It becomes impossible to block ads in all browsers new forks will be made and the features we want will happen. The bar to spin and maintain a new browser is high but it's not impossible on there are a lot of people that want this
this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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Sorry mate I think this is a little naive.
I suspect that the bar to "spin and maintain a new browser" is so high as to be impossible.
The resources required to keep firefox afloat are huge. It's not something a few like minded individuals can do on their weekends.
Independent Web browsers in active development which use their own engine and (aim to) support modern Web standards:
-
Linux Foundation Europe's Servo
That's it.
Internet is dominated by Netscape, then crushed by MS giving its browser away.. Firefox steps in for a while and is great but starts to suck / get slow, google steps in people start to shift to google, everyone is on google... Wonder who steps in next.
There’s a lot more vendor lock in than there has been in the past. I don’t see there being a major change without legislation. It’s still too early to see how the EU’s DMA will affect market share, but it’s probably the best hope, even if it is limited to a few geographical areas.
I assume with chromium being open source that there will be an alternative compiled version without this nonsense?
That’s how it works for now, but eventually the code itself will be removed from chromium, not just disabled. At that point they’d have to maintain a large patch set reimplementing it, which would be extremely time intensive to maintain and keep secure.
Many times stupid web pages don't load.... Call support and I'm told it only works in chrome.
Can't get away from it
source: my crackpipe
Anyone still using Chromium or any of its derivatives (including Chrome) just needs to suck it up and admit it's the loser here. Use a Firefox derivative, it's just all around better in every single way.
I’m using both Firefox as my daily browser, and Edge for school related stuff, Firefox is very often maxing out my CPU usage and I can’t figure out why
I had to call someone using Microsoft Teams today. It does not work with Firefox, even if you spoof the user agent.
Why not just download the teams app?
The Teams app is probably just Chromium pointed to the teams website. Might as well have Chrome/Chromium installed at that point.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at?
Microsoft has been playing this game since forever.
He's getting at Firefox being unusable for one of his usecases. Though i guess you could argue that he could just use something like brave specifically for that use case while using Firefox for other stuff
Yeah, I guess I mean that I'm surprised anyone is surprised when an MS product unexpectedly doesn't work in a non-microsoft environment.
You should be surprised, that is unfair competition.
They've been doing that forever.
And Antitrust in different countries forced them to comply with the law.
I don't know what's up with your setup, but this is untrue. I've used Firefox for teams in browser for years with no issues.
Shit like this is exactly why competition is of utmost importance. The internet was never meant to be single-handedly controlled by a corporation with private interests, and more importantly, private pockets
If we don't see a somewhat significant rise in Firefox usage increases after this, then I fear that battle is already lost. People can complain a lot but doing something as easy as switching browsers seems to be the hardest thing for most of them.
You Grandma and her Chromebook don't care though. The numbers aren't in our favor, but Mozilla absolutely dominating in the features and privacy arenas is.
My grandma is dead. And before that she used Linux Mint & Firefox.
Exactly
In my experience people have a poor understanding of the software they use, it just needs to continue working as it always has.
Even if Firefox were to win it's still a bleak future because the ridiculously complexity and scope of browsers prevents new ones being made. Without the possibility of newcomers either the war never ends or there is one victor. We should start to abandon browsers in favor of apps that focus on each part of the browser (e.g. why does a browser need to render video to the screen when the user already has an app for that).
"Destroying an empire to win a war is no victory, and ending a battle to save an empire is no defeat."- Kahless
Fuck that. I'm not switching between apps for every god damn function my browser does. I intentionally decline to install apps when I can just use the browser.
What's the difference?
- no unified password management (or even worse: everything gets just attached to your google/ios account - i hate apps that do not give me the option to keep stuff separate)
- no history functions (esp. over multiple devices)
- single apps getting bought out by marketing corpos or bad actors without getting notified
- data sniffing apps are harder to reign in than my sandboxed browser tabs.
- NO ADBLOCKING AVAILABLE IN APPS
I'm sure there are a lot more reasons, that's just what came into my mind
Apps being created seperatly doesn't mean they can't interact with each other, so I don't see those concerns as a problem. Is there anything fundamentally preventing the creation of new apps to do tasks currently exclusive to browsers?
Isn't the possibility of single apps getting bought out an argument against having all your eggs in one basket? 🙃
i think i would get notified in some way if the Mozilla Foundation changes ownership, and since it's open source that is not much of an argument. open source is getting more common the last few years, but it's definitely not common
sure, it doesn't mean they can't. everyone making their own app also means that they don't per default.
and you didn't touch the point regarding NO ADBLOCKING IN APPS while the whole debate here is because alphabet doesn't want effective adblocking in their browser.
Honestly I don't think most people know or even care.
The {"SHOP DEALS AT TEMU"} will continue until morale improves!
Manifest V2 phase out is a big deal, as Google is pushing towards Manifest 3 only. Google's version of Manifest 3 is hobbled by removing WebRequest blocking which breaks privacy and ad blocking tools - an obvious benefit to Google as an Ad and data harvesting company.
Firefox is implementing Manifest 3 with WebRequest blocking, as well as supporting Google's hobbled version declarativeNetRequest to allow compatibility with chrome extensions.
But at least Firefox is just compatibility, and not phasing out v2
As far as I know there is no plan to phase out Manifest V2 at Mozilla. As long as V2 and V3 are active in parallel it shouldn't have a negative Impact on adblockers etc.
Until MV2 API is shut off completely. What will FireFox's V2 do then?
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/05/14/manifest-v3-updates/
We also wanted to take this opportunity to address a couple common questions we’ve been seeing in the community, specifically around the webRequest API and MV2:
- The webRequest API is not on a deprecation path in Firefox
- Mozilla has no current plans to deprecate MV2 as mentioned in our previous MV3 update
That said, I believe Firefox users have gotten a lot of benefits by having extensions made that work in both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. I don't believe there will still be as much effort for a Firefox-only extension but I believe there will be a sufficient number of motivated users and developers to still develop blockers and other extensions that take advantage of Firefox continuing to support MV2 and webRequest.