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
    10·
    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
      11·
      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
      1·
      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

  • bennypr0fane@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    NOW you think it’s time to stop using Chrome? How about a decade ago? Ideally, when a gigantic, publicly owned monopolist makes stuff, you never even start using it.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    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.

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

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

  • Capricorn [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    I don’t use Firefox because it’s slow on Android. I use Vivaldi. Not fully Open Source but still good with privacy and actually kind of easy to check thay’re not fooling the users. Plus, it has a bunch of features I really like, such as nested tabs, workspaces, and full sync of almost everything

  • albigu@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    1·
    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.