Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome
arstechnica.com
Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a “topic” list it shares with advertisers.

Google is now rolling out a system where Chrome directly tracks your activity and shares its summary with advertisers.

Also Firefox is faster as of like two months ago.

It takes five minutes to switch browsers, and the difference is so little that you’ll often forget you did it.

  • raven [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    52·
    1 year ago

    Using chromium, ungoogled chromium, brave (reactionary baggage), vivaldi, opera, etc is not good enough. We must switch to Firefox specifically.

    All the Chrome forks I mentioned above use the same chrome rendering engine, called blink. When you use blink you’re helping google take over the web. Firefox is already on the shitlist of every major website because they refuse to prevent the user from installing things like adblockers and privacy extensions like Chrome does with manifest v3 and soon with their new Web Environment Integrity system. They cannot wait to throw up a “your browser is no longer supported :(” page for all Firefox users, and when that happens it will be over for our fox friend.

    • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      49·
      1 year ago

      They cannot wait to throw up a “your browser is no longer supported :(” page for all Firefox users, and when that happens it will be over for our fox friend.

      Whenever you see a site that does this, or a site that works on Chrome but not Firefox, report it at webcompat.com. Doing that will create an issue in github.com/webcompat/web-bugs.

      For sites that are intentionally blocking Firefox users, Mozilla adds interventions or user agent overrides for those specific pages or scripts (go to about:compat in Firefox to see a list of them) to make it work with Firefox, even on sites trying to block Firefox.

    • Clever_Clover [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Honestly, manifest v3 can’t come soon enough, the enshitification of chrome would mean more people moving to Firefox, so, I think it would be a good thing to force all chrome users to look at ads, simply to give them a ‘real’ (since privacy isn’t annoying or something you feel with every page you click) reason to switch

  • albigu@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    Not sure if this Chrome thing also applies to mobile, but this is as good time as any to remind people that you can now install uBlock Origin (and many other useful extensions) on the android firefox app.

  • xXthrowawayXx [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    it’s always been time to stop using chrome.

    ungoogled chromium isnt good enough either. if you want to get away from topics you need to be using firefox or safari based browsers.

  • ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    1 year ago

    To the people saying chromium is fine, do you know what Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (EEE) is? Maybe you’ve heard of it in passing, but don’t really know what it is.

    The web is built on standards, which is supposed to mean that no one entity dictates how the internet works. Microsoft pioneered the EEE strategy in the 90’s in an attempt to kill off HTML and replace it a proprietary alternative. This was brought to light during an antitrust trial against Microsoft. It is literally a strategy designed to centralize commonly held standards into the hands of a single corporation.

    When you see a popular product created by a corporation which offers a stripped down open source alternative, understand the end goal is to monopolize that product niche and encircle all the labor contained within the commons to enshittify the product (start offering subscriptions, selling ad data, putting more and more features behind a paywall, etc).

    This applies to Chrome and Chromium. It also applies to VS Code (Copilot seems to be the Killer Feature they’re attempting to do this with right now). But when a website works on Chromium but not on Firefox, it is almost always because Firefox is not implementing features which haven’t been ratified as web standards yet.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    If a simply migrate tool existed that could preserve everyone’s bookmarks, saved passwords, saved banking details, settings, etc and transfer them to firefox or other browsers it would be significantly easier to get people to move.

    The biggest blockade I am seeing in getting people to move is not their love of google, it is the stickyness that having all of their shit built up in the browser causes. A simple and easy to migrate method would get people off it.

    • dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      Chrome reading list is just a knock off of pocket which Mozilla owns and is integrated into Firefox.

  • very_poggers_gay [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    i just got a new laptop and it came with firefox installed on it, but i couldn’t really figure out its features. on chrome i like having different profiles with their own histories, bookmarks, appearances, accounts/passwords, etc… I couldn’t work that out in firefox.

    I’ve seen lots of people say it’s an easy switch, but my ass could not do it sad-boi

  • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    I am a vim gremlin. I use qutebrowser, which is ultimately chromium-based, because I cannot find any reasonable way to do vim bindings for Firefox. Tridactyl, the most featureful and mature vim binding extension for Firefox, shits out if Firefox hasn’t loaded a webpage.

    Is there any Firefox fork that is keyboard driven like qutebrowser? I don’t see how it could be accomplished without a fork or patchset, as the WebExtension API simply has too many restrictions for a proper input method.

      • dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        Accessibility for people who have a hard time regularly switching between their keyboard and mouse is not a spacebar heating like reason.

      • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        If it were, there would be a functional Firefox alternative that I’m unaware of. You don’t seem to know of one either. The moment such a fork exists I’ll switch, but my wrists are too fucked up to use a mouse constantly.

          • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            4·
            1 year ago

            Webkit implementation is unmaintained and insecure, developer recommends against it. The comic is about users or developers relying on buggy or otherwise bad behavior for bad reasons - ie, extension developers mad about Firefox switching to a far more secure framework for extensions when their own extension is totally possible to implement without being able to monitor all web activity without even notifying the user, because they got used to doing it a bad way that is no longer possible. That’s not really comparable to Firefox just lacking an accessibility option.

            Trust me, I miss using proper extensions and not just greasemonkey scripts, I’ve wanted such a fork for years, but the only other reasonable alternative is Vieb which is fucking Electron based.