this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Yay for Firefox
Sounds like they really want people to use Firefox!
They fund Mozilla a ton on purpose. They want a small subset of people to use Firefox. It keeps them from the monopoly investigations
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates
I knew about that. They also pay to be the default search engine on Firefox.
But my joke was that these changes make it seem like they don't want people to use Chrome anymore and switch to Firefox instead. If users knew about this stuff and understood it, Firefox would bounce back.
I have already begun to move from Google services.
Look for other large corporations to continue this trend: offer a product to the masses for free, wait until you have little to no competitors and dominate in market share, then put it behind a pay wall or strongarm changes that most of the population doesn't understand. Oracle did it with Java, knowing most companies were too invested to look for alternatives, and now Google is doing it with their Chrome baked-in privacy changes and ad crackdown.
I expect to see more of this trend from "free" services as the people continue to wake up and take their personal data seriously. We know the government(s) won't do a thing to change the status quo, and I have no idea what else to do other than cry into my ramen and binge watch the death of a planet in 4K!
Unfortunately, the rich keep scarcity high to ensure they not only make the most money, but they can use less money to buy favors from those with less. Man greed sucks...
It’s even more insidious when you look at the shit Amazon does, im almost certain they hyper-aggressively track the popularity of products not made by them, ones that are made by small companies (and even individuals in some cases) for the sole purpose of seeing what’s popular with the masses and then they make their own shitty version of said product followed by undercutting the original products cost significantly. And when people go to search they of course put their shit product at the top of the search page so that’s the one the unaware will always buy. It’s kind of a genius business model if we are being honest, if you’re an absolute shit stain that completely lacks morals that is. I just can’t believe they’ve been allowed to do this for so long under the radar because I feel like I never hear people talk about that particular scummy tactic they use.
I wish that were true. But how long have companies like Google and Meta been tracking people? Ask anyone on the street if they think Google and Meta know everything about them and they'll say "yes but I don't care" or "yes but it's unavoidable". There's just no way people don't know by now what incredibly invasive corporations they are. They just don't care.
I do think they know these companies are invasive, but they don't fully understand the ramifications of it, nor do they care to.
While I agree at some level, most users aren’t like you or me. They are my mom, my boss, my mailman. They only care about convenience, and understanding even the difference between browsers is one thing, let alone why they should use a different one. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s likely to change. If it was, Facebook wouldn’t exist, if those people cared about their online privacy they wouldn’t use the platform, but here we are
Yeah, people knew enough to ditch IE for Firefox, but I think Google's marketing convinced everybody that Chrome was the best. Most people tell me they use Chrome because it's the fastest.
Yeah early on when chrome was released I was a big proponent of it. But that was in Google’s earlier days before they adopted Microsoft’s EEE policy
Really? I always hated it. It was such a resource hog compared to Firefox, and that only got worse as Firefox improved.
My main Linux distro at the time, Fedora, wouldn't even ship Chromium because of how difficult and inefficient it was to package. It leaves a bunch of Google crap on Mac too.
Was it better on Windows or something? Because it's always been crap on Linux and Mac.
In 2008? Sure, chrome was lightning quick, especially with V8 on the JS side, granted this was on Mac. It was only a matter of time before it became google’s ad platform though
Maybe the Linux version was ahead of Mac and Windows in 2008. It was already crap then. lol
I’m a JavaScript dev by trade. V8 was light years ahead when it came out, the specs on runtime compilation were off the charts. I’m not defending google by any means, but the work that went into V8 is how nodejs was created, and Firefox has adapted many of those learnings into its own JS engine. Google was and always has been a corporation for profit, but their engineers really pushed JS into a new stage with their engine, whether or not the browser around it was great
I made the switch a few weeks ago. While the transition was a little inconvenient, I got everything set up in maybe an hour or two. Performance was wacky for a few hours after that, but it's settled now for my purposes.
You definitely have to finagle the browser with add-ons and other about:config things to make it work for you, but after that yeah I can say I prefer Firefox over Chrome!
Now I just need to deGoogle everything else...
I actually never stopped using Firefox. I tried Chrome/Chromium on and off since it came out in 2008, but I never understood the appeal. Chrome looks more minimal, but it always ran like crap on Linux and Mac for me. Was it better on Windows or something? The constant memes about Chrome's RAM and CPU usage would lead me to believe it isn't.
Check out Vivaldi
Riiiight, because Google wasn't doing sneaky tracking shit leading up to this. This time, they'll surely switch, all dozens of them, and a couple might even use Firefox. woohoo
Reality: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Someone reply to me saying they just switched to make this a perfect internet circlejerk.
Unironically, yeah, this is the nail in the coffin for me.
But think about it. You’re talking on Lemmy - currently a niche messaging board with a tech focused audience. I don’t think you’d count as the average Chrome user. Most people won’t hear about this or if they do, won’t care.
'Average user' just means all traits proportionally blended together, right? Lemmy users are not a huge part of the internet, but our contribution to the 'average' is just a big as any other person; and our opinions and knowledge and behaviour does matter. Some might argue that the opinions of tech-focused people matter more because they are more likely to influence other people about tech decisions.
So yeah, we're a niche group - but the discussion and sharing of ideas is important.
I honestly don’t get why people think chromium browsers are good, for example Firefox in my use case is far faster than chrome… by a long shot. Also if you want to argue…
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=1&highlightCommonAlerts=0&series=mozilla-central,3735773,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3412459,1,13&timerange=86400
Mostly for increased privacy but also additional features. Firefox and it's forks are usually relatively limited in feature set.
Speed isn't a problem on any of them for me.
something about the way it [chrome] handles memory isolation means i get fewer blue screens at work with all my bloated browser tools loaded at the same time. I have to have ~15 tabs open. It is not my laptop, so I cant go around experimenting with plugins much.
then again who gives a flying fart if chrome tracks me while i use the same internal browser tools day in and day out?
I cannot drag my tabs out properly. Its been the dealbreaker for many years for me, they dont fix it, but i just deal with it now because google is too evik.
That was also my experience with Firefox. I tried it one time because I kept hearing it was better than chrome, and then the absolute first thing I noticed is that they can't get tab dragging right.
I don't care how much more "private" it is than chrome. If you can't even get the first impression on absolute basic UI elements right, I simply have no faith in your browser
Maybe I'll use Firefox when it matures a bit
Its been around for like 20 years though
Sometimes there is a proverbial straw to break a camel’s back.
I mean, for some percentage of users this will be it. Will it be a significant share of Chrome users? Probably not, but it just means those of us who got people to switch to Firefox in the 00’s and Chrome in the early 10’s need to be as vigorous with getting people off Chrome now.
I used chrome since it was launched and this summer I switched to Firefox on all devices.
I just switched my internet off!
What's your thoughts on Orion? It's weirdly niche, but has been killer for me.
Orion is not open source so that’s a no. There is no way to know that what they tell us is true. If they free their code it might become my go to browser as well.
There is a way to tell - just check the binary. Actually, you need to check binaries of open source apps as well.
Check the binary for current outgoing traffic? Sure but instant traffic is not the only way to be tracked, and it is particularly difficult to get an overview for a browser.
A open source project is automatically safer to use. Sure, any binary can be injected with crap but in a closed source app there is really no way to know anything for sure.
The binary is your source. And it's THE ONLY source of truth.
Sure the binary is what I run, but I am not following what your point is. If you are paranoid about binaries from an open source project, just compile it yourself. It’s easy. That’s just not an argument against open source.
I'm not arguing against open source. What I'm saying is that binary is NOT an issue. You can analyze it exactly the same way you can do with source code.
downvoted for stating facts. I can only give you one updoot brother, you're the hero we need.