A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
Rhetorical question: antitrust when?
They are dominant in search, ads, browser, mobile hardware, mobile os, mapping, and email. They're using their dominance to corece users, and are just getting away with it. The influence they have over the Internet is second to none, and it shows they've dropped the whole "don't be evil" thing.
Judge: "Hmm, let's see if this has merit. I'll quickly google some case files"
News too. They even need to start funding local newspapers so there is enough content to link to.
Probably never honestly.
Fuck google and fuck chrome
More people should use firefox
Honestly we just need more options in terms of web engines
I'd already be happy if we still have the ones we have today in ten years.
Yup, there's 3-4 active ones, depending on how you count it (more if you count toy projects):
So essentially three, though Blink is a fork of WebKit, so kinda 2.5.
I switched to Firefox not too long ago, the only place I can't replace chrome is my Chromebook. I can't find a good Firefox copy, tried using both android and Linux versions but it loses alot of controls functionality (eg grestures on the trackpad)
That might work... if I hadn't already switched over to Firefox! Charade you are, Google asswipes!
If you aren't already trying to remove Google from your life, you should be.
i think the bigger problem is that all filter updates need to be declared which means google essentially knows what you're blocking which means they can respond quicker to fixing exploits to block ads
I really hope no one in this community uses Google as their search engine.
I primarily use DuckDuckGo now, but very occasionally I use google when I feel like DuckDuckGo hasn't come up with very good results.
(I also use Google when I need a word definition - I like the layout and ability to see synonyms quickly.)
Bing I don't use because I just can't stand the results page layout.
Any other recommendations?
You can use Startpage to get Google search results. It's a meta search engine for Google, but it doesn't expose any of your data. You can use it with DuckDuckGo's Bangs feature. That way, DuckDuckGo can be your default search engine and you can make all of your normal search queries with DDG, but if you want to search on Google through Startpage, you just type !sp followed by your search query into DuckDuckGo and it will forward your search to Startpage. This also works with many many other sites, type !bangs into DDG to get the full list of supported websites.
Thanks for the startpage tip. Just switched all my browsers to use it instead.
Why use !sp instead of !g?
Startpage gives you Google search results without exposing your data to Google. It's better for your privacy.
Cool, I'll give this a try too.
SearXNG is my go to. It's a search aggregator so you have to configure it to select your preferred search engines, but once everything is up and running, I've found it's results to be even higher quality than Google's
Sounds interesting. I'll take a look, thanks.
(I also use Google when I need a word definition - I like the layout and ability to see synonyms quickly.)
yeah that's one thing I really miss from when I had google as default search engine, typing word/phrase + define and actually getting a useful result. DDGs version is barely even helpful at all
Google Search is way worse than it used to but still beats DDG by a mile.
I've tried SearX and it was meh, maybe there's some better instance than the one I tried though.
Yandex is good for reverse image search and when the American government makes western search engines block certain search results, but not that useful in general. Also for a period Yandex just kept bombarding me with endless captchas and was completely unusuable
Bing search is just DDG, or well DDG is just Bing.
Baidu search, tbh haven't tried it much, but even for chinese I had better search results on google search so yeah
DDG is still really good, and DDG isn't Bing just because it includes it's results as well. I mainly use DDG and then try Google if I can't find my result, but 90% of the time DDG finds it just fine.
I mean I use DDG as default search engine in Firefox and Google Search isn't much better now, but google search isn't even a 10th as good as it used to be 10 years ago.
I use https://searx.be/ with both Google and DDG results enabled. Otherwise if you want something like Google results you would have to use Start page, although they pay Google for access to their search so you would be indirectly supporting Google.
I tried using DuckDuckGo but just could not stick with it. The search terms are just not as good and sometimes when I’m looking up definitions for words I’d prefer not clicking on a link and just having it display on the display results.
It’s just small issues like that made me switch back to google search. Won’t ever switch back to chrome though.
Maybe try Startpage, it gives you Google results without exposing your data to Google.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube can instantly switch up its ad delivery system, but once Manifest V3 becomes mandatory, that won't be true for extension developers.
If ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game of updates and counter-updates, then Google will force the mouse to slow down.
The current platform, Manifest V2, has been around for over ten years and works just fine, but it's also quite powerful and allows extensions to have full filtering control over the traffic your web browser sees.
Engadget's Anthony Ha interviewed some developers in the filtering extension community, and they described a constant cat-and-mouse game with YouTube.
Firefox's Manifest V3 implementation doesn't come with the filtering limitations, and parent company Mozilla promises that users can "rest assured that in spite of these changes to Chrome’s new extensions architecture, Firefox’s implementation of Manifest V3 ensures users can access the most effective privacy tools available like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions."
Google claims that Manifest V3 will improve browser "privacy, security, and performance," but every comment we can find from groups that aren't giant ad companies disputes this description.
The original article contains 915 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Firefox is best, but if you use linux and still like using Chrome for some things you can try Ungoogled Chromium
Meanwhile I just got TamperMonkey on my phone through Firefox, so I can now auto-clip digital Safeway coupons on my phone when I forget to do so before leaving the house.
Don't use proprietary Tampermonkey, switch to Violentmonkey
That's another open source app that works perfectly and makes me wonder why anyone uses the closed source ones.
I already use it since I like the UI better
I bet someone called Hank Scorpio works at google.
I can guarantee you that nobody working at Google has that kind of charisma
It seems pretty obvious why they are doing all this, why they dont remove it from chrome store?
They probably don't want all those people realizing they can install extensions manually, because then they'd need to actively scan for and block extension installations.
Or realizing they can stick to an older Chrome version with V2 extensions that retain full capabilities...
That will stop working way sooner than you'd like. Freezing a browser isn't tenable at all, not just for features websites are expecting but also security issues. There's a reason every browser except Safari has a 6 weeks release cycle.
Web tech doesn't evolve that fast. You can use a 1 year old version today without worrying about missing any website functionality.
What you're missing is features that the browser itself introduces, but in this case those would be anti-features so arguably Chrome will be getting worse.
Then there's of course the security vulnerabilities.
Of course the whole discussion is moot since there's a much simpler alternative, switching to another browser.
They're boiling the frog.