How many times has this been announced already?
Yes
Think of it as an iceberg & Chrome users as a boat.
Assuming no changes, this is landing in Chrome Canary now, so we’re watching the Chrome Canary boat hit the iceberg. The Chrome Beta boat is going to hit in a few weeks. Finally the Chrome Stable boat is scheduled to hit in mid November.
Now Google may choose to hold back actually enabling this flag immediately. It wouldn’t be the first delay. But likely in mid November is when all the posts will start to appear of people asking where their ad blocker went.
(Although I’m guessing it actually is delayed until after the holidays and in the new year, but that’s just wild speculation.)
Are Opera and it’s derivatives affected by this?
Not this with built-in adblockers, despite someone’s wishes.
Their adblockers suck though, especially on youtube
Why would you use a Chinese browser?
I don’t?
My friends do though sadly
what does the browser being Chinese have to do with anything?
You really don’t see a problem installing software from an authoritarian regime that spies on basically everyone and everything and has 0 privacy protection?
Are you talking about America lol
Shit Tankies say.
the chinese government isn’t making every software that’s made in china lol
like yea, opera is spyware, but so are chrome, safari and edge, and none of these are made in china
If you think the Chinese regime isn’t using Opera as a potential attack vector then that’s just naive. Browsers are very critical pieces of software infrastructure.
opera sure, but at that point, any proprietary software can be used as an attack vector by the government of the country the software is made in, that’s not specific to china
i don’t see why chrome or safari should be considered more trustworthy than opera just because they aren’t made in china
You really don’t see the difference between a flawed democracy with laws and regulations and an authoritarian regime? Tankie talk much?
imagine opera and opera gx 💀
Yes. There’s only 3 major browsers. Chromium (Chrome), Firefox, WebKit (Safari). Nearly every other webbrowser is a fork of one of these, most are forks of Chromium, including Opera. As such, most webbrowsers will be affected by the change.
Good, hopefully I can convince my friends to switch over
What’s duck duck go’s browser?
Chromium.
DuckDuckGo’s webbrowser is somewhat unique, in the sense that it isn’t its own browser at all. It’s a “WebView”, using the OS built-in webbrowser with a coat of paint.
This means it’s Blink/Chromium on Android and Windows, and WebKit on iOS and macOS.
depends on the OS!
DuckDuckGo uses the default rendering engine of whatever OS you use it on, so webkit (also used by safari) on macOS and iOS and blink (also used by edge and chrome) on windows and android
even if it uses the same rendering engine on some platforms, it’s not based on chromium, so it’s not a chromium browser
Chrome browser = chromium plus Google
Samsung browser = chromium plus garbage
Brave browser = chromium plus crypto and homophobia
Should probably add this info about Mozilla funding almost exclusively from Google but at least they haven’t disabled mv2 extensions yet. Even though they put in a fucking opt-out ad telemetry setting in recent releases.
I don’t think it should’ve been opt-out, but Mozilla’s ad metrics development is very much the direction ads on the web should go in. It is impossible to determine who you are from the data. It’s a way to still have ad revenue funding the content we all consume, while also still maintaining privacy. It’s a good thing. It’s just the opt-out aspect for existing installs that’s bad.
That said, I’m personally a proponent of just using adblock lol
I also use adblocking at multiple levels so it wasn’t a huge thing for me (been blocking Pocket and other bullshit for years at the dns and network levels) but I still feel like Mozilla witnessed Google going for broke with killing mv2 and inline ads on YouTube and decided wellll our existing users probably wouldn’t notice or care if we slipped in an opt-out fuckery… But we did. Immediately.
For any browser trying to sell itself as “the only privacy browser on the market” this was a dumb fucking move by any metric. Like why not just openly admit we’re going with the Brave browser model?
Is Chrome’s ad telemetry opt-in?
No it’s not. But if we’re hoping Firefox will be better in some way we’d expect more from them. Wouldn’t we?
Brave browser = chromium plus crypto and homophobia
the crypto stuff can be opt out tho
And yet, the homophobia can’t be
i didnt mention the homophobia bcs it was unrelated to what i was saying
Didn’t see this coming. Thanks for reporting it 😁
It did its job then. Gave warning.
🐥⛏️
“I’ve got the black lung papa.” cough
-Chrome Canary
Ad Lung
coughs up product placements
also coughs up scams and malware
shrugs in Firefox
Careful, there are some edgy people out there who don’t want to use more than one browser because Firefox doesn’t work with their cameras /s
Meanwhile, I’ll still be using Firefox too
Who needs to give their browser access to their camera?
It’s so frustratingly annoying. I primarily use Firefox, but switch to Chrome for specific Google services on my mobile. Once in a while, the search suggests I take a photo? Why?
Y’all got any more of that data?
/Google
I do this with Discord and Zoom as an alternative to installing their actual apps. 99% of the functionality is there anyway, and the 1% is stuff I don’t want anyway
I use MS teams for meetings every day at work, in Firefox, in Linux. It’s nice that even the camera works when I need it to.
People who use Webex, zoom, etc for one use in try browser and don’t normally use those links. Happens at work when an outside vendor doesn’t use what we do.
People who have to use their browser for telehealth and virtual teller banking access.
Sadly these are also things that require better security.
Yup. Firefox doesn’t work for me unfortunately, so I have to maintain Chrome on at least one device for these things
Hey, member when you always had to have IE for one of “those” sites and it was basically just an awful browser everyone was forced to have like as a legal requirement or something?
Heh. IE. Then when you’d use it to download firefox it’d say “Nooooo! Wait! I’m teh Best Browser!!” Hahahahah
IE. Ded.
I use Firefox for some teleconferencing, but my therapist’s software only works on chrome
Does it have to be Chrome, or just e.g. Chromium is fine?
May be bad phrasing, but Firefox doesn’t support h.265 so there’s limitations with streaming video on some camera platforms and other sites.
TIL Firefox doesn’t support HEVC. Hadn’t really noticed that before, I guess it’s why some Jellyfin streams started transcoding for me.
I guess it’s why some Jellyfin streams started transcoding for me.
You’re better off using the Jellyfin Media Player standalone application anyway.
Neither does it support HDR content
It is supported in the nightly build and full support is in the works currently.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/hevc-support/idc-p/63424/highlight/true#M36557
Why not LibreWolf? It’s Firefox without Mozilla’s BS.
You say that like they didn’t just remove several other adblock extensions themselves
The one they removed isn’t relevant until Firefox also removes manifest V2 which they have no plans for.
Firefox has a different manifest v3 that still retains webrequest functionality, so even when they do switch over it’ll be fine.
From what I’ve heard, they only “removed” uBlock Origin Lite. Normal uBO is still up.
Actually, they flagged UBO Lite and the dev removed it himself in a fit of pique.
and they only flagged it because it violated privacy rules
No. It didn’t. That’s why he was upset. Mozilla even admit this. Did you read the article or what?
“Mozilla later admitted in an email that they had made a mistake regarding the extension, but Hill has ultimately decided to cease development of the uBlock Origin Lite add-on for Firefox.”
shrugs in books
They have no idea how stubborn I am.
No they didn’t.
They’re still there. Ublock origin is the god-tier adblock, and it’s still there. It’s even a Recommended by Mozilla extension.
I think people don’t hate Mozilla, they want them to do better as there are not many options left if you care about privacy. It’d just be nice to not have to pick the lesser evil for once.
And they are doing better. Making ads private is a very good thing. They’re currently a privacy nightmare.
They are not making ads private, they are adding another tracking vector. This will not get rid of the other ones already there.
No they weren’t. Clearly you don’t know how this system works.
It is impossible to track anybody using this.
You are getting angry at Mozilla for making something that enables privacy, then getting angry at them again because they aren’t dictators of the web who can control everybody’s and networks.
PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.
So, let’s say I trust in everything they are saying, which is the absolute best case scenario, then they have done nothing for privacy, because the whole premise that ad networks only care about ex-post measuring the effectiveness of their ads is false. They could have done that long before.
They want to know who you are and what you do so they can sort you in categories and show you specific ads based on those. That’s the service ad networks sell to advertisers. So, tracking as usual will continue.
I don’t think Lemmy users hate Firefox. I feel like alot of it is either people who legitimately have whatever needs they have, fulfilled by chrome more than firefox, or…it’s fucking astroturfers/fanboys.
Edit Addendum: Also, if anything, Lemmy users fucking love Firefox.
I don’t mean all Lemmy users. I mean a surprisingly large amount that non-stop hate on Mozilla and Firefox.
I’ve even seen two users that hate Mozilla/Firefox so much that they wrote about it in their account bio, which I find crazy.
Mozilla have made a series of unpopular choices, especially their enabling of telemetry for advertisers that does nothing to benefit users.
It is no surprise some people are vocally unhappy.
Private ads that make user tracking impossible absolutely benefits users, and the ad industry would be a lot less of a cancerous cesspit if it were the norm.
It’s certainly been unpopular, but that’s more because most people on Lemmy don’t read past ragebait headlines and assume the worst.
There is no reason to trust Mozilla more with your data than anybody else.
It’s just another source of telemetry for advertisers and won’t stop any of the existing methods of tracking.
Except they didn’t… If you read more than headlines
I used to recommend uBlock as a no-brainer, now folks really need to change towards a better browser.
Or get network wide blocking. Doesn’t prevent everything but it does prevent most ads. Makes the internet tolerable at least.
nah, lets get them switched away from chromium based spy machines.
Not everyone can. Work machines for instance.
Depends on how lax the IT department is when it comes to random executables. I was able to move the firefox installer to the appdata root, and run a non-admin install to my user profile.
sadly, agreed. mindshare leads to adoption, tho - so putting Firefox in front of more faces is always a positive. after all, its how google dominates.
Can’t install extensions on a work machine but you can add a network wide blocker?
Possibly, if you work from home
Wouldn’t a company VPN bypass all that even though you are using your own internet connection to connect to the outside world?
Typically yes, assuming that the company VPN sets DNS to a set of company DNS servers. That is how my company’s works and several others I’ve worked for in the past.
Maybe, I guess I don’t know enough to answer that. I do know that being on a company VPN isn’t always a requirement, though.
Either way, I’m not trying to argue for one approach to ad blocking over another as a one-size-fits-all solution, I just wanted to point out that it’s possible to have more control over the network than the computer in some cases.
Something like NextDNS as a no-brainer? It works but hits the limit of the free tier if people use it beyond their phone.
PiHole and a TailScale exit node so you can use it for DNS whether or not you’re on your home network.
Or a variation of this is TailScale configured to use NextDNS and a TS exit node. That’s for anyone who doesn’t want to maintain a PiHole. I’ve done both. Personal choice.
ControlD then.
Pihole is good for a private network, but you can forget it in a work setting, especially corporate networks.
Great day to be a firefox user!
Wtf is Chrome Canary?
Chrome Canary, the pre-beta release version with the most far-out feature set
I see. So the beta version got the the “feature” later than the production version? Google really is in great hands.
Thanks!
We’ve known this was coming for a while now . . . but I suppose not everyone reads tech news.
I mean… Even if everyone knows it’s coming, you still need to have notice when it actually happens right?
one might say that this piece of news is the… canary… in the coal mine?
Lmao get rekt, I’m on a gecko based browser.
Hoping that Vivaldi is going to hold off somehow - perhaps with their built-in ad blocker. And before you say “switch to Firefox”, I’ll say I’m not gonna, at least not until I see native mouse gestures implemented and working everywhere.
I made the switch from Vivaldi back to Firefox recently. I loved Vivaldi, but I’m happy with Firefox too.
Fair enough. All I’m saying is that mouse gestures are so much ingrained in my muscle memory that their absence in native capacity (and reliance on extensions for that) is a show-stopper for me.
I get it. Date your distro, marry your browser.
I miss the level of customization you could do in Vivaldi, down to minute details. But I don’t miss it enough to put up with ads and tracking nonsense.
I started on Firefox back when it was a beta called Phoenix. I eventually moved to chromium based browsers like the rest of the world, but now I’m back. I’ve come full circle!
Maybe we’re thinking about this wrong. Maybe we should all start running plugins that just load whatever ads that show up in the background hundreds of times without showing them to us. Every viewer is thousands upon thousands of impressions and click through rates become absolutely miserable. We can make the ads worthless or maybe even make them cost a significant amount of money to host.
AdNauseam does this to a lesser degree. I’m not sure how effective it is.
It’s mildly effective in the sense that it will decimate click-through rates, but if enough people did it, they would start filtering by IP, and you’d need to change how many ads it clicks on so it looks more human.
It also still gives advertisers your data, since it still has to load the ads on your system to click them, so it’s not as privacy-preserving as a full-on adblocker that outright blocks every advertisement and tracker related network request in the first place.
Yeah, I don’t want to use it because I don’t want them to get some weird over fitted model of my behavior.
I thought they already killed it? They keep killing it multiple times.
Yeah I heard it was permanently removed like a month ago. Still working for me.
Been using Firefox for quite a time now! What are the other alternatives?
Brave, Librewolf (didn’t test yet)
Ladybird is working really hard to become good enough for daily drive. Will they succeed? Idk. How long will it take? Idk.
Is that Firefox alternative?
It’s a new browser being built from scratch.
Not right now.
Looks like time to find a new browser!
May I interest you in browsers based on FireFox?
why not Firefox itself?
Vanilla firefox needs to be hardened, either manually or with arkenfox
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
True. But not like stock Firefox is “good” either.
Someone who repackages/patches free software has different incentives than upstream. So generally speaking, derivative browsers are more privacy friendly, have better features, etc.
That’s not to say that upstream isn’t important. It absolutely is! It’s just that derivatives are generally better.
I’ve looked at one or two variants but how do I trust them? They are also forked from some previous version so presumably somewhat out of date? And then also it’s not clear what they are doing what firefox isn’t.
Trust is a tough problem when you go deep enough down the IT security rabbit hole. I personally trust software more when it has a public github you can look at and see exactly whats being worked on or added to code base. Generally forks of browsers like Firefox or Chromium like to stay up to date and so are updated within a few days of the new browser release if not shorter. There are some older browsers like palemoon that do their own thing independent of current firefox releases but in general most forks you would want to use are regularly updated and fast.
I like Librewolf. Their website is pretty clear about the differences in goals. Firefox by default has a lot of its security features disabled so to not break website compatability. Not just in regular settings either but the real nitty gritty stuff in the about:config section. Firefox also has sponsorship stuff activated by default so mozilla makes some money. Librewolf has more of these security features enabled and rips the sponsorship stuff out. It also comes preinstalled with UBO.
You can go even further beyond with advanced security profiles like arkenfox’s user.js. Remember though theres a trade off you are making between security and convinence. The more locked down your browser the more things are gonna break or more personal inconvinence youll have to deal with. Cookies that last multiple sessions suck for security but damn logging in over and over and over gets annoying. So I’ve been there, i’ve done that. The pain in the ass that comes from a super locked down browser wasn’t worth it for my threat model.
Oh I didn’t even mean trust as in maliciousness, and not even as in “do they know their shit” but do they have the time and money to do things right? And also do I have time to read and learn what all this is supposed to mean?
And the inconvenience with VPNs alone… What I really want is a kind of universal addon or browser project that just “cleans up most websites”. So many websites have bad behavior now and anti-features. I just want to read an article not get a slide in or blinky thing. Internet is becoming unusable even before the dead internet thing. Ironically for such a “website cleanup” you’d probably want advanced AI so Mozilla is probably on the right track.
I see what you mean. The best defense against website crap at the moment is Ublock Origin addon which is why chrome killing it was such a big deal for people. A tool I really like to use when browsing online articles to cut out crap is newswaffle. It gets all the text of the article while cutting out everything else. Its open source and I have had email conversations with the dude who made it hes a great guy. I recommend you check it out if that sounds like something you want in your life.
I suspect this will soon be followed by a renewed effort by google to kill firefox compatability.
So you will need to have a backup browser to use only Google services and everything but Google search blocked in ff
Its not google services i worry about ive pretty much degoogled everything i can. Its the google bits so deeply embedded into almost every website across the internet. If they implemented some tpm bs into chrome that somehow Verity’s itself with tpm and google servers before it loads anything then that instantly makes a majority of websites juat not work on ff with no fixes backdoors or bypasses. They will try, we have little hope in stopping it, and most people wont even notice let alone give a fuck.
Have you looked at the market share of Firefox lately? Why even waste time on that?
Because this is likely to drive a lot of people to try switching. And they’re the type of people who try to convince other people to switch, too. Techies, etc.
When forced with trying to keep family safe from abusive and/or manipulative ads, this is a pretty hot topic. Plenty of people tell their family what browser to use and even set it up for them with ad blockers, etc.
I’ve recently had some experiences that tell me my parents are at a vulnerable age and can’t fully protect themselves, so it’s pretty important to have control of this.
A slight misunderstanding, perhaps. I meant why should Google try, as right now Firefox is no threat to them.
