Clearly, Google is serious about trying to oust ad blockers from its browser, or at least those extensions with fuller (V2) levels of functionality. One of the crucial twists with V3 is that it prevents the use of remotely hosted code – as a security measure – but this also means ad blockers can’t update their filter lists without going through Google’s review process. What does that mean? Way slower updates for said filters, which hampers the ability of the ad-blocking extension to keep up with the necessary changes to stay effective.
(This isn’t just about browsers, either, as the war on advert dodgers extends to YouTube, too, as we’ve seen in recent months).
At any rate, Google is playing with fire here somewhat – or Firefox, perhaps we should say – as this may be the shove some folks need to get them considering another of the best web browsers out there aside from Chrome. Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has vowed to maintain support for V2 extensions, while introducing support for V3 alongside to give folks a choice (now there’s a radical idea).
While this will drive some users to Firefox, we all know it won’t be enough. Too many people simple don’t know, or don’t care, it won’t affect their lives in any meaningful way, or so they will believe. Google will be harming the tech illiterate and normies (sorry for the slur) because money, bullshit, and to drive the stake deeper into the monopoly. If you have older family members using chrome, sit them down and explain to them the dangers of the internet without adblock.
If you have older family members, you could try just installing Firefox for them and tell them it’s their internet now. This worked for me parents.
It gets me thinking. Tech literate people are the types to install blockers, and would be the same type of people both motivated and knowledgeable about how to switch browsers. On the line of thinking it seems like it is just going to drive them away from Chrome. Tech illiterate people remain unaffected since they are getting ads anyway.
But then on the other hand, if someone is tech literate then why are they even still using Chrome? Does such a person value whatever advantage Chrome theoretically provides over their ad-blocking?
as a chromium browser user - i’ve been meaning to switch to firefox, and i know it’ll take me maybe a day, but it feels like so much workkkk. In a similar fashion i’ve been meaning to switch to Linux for ages too. I guess it just hasn’t gotten bad enough for me to take action
as long as my adblockers & script blockers work, i’m not forced to upgrade to win11, and win10 still has security updates i don’t think it’s pushing on my discomfort buttons strong enough. I know the day will come, but like with a lot of things in my life - why do something today when i can do it tomorrow?
I use Opera for myself, but I have to use Chrome for work reasons (user profiles for different work areas based on whatever email is being used at the company computer). Thing is, Firefox also lacks the feature that makes me use Opera: speed dial. My Opera starting page is my speed dials, and speed dials are 10x better than just bookmarks, and I wouldn’t want to go through all the trouble of transfering literally hundreds of saved pages to standard bookmarks. But, if ublock fully stops working, guess I’ll have no choice.
That’s some procrastination going on. Sometimes you should force yourself to start doing something for a minute or so and things will eventually change.
I feel you. It’s vey much a convenience thing, and sitting down with something you’re used to.
if that helps, switching browsers is a lot easier than switching your OS. the automatic import brings over most of your data (bookmarks, passwords, history, …), and you only need to handle the addons, if you had any, and the browser settings if you need anything from there
What do you mean “work”? What is it that needs to move?
You just fire up Firefox and start using it. It’ll even scrape your chrome setup to move bookmarks and stuff over.
It’s not an OS. It’s an application.
i don’t use chrome itself. i have a lot of saved things, roughly a million tabs open at every moment, and passwords saved which i do not remember
If you have tabs like that, they’re not “open”. They are crumbs left as you wandered the internet. You’re not going back to them. Do yourself a favour and close them.
It’s like having thousands of unread emails in your inbox. At some point you have to stop kidding yourself you’re going to read them.
This is all mostly automatically transfered over… I don’t know about passwords though
I’m not sure if Firefox pulls passwords when you import your data, but you can manually export passwords from Chrome and import them into Firefox.
There’s extensions to export all your open tabs and then a similar extension to import those tabs and open them as a session in Firefox. Source: I, too, have a million tabs open at every moment, and had to do that to transition myself. Same for exporting/importing passwords.
Chrome devtools and debugger are awesome
~laughs in firefox~
I remember the internet before Google, and how game changing it was to have all of the internet indexed in one place (even if that wasn’t actually quite true back then). If you had asked me 15, 10, even 5 years ago if I would be cheering its downfall and yearning for a return to a simpler, far less centralized internet, I would have called you crazy. And yet here we are.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
It wasn’t hard to foresee. We knew these kind of things could happen. The internet used to be very out spoken about it. That ethos is long gone. What’s equally disappointing is tech nerds selling out for bigger paychecks.
That’s because the OG visionaries of tech are gone, and have been replaced by MBAs and techbros.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not Google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
Hello fellow bird watcher.
Google, fuck you and your ads too:
Agreed, but I don’t understand the point of this image? Am I dumb?
A web extension isn’t going to be that much of a game changer for Firefox. Usage is down, new profile rate is down, concerning financials towards Firefox and this issue has been ongoing for sometime with ublock. This isn’t meant to diss ublock though.
I don’t have much hope for Mozilla attracting more users to make userbase count impact. Hopefully overpaid execs proves my pessimism wrong about my favorite browser.
One of the reasons why I left chomium based browsers even ungoogled chromium (I use chromium alongside firefox but mainly firefox)
There’s no need to wait. Just switch to Firefox now. All the cool kids have already done it.
The cool kids are switching to Librewolf because whatever is happening at Mozilla is increasingly concerning by the day.
Uh-huh. Which uses Mozilla’s renderer. So, all those upstream commits in Libewolf’s code base are coming from where, exactly?
bad changes aren’t really happening in the renderer, are they?
No, but Librewolf and Iceweasel and all the other forks are ultimately wholly dependent on Mozilla and Firefox continuing to exist. If Mozilla techbros themselves into imploding entirely and goes bankrupt, for instance, all of those other fork projects are also by association toast.
I was pretty sure manifest v3 had already happened - but when I knew it was coming, I went ahead and switched ahead of time. Came with the extra bonus that now I’m ad free on mobile too! Mobile websites are absolutely filthy with popovers and 2 sentence paragraphs with an ad between every paragraph. I’m sick of it. And unfortunately I spend so much more time browsing the web from my phone these days than my desktop - so when I swapped on pc to Firefox, it was such a relief to have browser extensions on my phone now too.
Some of us never left.
Some of us switched to Chrome when it was legitimately better, but are back now.
i switched to chrome when I was too young to understand anything, and I’m not even sure if it was better for any extent. have switched back 5+ years ago
people who used Firefox since high school😎😎
suddenly 20 new chromium forks appear
Huh, where’d those come from, I wonder. 🤔
If only banks and government websites moved their asses and stopped mentioning Internet Explorer for one more time…
I still use Chrome on Android, but with the system wide Adguard adblock app. Works great! It even has a Tampermonkey style script injector. It’s my must have Android app next to ReVanced Manager.
I kinda wish for google CEOs and shareholders to die a horrible, painful death :p
They know that’s how peasants feel that’s why they feel zero shame or guilt about fuxking people over. We are not human to them anyway.
I would wager that at least some of them do not confuse effect for cause.
Google has a browser now?
Chrome was started by google
When new fearures added to V3, will Mozilla port it to V2 too?
IIRC, they’ve said they’ll implement V3 to maintain compatibility, but they’ll also continue to maintain V2. You, the extension developer, will not be forced to use V3 if you don’t want to.
educated guess: since firefox is implementing v3 support alongside their v2 extensions, there shouldn’t be any issues running v2 and v3 extensions side by side in the foreseeable future
I think they are wondering if one extension can use both v2 and v3 APIs at once? As in whether v3 APIs will be “backported” to allow v2 extensions to use them
My Chromebook heard about it and a few weeks ago developed a display issue. I’m now looking for a new laptop that allows Firefox browser. It’s kind of funny how things work out.
Wait, a Chromebook won’t let you use any browser other than than Chrome?
Chromebook won’t let you get browser Firefox unless you switch to Linux but not all Chromebook’s are able to get Linux because of hardware. I was one of those people.
