I switched this week.

I use firefox as my sidearm browser on my work computer, but I literally just made it the default on my personal computer

Firefox is awesome now. It was great, then it lost out a bit to chrome, but it’s back to being awesome. If anyone’s reading this and isn’t using Firefox, please switch!

And importantly, their import mechanisms are great. A typical user can switch with basically no effort. Next time they ask you for help, switch your parents too, and your siblings, and that neighbour who keeps referring to the internet as “the google”. Set them up with Firefox and ublock origin and they’ll be set.

I’d solely use Firefox if jetbrains had better JS debugging support for it.

So for now I use edge for that at work.

Also I really like the tab sleep and vertical tabs features on Edge.

But everything is Firefox on my personal machines

We must plunder the treasure so no one else can have it!

Oh, wait

The web is not the whole internet. Plus isn’t you being here prove that the internet is resilient?

Safari won’t care as it benefits them and their ecosystem to have device checks.

Apparently Apple already rolled it out in a previous update, they just didn’t call any attention to it.

I just hope that google won’t try to lobby for this API like disney does for copyright changes

I’m hoping the average user will be sufficient annoyed by the lack of adblocking to finally give a shit.

“It’s in our interest to make the Internet better and without competition we have stagnation”. From the Google Chrome comic book.

Being fair to Chrome (which I hate doing but there is a point), they got in when more tech-people online saw them as pushing so many things forward. Was functionally faster than IE for sure, but also Firefox got stuck on their 4.0 limbo and being heavy in memory usage. Though I think the issue with memory usage also came from having almost a decade of so many extensions. Chrome was also slightly simpler than Firefox (imo even though my primary browser is and has been since before 1.5). Pair that with Google also then becoming the only (in market share) real competition to Apple’s ecosystem on Smartphones.

The best way to start taking down Chrome’s massive control over web standards is to do the same things as when IE was the default name people knew. Start using Firefox and get others to try it again or for the first time. Since so many people would trick their parents into using Chrome by changing the name and icon to IE. Most older folks kind of don’t even notice, and just think and “update” changed the look a bit. But as long as it works, they will just use it. In fact this can apply to a lot of the general public in actually scary ways. Back in the day with IE and those stacks and stacks of toolbars that I saw on almost every PC I worked on for people. I would just start removing them while they told me about why they were in (which was often caused by but not seen as to them as the issue). They would see me just OCD getting rid of them and would be shocked, and I do truly mean shocked, that those things weren’t just “part of the browser and never questioned them being there.”

Now that Chrome and Chromium are the main browser and browser base. I see soooo many BS Chromium browsers just get installed via the same kinds of tactics as the old toolbars. Even set themselves to both launch at every reboot, set themselves to always be able to run in the background, AND set themselves as the system default browser. Sometimes there may be multiple all doing the same things, but also have been made into desktop toolbars/docks of sorts. And that same shit is done by the super annoying ones skinned by the AV companies (AVG, Avast, CCleaner, and now even mainline Norton). And the person just thinks they are just part of Windows, but they only even came in because they “started having issues with wifi” or even a broken Windows update that wasn’t related.

That shit should really really get more attention in general. With so many fake things just being ignored, it means that the mass public will just never know or care about Google turning the internet into whatever it wants. Just not even know that they had actual options before they are removed. If it wouldn’t piss off the massive amount of companies that do ad business with Google. I wouldn’t be shocked if they turned ad blocking into a “premium feature” to subscribe to monthly.

I personally install Firefox as the non-Edge option when setting up someone’s new PC (so long as they didn’t specify Chrome) so they might at least try it. I never set it as the default, and will remove it if they want it gone when picking up the PC. Also do try to let some of them that ask about Chrome know that Edge is 100% compatible for their sites that mention Chrome. Which they at least then tend to be like “oh, well then I guess don’t worry about installing Chrome then.” No real pressure is put on them, just information, though Microsoft is making it hard with all the wild “HEY TRY THIS FEATURE!” pop-ups and that damn pointless desktop search bar.

slowly switching to firefox here

Same as with IE in the past. A little better with most of the source being open but not much. I wonder how we could solve this issue since people obviously don’t care.

Example Firefox: As it is Google is funding Mozilla to make it seem that there is competition. I don’t know if I want firefox to get bigger just enough so Google cuts their funding and it disappears. If so many people want to use spyware let them, so we can have the goodies.

I think we need to try to get Firefox’s user base up fast (and the user base for other browsers that are ultimately controlled by non-profits) - if non-commercial browsers dominate or even have 30+% market share, if they say no to something bad for users and the open web, it doesn’t happen. While non-commercial browsers are a small minority, if they say no, services that work everywhere else follow Google / Apple and consider breaking Firefox acceptable collateral damage, and then Firefox etc… becomes an ever smaller minority, so they get forced into things like this.

The trouble is FAANG get advantage by posing an insidious threat - they treat users well when they are trying to gain market share, and invest heavily and maybe briefly offer a superior user respecting product. But when they get the market share to give them the leverage, the switch part of bait-and-switch comes out, and we see them try to take down the open web to cement their position against the non-profits, and make their browsers inferior for users to bump up revenue (enshitification, to borrow a term from Cory Doctorow).

welp, who isnt on firefox might want to start using it now.

It’s a little slower and a little more broken and a little less compatible, but its not google’s.

wiping_tears_with_money.gif

It’s already supported 👍 Sponsorblock too.

I don’t follow.

The first line of the comment is: “Mozilla opposes this proposal because it contradicts our principles and vision for the Web.”

And the proposal is called: “Web Environment Integrity API”