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.

  • YEP [he/him]
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    92 years ago

    Anyone have a good guide to migrate data to Firefox. Things like auto fill bookmarks ect

  • 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.

  • Omegamint [comrade/them, doe/deer]
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    52 years ago

    God they just can’t but ratchet this shit up huh? I finally heard my roommates suggest ditching streaming recently and am hoping moves like this make it easier to migrate people off these platforms. Unfortunately the greatest issue is always ease of use in terms of what people are used to

  • raven [he/him]
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    2 years 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]
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      2 years 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]
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      52 years 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

  • Helmic [he/him]
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    2 years 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.

      • Helmic [he/him]
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        52 years 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.

        • buckykat [none/use name]
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          22 years ago

          Anyway, apparently qutebrowser can optionally use webkit instead of the chromium based qtwebengine so do that I guess.

          • Helmic [he/him]
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            42 years 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

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

  • VernetheJules [they/them]
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    42 years ago

    I switched over and there’s a few things I miss:

    • Profiles: Containers works okay for me but every once in a while it’ll just completely kill a website and then I have to open it in a different window. I know Firefox also has actual profiles which I need to try out but it’s also annoying how those don’t sync (I think?)
    • Offline Google Docs Editing: Huge deal breaker for anyone without consistent internet. Only works on chromium based browsers. Yeah I can kind of work around it but I wouldn’t expect many people to want to go out of their way for this.

    What I love:

    • ublock origin for Android. I wouldn’t switch back without it. I can watch videos on YouTube without ads, and there’s no ads anywhere else either. Absolute game changer.
  • xXthrowawayXx [none/use name]
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    212 years 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.

  • Awoo [she/her]
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    122 years 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.

    • ewichuu [she/her, they/them]
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      82 years ago

      it’s really not that bad, you can export your settings and any firefox-based browser can read them and do most of the things, the worst you’d have to do is reinstalling all your extensions

      but seriously it’s like… a few hours of a single day at max, and in exchange you’ll be so much more private and secure. I recommend LibreWolf for an out-of-the-box privacy browser instead of having to customize tons of firefox settings to be truly private

      • Awoo [she/her]
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        72 years ago

        a few hours of a single day

        Yeah there’s the problem.

        I’m not talking about just me. I’m talking about getting mass migration to occur. The only people you’re going to get to go through anything that takes more than 10-20mins at most are people that REALLLLLLLLLLLLLY care a lot.

        • ewichuu [she/her, they/them]
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          42 years ago

          i dunno, people who don’t see the benefit in switching probably won’t switch even if it is easy, and people who do see the benefit… well if they don’t switch because of a mild inconvenience, i dunno, they probably didn’t actually care

        • rogrodre [none/use name]
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          32 years ago

          I try new browsers all the time and it’s like 5 minutes to switch back and forth between all of the chromium skins and Firefox, and that includes my addon settings, if you don’t have addons it’s literally one button that pops up when you first launch it. People don’t switch because what they have “works” and they don’t really care.

    • stardust [she/her]
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      112 years ago

      Most of this can be easily imported from Chrome to Firefox. Mozilla has a guide on it and it’s pretty easy.

      Settings will have to be redone, but I find that usually is pretty quick