of the project and “donation” thats pretty easy to setup for both sides, but too complicated for those who pay designers money so they can place the ad layers on top of the 400 other layers of spypixels and navigation controls… really ? lol*
if those you are talking about cannot afford to have a bank account for some reason, i guess they also cannot receive the revenue of ads on their webpages ;+)
saying there are no alternatives to ads is rather a candidate for the lamest excuse award ;-)
What’s the alternative to ads, though? Not everyone wants to (or can afford to) pay for every site they use.
Ublock origin isn’t the only ad blocker out there. If you like Ublock origin, use Ublock origin lite. It’s fully V3 compliant.
Not so effective against the likes of YouTube allegedly.
I wonder if we trained an AI on the entire corpus of articles about how Google is gonna kill adblocking, if we could keep these articles going after most people switch uneventfully over to Lite.
Simple solution. Don’t use Chrome.
Ive been testing out ungoogled chrome with uBlock, and it still seems to be working. But I think I’m going to add Waterfox along side of my Firefox to look at that one also.
But I’m also not sure you can install uBlock anymore from the Chrome repository either.
Not sure about the repo route, never went that deep with Chrome. Firefox has always been my mainstay (and Netscape before it.)
In case anyone here needs this
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-chrome-firefox
There’s an easy fix for this. 🔥🦊
