Why Bother With uBlock Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox::Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs.
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That was Internet Explorer 20 years ago and look where we are now.
I personally can’t remember the last time I had issues with a site on Firefox in the last few years since I switched.
The teams web app was borked for me on Firefox at one point. Idk if it’s still like that. Also Google Chat or whatever tf it’s called now disables a bunch of features on Firefox.
Still worth it to switch. 99% of websites work just fine. They basically have to intentionally design sites to not work with FF.
Ah yes wtf is Teams doing!? Some arbitrary features are blocked on Firefox, like you can’t direct call someone but you can be part of a group call 🤪
But I don’t think Microsoft’s online suite is a reference, most of it feels buggy or bloated at best.
Makes sense since the browser microsoft pushes on it’s users is chrome based.
Just spoof the user agent and it works fine.
When I was using Firefox I felt like spoofing user agent was essential to make websites work the way they were supposed to. I could loose some rounded corners here and there but it was still better that some features completely missing
Chrome turning into Internet Explorer was something that I didn’t foresee some years ago.
Heck they have literally done that with Edge lol.
Been using it for years, and the only few times I had issues was due to worthless websites creating artificial obstacles with an “unsupported browser/OS” page or banner rather than something actually breaking for being incompatible.
Discord and spotify web versions don’t work on Firefox for me. On discord in can’t connect to a call and Spotify doesn’t play songs or it takes a long time after pressing play for the song to start playing.
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Interesting. I will have to try discord. I’ve used Spotify with no issues.
Good to know. I’ll try reinstalling Firefox. Both of these work flawlessly on edge for me.
I tried to bring this up as an issue back on Reddit, and I got downvoted into oblivion.
I think sometimes switching your use agent to Chrome can bypass some issues.
So many tech minded people, but at same time, so many of us fail to consider others POV and priorities.
JUST DON’T VISIT THAT WEBSITE! - sure bro, that means i won’t be able to pay the bills this month because the only traditional way of doing this is visiting a physical kiosk at working hour. Did i mention that i gotta work?
Similar with messaging apps.
YOU NEED BETTER FRIENDS LOL - trust me I’ve tried. i also need to send my resume using this app to whoever interviewing me. no, no email. yes, i tried teling that. no, i won’t be that guy preaching about software freedom when all i want is a fucking job.
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There is an addon that does this automatically.
Some pages load weird like a pop-up on mobile that should take over your view window is a side bar instead. Still fully functional but slightly harder to read.
But you know what makes it way harder to read? Ads
I’ve visited pages in Chrome without an ad blocker… Almost unusable, my eyes couldn’t even focus on what I actually needed to do.
I’m not sure if it’s better, or worse, than the cancer that was the dot come era. Pop-ups everywhere. Random fucking toolbars. So many toolbars. A clippy version of a titty dancer if you’re unlucky.
Make sure to only do that temporarily and only if it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise just avoid using said website and look for alternatives.
I keep seeing this sentiment on these posts, often with a suspicious number of up votes that don’t seem to correlate how many up votes everything else in the topic get.
Literally the only place I have EVER seen this issue was a state toll road website, which was using a timezones that didn’t actually exist but chrome added (and documented on the Internet to trick people into using it). A simple email to the website with an explanation and the correct timezones name and the problem was fixed.
Pretty sure a lot of this sentiment is either astroturfing, or people passing on astroturfing trying to be helpful.
Yeah, I’ve been exclusively using Firefox dev edition for the last 2-3 ys. I can’t remember one site not functioning properly apart from the odd visual bug from time to time.
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Give me examples. I’ve been using Firefox exclusively for over ten years and I can recall one website I’ve had to use chrome on. That was draw.io to get shared drawing through a Google drive to work.
For me there are certain sites where the site icon doesn’t show up in my bookmarks. While not world shattering, it can be annoying.
But I keep coming across sites that don’t function properly with it. Is this Firefox’s fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don’t, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.
Reminder for others that they can report to Web Compat
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on desktop I don’t think I ever notice an issue, but on mobile it’s really noticable
It blows my mind how many people do you not understand how essentially useless Chrome is now and how much it has changed.
What I don’t get is that my browser experience is legitimately better overall, I don’t know what was keeping me from switching all these years. Familiarity perhaps.
I had the same reaction. Used to love Firefox with all it’s awesome plugins but it took me soo long to go back to it. I just became so used to Chrome that the switch seemed daunting, although, I’ll admit it took a little while to get comfortable with it again.
Not to mention that Youtube and Chrome are run by the same company.
What about chrome is useless? What makes chrome so useless that a normie would want it to change? In the end both let you browse the internet just fine. from work i use Firefox and at home i had chrome for years. I did not recognise any diffrenses except ram usage and it beeing a Google product. I changed to firefox at home a few months back so it is the same at work and at home. Can’t say it feels any snapier or whatever. For a normie Privacy is no reason to change. They don’t care. Ram, they probably don’t even know what that is. You have to search for new extensions in the mozilla store if the same one you used does not exist there. That is the reason firefox will not dominate Chrome in my opinion. For a normie there is absolutely no reason to change and normies are the majority of people. Some anecdotal story. At work i installed for some colleges Adblockers because the said some of the ads where anoying and after i did in the following months one after another wanted me to deactivate it again because they could not figure out to visit some websites. As i offered them to show them how they could get around it they just denied. “that is to complicated for me.” So yeah. Normies do not care and even worse adblock blockers work.
In my book, nothing changed because I refuse to run anything closed source on MY computer.
Very Stallman of you, unfortunately for many people’s use cases they will want at least proprietary video codecs or drivers. You could even argue using most websites with minified JS is closed source.
Whatever you’re willing to be exterminated for.
Edit: All you fucking morons come here and downvote me but fact of the matter is you will all die and there will be zero reproduction of humanity in far less than a decade from now.
Only Free and Open Source AI Software will save you. Only. But go on, like your vote makes any fucking difference.
Well, that escalated quickly.
You’re missing shit. Like, the fact that you and everyone else will die for ignorance of the only survival possible on this planet being FOSS.
Neither I nor you escalated shit. The patriarchy in its attempt to murder everyone already did that. You’re just ignorant of that and misread that happening here and now.
The… patriarchy.
That was an unexpected addition to your disassociated rants.
Dissociated? Just exactly what do you draw that from? I ain’t chugged in months…lol.
Why’re you so angry over this?
You read emotions in words written down. You a fishing. You are ignorant.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. I’m genuinely curious as to why you’re getting so angry over this, that’s all.
There’s no angry. You’re reading shit. Not observing a person.
there are many reasons to prefer chromium based browsers, security being one of them
am not saying that firefox is inherently bad, but that there are valid reasons to use something else. I know that this is considered a hot take on lemmy but it needs to be said
On balance, though, since most people go almost exclusively to well-known, uncompromised websites that are legitimate and also trying to harvest data, privacy protections are more important. Defend against the attacks you know are happening and all.
Besides, most attacks are social engineering these days, and even the most secure browser on earth won’t defend against that. The recent flurry of high profile YouTube account hijacks was accomplished via malware that stole session tokens from both Chrome and Firefox.
both privacy and security are important and neither one is going to save you from a social engineering attack.
and besides, trusting on your users to only go to well known websites isn’t something you should rely on.
but yeah, I totally get your point
Agreed all around.
Tbf every time is the best time to switch to Firefox
I would gladly if their Android app wasn’t filled with bugs and performance issues on my phone
It’s bad on Android, but is good on desktop
i’ve been on Firefox in the last 8 years. i don’t even know what’s going on in Chrome and other browsers lol.
Same… I don’t understand the appeal of Chrome. I think they used a new java engine like 10 years ago and beat Firefox in a handful of benchmarks, and then Firefox conclusively and irreconcilably trounced Chrome a few months later, never letting up a bit.
I remember when they released Firefox Quantum. Too many tabs was never a problem again.
I mean I tried to download the official minecraft client for debian and was not able to on Firefox.
Microsoft disabled the site on non Chrome browser
This sounded weird to me, so I just tried it. Running Firefox on Kubuntu, I just downloaded it with one click from here.
Well didn’t work for me on debian
user agent switching is fortunately not too difficult to do.
Are you sure? I just tested and after logging in, the option to download the launcher was there (popos/firefox).
Maybe my adblocker is the issue
Just tried it myself and it doesn’t have any issues at all. It seems like it might be an issue with something else on your end.
Though honestly I’d strongly recommend against using the Official launcher as it has been known to introduce bugs and in general has poorer support for mods. I prefer the MultiMC forks like Prism, which don’t have the bugs the official one does.
I wanted sth that is updated by my system and the flatpak I found logged me in as a unsecure user or I had to login at each launch
Remember when Firefox started dealing damage to IE’s insane monopoly, and then Chrome came along and shanked them both?
I hope Chrome finally eats dirt after basically becoming knockoff IE 2.
Literally every new HTTP standard is coming out of Google’s dev team. That is not a good thing.
As long as Chrome was convenient people preferred it. Now that they are showing their true face and squeezing it in favor of being more ad-friendly I hope people realize there are better choices.
Am I the only one concerned Google may try to pull a fast one and block Mozilla from using the Widevine DRM?
Time to boycott widevine and insist websites switch to an open standard … (though honestly good luck with that, Google might very well win that battle)
Not that easy since the W3C mandates everyone use Widevine or something similar. There was such a shitshow over this that the EFF pulled out of the org.
Google has the internet by the danglies via this little whatsit and the W3C can do nothing about it, because Google accounts for a sizable amount of their funding, and dropping Widevine/EME would break everything.
Also, Google could just more simply stop funding Firefox: Mozilla gets a lot of money from Google just to be the default search engine. Then again, maybe Firefox can switch to Bing or Duckduckgo, though I don’t know if those would pay as well as Google.
Google is not funding Firefox only for the search engine being default. Google needs to keep Firefox alive because it is their sole competitor. If Firefox (Mozilla) goes down, Google can be accused for monopoly practices which is something they want to avoid.
I mean, they could also argue that all the Chromium based browsers are not Chrome, and so there is competition (we know how it really is, of course, but they have good lawyers…).
But I’m sure that’s at least part of the reason why they keep funding it.
Chromium comes straight out of Google though. It is not another browser. It is the same engine. They give their engine for free and different companies use it to make their own flavors of the engine of the “Google browser”.
They’re actually increasing the market share of their browser engine by having chromium open source.This is not competition.
Mozilla has good lawyers too.
Yes of course, but I guess they could argue that legally they don’t count as the same browser, because each company using chromium as a base for their browser is adding or changing it as they like.
Someone could, in fact, fork Chromium and bring back support for Manifest V2 extensions, or disable whatever things Google does to block ad blockers (and in fact, I bet someone will).
Nah they don’t. If they had, the whole IE2 debacle would have been over in a court of law.
I’ve never seen any websites use it… btw mozilla kinda abuses widevine by running it in an isolated container (because no one wants proprietary drm software running directly on their machines!)
If you are concerned about things like PWAs like I was, try it out anyway. PWAs require a bit more setup, but are a lot more flexible in Firefox. For example, PWAs with http connections have a huge banner in Chrome, and just an icon in Firefox. Everything I’ve noticed is that firefox is just as snappy as Chrome
I thought PWA’s didn’t work on Firefox. That’s good to know, because I’ve been using chromium specifically for PWA’s.
Same here, I tried the PWAsForFirefox extension a few years back and found the setup to be too much of a pain in the ass compared to the Chromium forks. I tried again around 9-12 months ago when Manifest V3 drama was making the rounds and found the extension had been overhauled and that’s no longer a problem. As a bonus each PWA is a self-contained browser instance, so performance is improved when only the PWA is open, and extensions are per-PWA. So I can run only Purple Adblock on my Twitch PWA, or only uBlock for Youtube, etc.
I’m using them heavily as well. Mostly good. Painful though when moving between computers as you have to set them up on each one. If they can get it to sync eventually that’d be handy.
What PWA do you use? I think they’re a neat idea but I haven’t come up with an actual use case yet.
I just use it for any tab which I always have open, so they’re organised on my taskbar. That way I don’t end up with 40 tabs of like 5 different websites that I just pathologically open up a new tab for each time I revisit, having to scan through them all each time I want to switch to find one from before. That’s an ADHD thing though. Effectively for some websites I want the tab to always be pinned and easily accessible with a large icon for a visual cue, and this way that all happens automatically
Gmail x2. Pulse SMS. Keep. Calendar. Whatsapp, Facebook, Messenger. All as task bar icons.
I used to use Chrome for this but every now and then it’d break and they would either open in the wrong profile, or they’d add a tab to the main browser rather than opening as a window.
Any idea how to get links clicked in a PWA like Google Messages to open in a normal browser tab? I’ve tried nothing.
Go to the PWA settings and enable “Open out-of-scope URLs in a default browser” and restart your PWAs.
Why would I use a PWA on the desktop?
I mainly use them when I want something windowed but without tabs taking up space. Like monitoring my solar panels
Aesthetic and productivity. Which are good reasons.
Let’s say you access your company ERP system through a PWA, or the HR system. You want to alt tab back and forth to it like a regular app. You’re checking supplier data on the web and entering it on the system. It’s a lot easier to do so if your ERP is an app. But if it’s not available as a native app, PWA is a good alternative.
Firefox is my daily driver, but oooh how I miss native tab groups like they have on most chromium browsers right in the tab bar. Extensions like simple tab groups just hit differently and are inferior…
Are there any settings you can tweak in the about:config page? That’s how you have to enable the compact tab size, which is annoying.
I feel you. STG is the best addon I could find, I tried Floorp but it just was not the same thing.
I totally agree. Especially now that you can save the tab groups like bookmarks (experimental flag in chromium)
The people who know what UBO or a firefox even is is the vast minority. Google could single handedly completely fuck over the free internet and a majority still wouldn’t give a fuck as long as they get that sweet sweet one click convinence. The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options. They just want their shit to work, privacy and daddy google violating their basic human rights be damned.
Oh and also some websites make it a huge pain in the ass if you aren’t using chromium. I think its a bit of a conspiracy but could be wrong.
Also stop shilling firefox and start shilling Librewolf
is librewolf on mobile?
Nope only desktop. FF on mobile does have UBO available to install and I hear they are making plans to have all desktop addons be available on mobile at some point. I use kiwi browser for mobile. It is unfortunately chromium based but lets you install all the desktop adds from the chrome store including UBO
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The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options.
Doesn’t this apply to most things? Phones, laptops, desktops…and cars, refrigerators, garage door openers, light bulbs, etc etc
uBlock Origin
It would be nice to spend one day on Lemmy without seeing a half dozen posts telling me to switch to Firefox nor 100 comments on every post that’s even vaguely browser-adjacent about how ever since they switched to Firefox their life has been nothing but joy and rainbows
May I interest about about switching to Arch Linux instead?
I’m using arch and Firefox. But I keep chrome as a backup because I also have a ton of nest devices… Is your mind blown?
If it makes you feel any better (it probably doesn’t), the same article was on reddit too. And hackernews also had it hit the frontpage.
People who are on an open source reddit alternative like open source software and an open internet, holy shit!
I’m using Firefox basically since it came into existence and my life is depressing and sucks. But at least I can browse the web without being tracked so hard by Google and others while trusting on an open source project whose first priorities are its users and not profit.
Start hanging out in different communities.
Make those other posts.
I didn’t switch to anything, I simply never stopped using Firefox as there was no pressing need to do so.
agree, no matter what communities you browse, you just get repeatedly hit over the head with the same 5 topics.
Why settle for less anyway, Firefox all the way
Why settle for less
Because I’m a tool.
It’s a shame that Firefox is still heavily reliant on Google. It’s not chrome but we really do need some competition in this space that doesn’t feed the monster and is also not safari lol.
How does it rely on Google?
funding, mainly.
That’s right. If chrome didn’t suck that much, no one would be funding firefox. Thanks Google!
Oh yeah, good point. Well at least that’s just a deal to set the default search engine. Is there more?
More, as far as I know. Google has to at least keep it afloat, or else be accused of being a monopoly. It’s a small price to pay for them.
Much like Microsoft bailing out Apple back in the day.
Finance an underdog so when someone complains about anti-competitiveness, you can point your finger at them and claim there’s healthy competition.
Something like 90% of Mozilla’s funding comes from Google paying them to make Google the default search engine in Firefox.
I switched from Chrome and it was seamless. After a few weeks I didn’t notice any negative difference.
This “article” is an ad lol
The irony is real
As if Mozilla was profiting from Firefox.
