Misleading title. This is nothing new, just Manifest V2 being removed. Ad blockers like uBlock Origin Lite still work.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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I'm worried about the direction of Mozilla, though. We need another :'(
LibreWolf for desktop, Mull for Android.
Keep in mind both LibreWolf and Mull are very slow because LibreWolf disabled WebGL, enabling higher privacy features, and Mull disabled JIT, a massive performance hit.
This is for people who don't know then blaming Firefox being slow, LibreWolf and Mull are slower version of Firefox, just that.
Aren't those Firefox with some patches?
Well yes, but it's the patches that make them special. Every Firefox fork that disables Mozilla PPA by default is another browser that cuts into Mozilla's attempt to resell private data to advertisers while marketing it as private (which is, I kid you not, a reason they say they needed it enabled by default).
And considering Firefox itself is still open source, it's a completely valid browser to base a fork off of. Especially when the only serviceable alternative is Chrome right now.
Isn't chromium open source too?
someone else can probably give a more comprehensive/correct answer but here is how I understand it. i believe chromium is open source and chrome is mostly chromium but also some proprietary (and therefor unknown) bits are included. whereas firefox is entirely open source, meaning you could compile it yourself and still end up with the same package.
I won't be surprised at all. They bought an advertising network company and most of their user-tracking always was opt-out and “hidden” in about:config and this won't change now.
They also released this pamphlet against an ad-free internet, so instead of being less intrusive with their spam and user tracking, this will become more and more annoying and complex to circumvent.
I installed ZenBrowser and it's pretty good. It's pretty, it works
It's just reskinned Firefox though.
Ladybird is slowly being worked on but I doubt we'll see people daily driving it for a few years yet.
I wouldn't worry too much about Mozilla when it comes to Firefox at least. As long as they keep up with the backend then forks can clean the crud off.
Ladybird needs to support openness & stop using MS GitHub & Discord as their only means of communication/collaboration.
I wonder how NEW open source project are still hosted on MS GitHub. I mean, yes, legacy projects hosted there are fine (but should work on leaving Microsoft behind) but new projects? Someone using MS GitHub doesn’t really understand the open source culture. Same with Discord (which is neither a support platform, nor a bugtracker, nor a help articles resource).
Their brain is certainly smoother to do this. Motivation I mostly hear has to do with network effect, user base. I disagree with this tho since the only way you move that network is to start hosting elsewhere & getting folks used to it (aka be the change you want to see); ‘early adopting’ & momentum in this direction is what drives a new audience to try, collaborate, contribute to these platform some otherwise wouldn’t have tried. You might lose some commits, but others (those banned from the service for US sanctions or philosophically refuse to have an account) now do get access. That might be the smaller pool, but this audience is rarely considered or catered to.
Even if you want “visibility” or some other marketing term, a compromise would be to have a read-only mirror. But a mirror like this would contain the entire history that would be used to train their AI that they sell back to us.
One of many reason tho, I have been using Darcs or Pijul over Git in recent times to create yet another barrier to not having code hosted on the Microsoft platform. If Pijul’s Nest supported tarball archives it would be ‘good enough’… & it only supports converting from, not to Git 🤣
While at the same time Firefox implodes
It really isn't all things considered
The sad reality is, there was no significant change when they intentionally crippled the API to fight against ad blockers and there won’t be a significant change now.
Its a booked frog strategy. Chrome used to be great and was quite open. The internet has ramped up advertising in general, tracking in general. So, ad blockers became more commonly used. So it started to hurt them much more. Its a self perpetuating problem of cat and mouse. Chrome being the platform while owned by the largest advertising company was never going to end well.
However, there's not much between browsers these days in terms of technical ability. So, hopefully the trickle of movers becomes a wave. Open standards and competition are better for everyone.
The average person doesn’t care. The average person doesn’t even know what a browser is. They think a browser is The Internet.
They think Google is the internet. They will most likely type Google into the search bar to get to Google.
I wouldn't call that average...
However, people are likely to blame the extension
It’s been a decade since I have done professional computer repair, but the lack of knowledge that people had always shocked me. I don’t mean surprised me, I mean outright shocked me with their ignorance. They just don’t care, and don’t want to care. Computers and the internet aren’t that important to A LOT of people, and no, they’re not all old.
I think you are describing less than half of the population. It probably varies by region but to say that's average is not a fair statement.
You would hope so but some chromium forks still try maintain their own ad blockers. And I've seen people just jump between what ones still work, or those few who just give up on ad-blocking all together.
There are also projects like qutebrowser which allow external programs to be plugins. In case of qutebrowser it uses the Chromium open source platform as rendering engine, etc. but completely relies on external Python scripts for plugins (including ad blocking).
If Firefox goes down the Chrome route with their forced advertisement I can totally see something like this happening.